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The Role of the Goal
How does this transition come about? How is it that a game can draw us in and take us hostage? Some of the most powerful mechanisms of pleasure that a game contains are derived from their constituent parts. The difference between games and other forms of play is most often the fact that a game has a goal and a quantifiable outcome. When it comes to understanding the pleasure of a game, the goal plays an absolutely crucial role. A game's goal is often the largest single element that drives the pleasure of a player. The goal is the ostensible reason for playing, but the goal is never easily attained; rather, it is the obscure object of desire, the carrot held just out of reach, pulling players forward through the varied pleasures of game play. The goal helps move players through the space of possibility, a space stretched between the starting state of the game and its outcome like a billowing cloth staked to the ground. The goal acts to guide the players along the axis defined by the beginning and the end, letting them know if they are advancing or falling behind. In Chutes and Ladders, the player's position on the board clearly communicates proximity to achieving victory. In Chinese Checkers, the accumulation of pieces within a player's goal serves as a competitive marker toward winning. In an online deathmatch, ranking players by frag count shows which players are closest to victory. A core component of pleasure in games lies in the creation and maintenance of a player's relationship to the goal. The game designer, by creating the game rules, indirectly engineers this relationship. Do you want to create a close game with a dramatic finish? Then engineer a negative feedback loop that punishes the lead player and closes the gap with players at the rear. Or perhaps you want to make use of hidden information, so that the outcome is in doubt until the very end. In the puzzle game Mastermind, each turn brings the player closer to the end of the track, where failure awaits after a set number of turns. Each turn also offers the player feedback and a glimpse of hope, signified by the black and white pegs, as he tries to puzzle out the correct solution. Between the inevitable, uncontrollable turn-by-turn movement, and the sometimes-backpedaling advancement toward the solution, the game unfolds as a journey of the player's desire. The result is the genuinely compelling play of Mastermind, in which the physical structure charts the player's progress through the game. The classic arcade game Missile Command offers yet another example of the way games engineer dramatic experiences for players. As J. C. Herz writes in Joystick Nation: How Videogames Won Our Hearts and Ate Our Quarters:
The most intense thing about Missile Command, though, was this weird crazy moment near the end, when the ICBMs were raining down and you knew you were just about to lose it, that was totally euphoric. Because you knew that you were going to die, that you were within seconds of everything going black.You're gonna die in three seconds. You're gonna die at this instant. You're dying. You're dead. And then you get to watch all the pretty explosions. And after the fireworks display, you get to press the restart button, and you're alive again, until the next collision with your own mortality.[14]
Within the game the goal takes on enormous importance, but the goal itself as a formal construct is not the point: the goal is important only insofar as it serves to shape a player's experience. The goal is an artificial, invented condition that the players accept as their ultimate objective. In establishing the nature of that goal and the way that players overcome adversity to work toward it, the game designer has tremendous influence on crafting the character of the play experience. [14]Herz, Joystick Nation, p. 64.
