Games and life goals: Find an ending

Something good that can be said about Monopoly: It ends.

Decisively, if belatedly.

You know exactly the moment that it ends, when the second-last remaining player's dice come to rest, and in their moan you can hear the escape of their long-extinguished hope as the game instructs him to self-immolate by moving his metal battleship to a hotel-laden Oxford Street. It is the sigh of relief that it is finally over.

Monopoly has a decisive end, though the fun runs out well before. The players know by 9:15 that Dave won as soon as he put three houses on every property from Pall Mall to Vine, but the game won’t let you pack up until the horse is well and truly flogged at 10.

Win or lose, Monopoly does not know when to finish.

The end-game of athletics

Athletes often approach their sport as if it were a game. They set a goal, then work towards it. Win it or not, that’s the end of the game. Done.

Well that creates a problem: The game is ended but you keep going.

Some athletes are frankly glad to move on, and already have another purpose in mind, happy when a dull ache in their hip reminds them of flying over a pole, but also happy that they don’t have to do that anymore and could start a new game.

But what of those who set a decisive goal, but the pursuit of that will cause considerable grinding for no satisfaction?

If your path creates neither a spectacular success nor a catastrophic disaster, but somewhere that is… pretty good, then when is the right time to ask some poignant questions about how your challenge is going, and would you like to set a new goal or play a new game?

Win or lose, when does the game end?

A good end to a game for game designers

End the game before the fun runs out.

The early struggle of a game is often where the fun is. You scrap and scrape for resources, taking risks with what little you have until you are in the clear and plain sailing.

That’s where you end it. Anything after this would be a lap of honour, or grinding.

Once you reach the end of the struggles in a modern game, the game ends.

Some do have a decisive thematic ending: You fill the final square in your Bärenpark, contact the last of your Codename agents, or finally fling open the doors to escape the betrayed House.

After this you can pack it away, satisfied, and get on with other things.

Other games have a set number of turns, which seem arbitrary, then invite you to count up your victory points, or end the game when you reach a certain number of them.

As we saw in Monopoly, the definitive goal can come waaaaay after the fun is done.

Dominion, for example, is specific about the game ending when the last of the big victory point cards is bought, then gives you eight for a two-player game, and 12 for four players.

Why specifically this many? Because designer Donald Vaccarino presumably found out how long the game would be fun, and after which point extra play would be redundant.

Why 15 points in Splendor? Why not 'When the last of the nobles is acquired'? Possibly because the pursuit of the completionist goal would extend the game past the point of enjoyment.

Scott Westerfield suggests that 'Victory Points Suck,' and paints a compelling picture from the point of view of a novel writer, but what makes a good script does not always make a good game end.

It is important to know the right time to end a game, even at the cost of a narrative ending.

The Ferrari that wasn't the goal.

Life goals need an ending too. We love completion. But sometimes it is more important to cut a game short than to draw out a game for a definitive win.

A friend of mine was years in real estate with the goal of earning enough money in the industry to buy himself a Ferrari. After two decades of grinding out 60 hour weeks, he achieved this goal, then was fortunate enough to lose it one month later with the Global Financial Crisis.

Fortunate? How?

Real estate wasn't his passion. He was good at it, sure, and liked it well enough, but the long hours weren't taking him any closer to his true love, which was big engines. He chose a measurement - the cost of a Ferrari - and the car as a reward to give himself an extrinsic goal to motivate himself through 20 years of grind.

You have to admire his grit.

With that game ended, he was free (forced, really) to take up a new game, so sold up and for a year was a happy driver of trucks with massive, massive engines.

But could he have saved some years of grind? If he had marked an earlier end-point, say ten years, and counted up his chips, could he have changed his game sooner?

He won the real estate game, but he reports that the last ten years were a bit of a grind. The definitive completion caused a decisive, if belated, victory. Past the point of fun. Could he have taken up mechanical engineering if he had called it earlier? We'll never know.

So there is something to think about both in game design and life goals:

Find an ending before the fun runs out.