A Typology of Imperative Game Goals
A Typology of Imperative Game Goals
A Typology of Imperative Game Goals
By Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera
September 2003
Summary
What are the types of goals that games have and in what way do they interact and relate to each other? In game studies, goals have been equated to victory conditions, end conditions and to both victory and end conditions.
A game's goals can get complicated when we consider that most games include a network of nested and inter-related goals that must be met in order to win, prolong, or complete a game.
Player defined goals are the goals that players bring to a game that are not necessarily considered by the game's creators.
Game goals can be ordered hierarchically, where superordinate goals are more abstract than subordinate goals.
Due to the common object of interest, and the ludological perspective, our list of imperative goals in games overlaps with other models, frameworks, and game design vocabularies.
We can think of them as some sort of Schrödinger's Game Goals: when discussing a game in the abstract, these goals are simultaneously required.
In our case, the object-perspective would claim a theoretical possibility of describing all possible game states that a given game system can produce and list all the goals that emerge from these states as goals of the game.
At that point it becomes necessary to identify an appropriate level of granularity of goals for each game: is it better to describe Super Meat Boy as a game whose ultimate goal is Finish, but whose imperative goals are a sequence of Reach goals with a final area being the one that allows the player to Finish the game? Or, should we focus on the goals within a level? Or something even narrower?
We have developed a typology of imperative goals in games by analyzing multiple games.
We argue that game goals work on three different levels: ultimate goals, imperative goals and contingent goals.
Reference
Debus, M. S., Zagal, J. P., & Cardona-Rivera, R. E. (2003). Game Studies. Retrieved September 27, 2020, from http://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/debus_zagal_cardonarivera