Goals that have been used in the past:

Conquer everything.

Build something(s), or inversly destroy something(s).

Control a point(s) on the map for a specified time; get to a particular numerical by occupying or taking control of specified points.

If the game has economy and trade, "cornering the market" on some commodity or commidities, or amass a certain amount of resources. A somewhat rare form of victory in games, the Civ series and an underplayed classic Seven Kingdoms exhibit this.

Similar to victory by economy and trade, gain victory by controlling/destroying/combining some objects/locations from around the game world. This has been pretty rare goal in the digital strategy arena.

Victory by espionage- trick/double cross/decieve/have unit that is an infiltrator/invisible, get some sort of object, destroy some object, get the player's "codeword", capture an object (flag?). If it is a "game" when hacker/cracker types scrimmage each other in organized competitions, this has been somewhat common in digital games. What makes this different than other victory types is requiring some sort of guile or deceit on the part of the player. Diplomacy has a limited version of this, many TBS game have spy units, and in Seven Kingdoms this can end the game.

"Research" victory, be the first to get to the top of the tech tree. A variant on this theme is putting powerful, game-ending abilities/units at the top of the tech tree that effectively win the game by themselves, so the first player to research and deploy them wins.

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Many games have implimented these concepts in one way or another, but few impliment more than three of these or so. Some reasons why most games limit the types of victory conditions are:

Simplicity (difficult to code/balance complex systems). The more complex a game, the more difficult it is for new players to learn, the more you have an "aged" elite dominating play.

Metagaming (players gaming the system, or paper/rock scissors effect on strategy, boiling the game down to a few choices made by each player at the beginning of the game, often without any knowledge as what the other player is up to).

Aesthetic (there are few gaming "fictions" that allow much freedom in victory conditions beyond the mundane we are used to).

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In my opinion, the games which create the most dramatic tension are those with one primary path to victory (lets say conquest), but with some sort of backdoor to allow an endgame race, allowing the players that are behind to catch up- and give a big advantage to whomever gets it first (allowing a 2nd or 3rd, even 5th place runner up to win from behind), like a research victory or bonus. This puts a lot of pressure on the player who gets ahead early/midgame to keep taking risks to insure their victory, rather than dragging the game out by the leading player eliminating all others slowly but surely (defeat in detail).

Some games with mechanisms such as this are the Civ series, Alpha Centauri, and Rise of Nations (all Sid Meier/Brian Reynolds collaborations, save the last). These games of course share a basic fiction outline and many gameplay mechanisms, but I can imagine other gametypes that might generate the same dramatic effect.

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Original post by Trapper Zoid Do you think that their needs to be an overarching ultimate goal, or do you think that a series of smaller subgoals could replace this? I'm thinking a bit about soap operas here, where a character will often have a single big goal which is sometimes achieved (such as getting married) but since the show still goes on they get a new goal to work towards.

This is a very tough call. The major gremlin in this mix, I think, is meaninglessness. If you have one "great goal" that you're working towards, then I believe it shapes the player's experience and imbues all of their actions with some meaning (even if it's in juxtaposition to the great goal).

If, on the other hand, you have lots of smaller sub goals, I think you'll have to guard against the sense that things are rambling on aimlessly. Psych teaches us that we normalize experiences with repetition. So if the sub goals don't have a greater and greater emotional payoff, I suspect players will call into question the meaning of their own actions.

(Of course, I could be a blithering idiot on this one-- many a mission-based game gets away with subgoal after subgoal each mission. But often, those missions get larger, more daring and more complex with time, and the player ALWAYS knows that there will be an end-- which effectively imbues their actions with meaning to a degree.)

Very insightful post there, Wavinator. This is actually at the very core of the design problem that I've been thinking about over the last couple of weeks, and follows the chain of thinking I've been going through.

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Original post by Wavinator This is a very tough call. The major gremlin in this mix, I think, is meaninglessness. If you have one "great goal" that you're working towards, then I believe it shapes the player's experience and imbues all of their actions with some meaning (even if it's in juxtaposition to the great goal).

This is exactly why I think having a "great goal" is useful; it helps direct the player towards a single focus point, and all the other smaller goals become meaningpul as part of some great plan. The main problem is that my game concept (a sort of fable or RPG based village sim) is hard to meld with any one huge goal, since the player acts more as a protector. However, there is a major "anti-goal" or failure condition that needs to be avoided; the destruction of the village. Do you think that just having a large failure condition to avoid would be enough?

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If, on the other hand, you have lots of smaller sub goals, I think you'll have to guard against the sense that things are rambling on aimlessly. Psych teaches us that we normalize experiences with repetition. So if the sub goals don't have a greater and greater emotional payoff, I suspect players will call into question the meaning of their own actions.

That's true, and the tricky part is how to keep continuously ramping up the payoffs to keep the player's interest. Of course, eventually every game will reach a limit based on the resources available to create the game (even with randomised content), which is where the game usually ends. I'm wondering however; could the game introduce a series of cycles of emotional build-up through the appropriate choice of sub-goals? I'm thinking of the case where the game slowly builds up the tension to boiling point, and then (if the player succeeds) pulling in back into a moment of calm to recover, then slowly building up the tension again (and repeat ad infinitum). Is the psychological reasoning behind this sound (i.e. would this be fun)?

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Original post by Trapper Zoid The main problem is that my game concept (a sort of fable or RPG based village sim) is hard to meld with any one huge goal, since the player acts more as a protector. However, there is a major "anti-goal" or failure condition that needs to be avoided; the destruction of the village. Do you think that just having a large failure condition to avoid would be enough?

Do you want it to be a game or a toy? There's nothing wrong with either in my book, but I think they lead to opposing strategies to solve this problem. In the SimCity-like games, I think people simply approach them and drop them continuously until they're completely tired of them. There's no real problem with overall meaning because, like a ball, the game is meant to be more amusement than experience. So for SimCity, a failure state as your overall objective is fine. It's kind of like not shooting the ball out of bounds.

If you're going more for the game approach, I believe you need to consider (strictly from a psych perspective) that Maslow hierarchy of needs pyramid. Survival alone, for many, is not enough in real life. They'll take it if that's all there is, but games are elective experiences, so we need to give them more: Perhaps wish fulfillment, or competency, or self validation, or control--things that the player finds ultimately "soul-satisfying".

Is it really true that a huge "overgoal" doesn't work with your game? Personally, I said this myself for a long time as I was wrestling with the design until I realized that it if I had a context big enough to fit the feeling I was going for, I could easily give players an overgoal. (That's why I keep talking about gods, souls, empire games and RPGs so much of late, it's the perfect umbrella for the meaning I want to try for).

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That's true, and the tricky part is how to keep continuously ramping up the payoffs to keep the player's interest. Of course, eventually every game will reach a limit based on the resources available to create the game (even with randomised content), which is where the game usually ends. I'm wondering however; could the game introduce a series of cycles of emotional build-up through the appropriate choice of sub-goals?

I think this can work but you'll need a high amount of variability in the experiences AND you'll still need to shock a normalized player out of their attenuation. So the situations need to cycle differently, and need unexpected mutators. You don't want a "ho hum, another kidnapped princess rescued" type experience, obviously.

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Original post by Wavinator Do you want it to be a game or a toy? There's nothing wrong with either in my book, but I think they lead to opposing strategies to solve this problem. In the SimCity-like games, I think people simply approach them and drop them continuously until they're completely tired of them. There's no real problem with overall meaning because, like a ball, the game is meant to be more amusement than experience. So for SimCity, a failure state as your overall objective is fine. It's kind of like not shooting the ball out of bounds.

Good point. Technically as it stands the design is for a "toy", as defined by Will Wright. There's no real competition (as in a second opposing player or A.I.) as such, it's just trying to explore the environment, and occasionally survive what the situation throws at you.

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If you're going more for the game approach, I believe you need to consider (strictly from a psych perspective) that Maslow hierarchy of needs pyramid. Survival alone, for many, is not enough in real life. They'll take it if that's all there is, but games are elective experiences, so we need to give them more: Perhaps wish fulfillment, or competency, or self validation, or control--things that the player finds ultimately "soul-satisfying".

Very good point; I haven't yet fully integrated exactly what the player will get out of this game design yet. I'm hoping that I can somehow get the players to bond with the characters in the game, so they want to see them accomplish their own simulated wish fulfillment and competency, so I guess the players will be getting the equivalent drive as a guardian or mentor to look after them. But this area of the design still needs a lot of work.

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Is it really true that a huge "overgoal" doesn't work with your game? Personally, I said this myself for a long time as I was wrestling with the design until I realized that it if I had a context big enough to fit the feeling I was going for, I could easily give players an overgoal. (That's why I keep talking about gods, souls, empire games and RPGs so much of late, it's the perfect umbrella for the meaning I want to try for).

I've considered having a single over-goal based on the same ones used in RPGs (defeat the villain; save the world! etc.), but now I'm moving to a more fable based approach I don't think that would work. I can't think of an appropriate ending condition as of yet. The game design itself is very SimCity-ish; the player is a disembodied entity that just looks after a village. I suppose I could make a successful player "transcend", by making the whole thing some sort of trial for a higher rank in some mythical pantheon, but that's doesn't really feel right to me.

I've still got a lot of time to finish the design though (this is a hobby project that's operating on the "Duke Nukem Forever" time scale, so I don't particularly care when this one is finished), so I'll think about this some more.

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I think this can work but you'll need a high amount of variability in the experiences AND you'll still need to shock a normalized player out of their attenuation. So the situations need to cycle differently, and need unexpected mutators. You don't want a "ho hum, another kidnapped princess rescued" type experience, obviously.

Both of these are problems I've identified, and both need an awful more work in design for me to think of suitable approaches to solve the problem. The variability one is potentially a game killer, so I need find a clever way to make repeated challenges seem different or interesting. For the cycle, I'm planning on making the game world a bit chaotically unstable, and rig the scale of events to meet the desired curve of emotional payoffs required. In fact, getting the answers to these two questions is one of the main reasons why I'm building this particular game; I'm interested in interactive storytelling as a method for improving games, and solving these two points are central to achieving that.

Thanks the discussion; it's really helpful to work through these problems on the forums, it saves me months of working on design dead-ends.