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…
