Goals in Games and Life: How Really Different Are They?
Not as much as we might believe
“What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Reading and digesting the quote above was a big aha moment for me. I realized that everything in my life has all those four components: goals, rules, some feedback or validation system, and voluntary participation, which includes my will to participate in a specific activity or not, to join it and leave it at will.
Yes, I could see other components, like drama, complaints, fear, and sub-parts of those main four. Still, on a global scale, I could “strip away,” as Jane McGonigal says in her book Reality is Broken, the components of any project or activity in my life to those four core components.
Let’s look more closely together at the goals.
“The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
The goals are probably one component you will easily see in anything, including games. It’s the first of the four core components of games and anything else in life that connects the two solidly. Here’s a great quote demonstrating it:
“As soon as you have a goal, you have a game.”
— Jason Fox, The Game Changer: How to Use the Science of Motivation With the Power of Game Design to Shift Behaviour, Shape Culture and Make Clever Happen
Our dreams are goals, too. And we often follow more than one goal simultaneously in many projects and activities we take on.
Games often have missions, and reframing (i.e., rewording) our goals into missions can add an epic touch to our goals. What or whom are we saving in our real-life games? Many of the goals in our projects and activities had been defined with great meaning and intention, which we forget in the process of complaint that we haven’t reached them already.
Another idea is to use the word “quest” instead of goals. Here is why:
“A quest instills notions of an epic journey; a journey that will be hard work, but provide you with a sense of accomplishment once completed. A quest will become a defining part of your hero’s story.” — Dr. Zac Fitz-Walter in “Prioritise your main quest this year” on Medium
Here is this epic feeling again. And it can be found in the most simple of goals. Living a healthy life prolongs it and lets us spend more time with our loved ones. Finding a job we enjoy will let us take this joy into any area of our life, including being with our family and friends or just on our own.
You may discover, as I once did, that by implementing a technical standard for your company or your company’s clients, you save tax money that can be used by the state or country you live in for education and health purposes. You can find out that with your work, you increase the quality of life for other people or empower them to live a better life and help and support themselves. What can be more epic than helping, serving, and empowering others?
But not every goal you follow needs to be epic. They can also be silly or make sense only to you. You could, for example, earn some fun titles.
At the time of writing these words, I was a proud bearer of the Legendary Super Sleeper title in my game for getting enough sleep. This title shows that I slept, on average, more than seven hours a night for more than five hundred days since I started playing the game.
As I self-edited this chapter on October 18, 2022, for the first time, I slept at least seven hours and ten minutes on average on 680 of 690 nights since the start of the Super Sleeper game at the end of November 2020. When I cross the line of 1000 nights with at least seven hours and ten minutes on average, I will become the Mythical Super Sleeper. The cool titles of the Magnificent and Epic Super Sleeper will follow in leaps of 500 nights.
In another game, Blogging on Medium.com game, I am currently the Mega Creator for having written and published over three hundred articles since starting blogging there on April 30, 2020. In that game, I gain a new title after writing and publishing fifty new articles or blog posts.
The clue here is that you have all the freedom to see, approach, and adjust goals so that they appear meaningful, fun, epic, exciting, even silly (if that is your goal in finding fun), and the best possible to make whatever you are up to engaging and motivating for yourself.
About this article:
It is a modified excerpt from Actual Real-Life Role-Playing Games: A Gamefully Philosophical View on Life and How to Design and Play It.
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