My wife recently won one of those contests run by the fast food companies to get you to eat at their restaurants. She pulled off the tab from her drink, and announced that she’d won something. She won an order of French fried potatoes.
At that instant, I wondered why these places insult our intelligence by telling us we won free French fries. Seriously, they might as well announce that we’ve won a free drink refill. They give these things away as if they cost nothing as it is. We’re sorry we completely messed up your order by putting fish cakes on all the sandwiches instead of hamburger patties; would you like some free fries? We’re sorry you had to wait so long for your food that you completely missed all your afternoon appointments; can we give you some fries? We’re sorry your kid got run over by our delivery truck in the parking lot; how about some fries? Fries mean nothing to them. If they can’t get you to take them, they usually throw away whatever’s left over at the end of the night, or sometimes what gets cold in the middle of the afternoon. Thus I am underwhelmed when I peel off a contest sticker and learn that I’ve won free fries.
The lottery does this, too, at least in New Jersey. There are a lot of reasons I don’t particularly like the lottery, but this isn’t the place for that discussion. If you’re interested, I wrote about it elsewhere. I don’t play the lottery, because I don’t like losing games. Yet when I lived in a particularly depressed portion of the state, I found it impossible to walk into most convenience stores without getting on line behind some clearly impoverished person with a long list of lottery tickets they wanted to buy. New Jersey has these scratch-and-lose tickets, ranging from one dollar to several dollars each. People buy them, and immediately scratch off the boxes in the store. I’ve never seen anyone win more than a couple of dollars. I have seen them win–now, this is the interesting part–more lottery tickets. Someone will spend a dollar on a dollar lottery ticket, and they’ll win, but not even get their dollar back. They’ll get another lottery ticket. That seems silly to me. If they got rid of all the tickets that said you win another ticket, they could save a lot of money on printing, because they wouldn’t need as many tickets. Somehow, though, those who scratch off the boxes and get another ticket count this as winning.
It’s a mystery to me. French fries and lottery tickets are not prizes. What is the point in pretending that they are?
The point is that those who win these nothings are made to feel as if they’ve won something.
One thing that they teach in motivational training is to set attainable goals. It’s difficult to illustrate this, as one person’s attainable goal is another’s pipe dream; but the idea is to build up to your dreams in steps that can be seen as successes. Education is a good model to consider. A high school student might decide that he wants to be a lawyer; this will be accomplished when after seven years of advanced post-high school education he finally passes the Bar exam. For some people, it might be possible to keep that goal firmly in view, and never hesitate on the road that leads to it. For most of us, however, it makes far more sense to break that up into smaller steps, intervening goals. Let’s make it a goal to get a solid B in algebra; we’ll celebrate if we get that far. We’ll have several other clearly realizable goals which lead ultimately to high school graduation. Frankly, on the road to becoming a lawyer, high school graduation isn’t really much more than winning French fries; but we’re going to celebrate it, because it’s a goal, something we set and reached successfully. Beyond that, there are many more steps that can be recognized along the path: the milestones of completing each of four years of college, a strong score on the Law School Admission Test (L.S.A.T.), advancement within the graduate course itself. Successful completion of the first year of law school doesn’t really mean that much; that is, if you stop there, you don’t really have anything. People who wash out in the second year aren’t really any closer to being attorneys than people who go to work right out of college. But if you can call that moment a success, the reaching of a goal, and celebrate it as such, it will help give you the motivation to push on through the next year, and ultimately finish the task.
By now you’re probably wondering what French fries and lottery tickets have to do with law school admission tests, and what any of it has to do with gaming. It all has to do with rewards–not necessarily the rewards systems that we build into our games, although it can be connected to that, but with the idea of building scenarios with interspersed victory points, intermediate goals that can be reached on the way to the ultimate goal.
Let’s suppose you’ve got a great idea for an epic campaign that will be about the overthrow of an evil emperor who is oppressing all the civilized planets in the galaxy. (O.K., I didn’t say it was an original idea; I only said it was good.) It’s going to take the player characters years to bring down this guy. They see the problem, and they start working on it, and they build up a resistance movement and begin the struggle toward their ultimate goal. As play drags on, nothing is really happening. That’s not true; you, as referee, can see that many things are happening. The resistance is getting stronger, there is growing support on many planets, and things are moving toward the confrontation that will turn the tide–but your players only see that they’ve been at this for a long time, and don’t appear to be any closer to deposing this despot than they were at the beginning. They’re losing interest. It’s inevitable. Who wants to keep reading a story in which nothing ever really happens? Who wants to keep playing a game which seems like a perpetual stalemate?
To solve this, you have to give the players intermediate tasks that they can accomplish along the way, moments that may have nothing to do with the coup against the emperor, but which will give them that feeling of success that they need to keep going. So imagine that the empire has built, I don’t know, some sort of super weapon in a space station that can destroy entire planets (I didn’t say it was original, did I?), and that the group of which the player characters are part has managed to get hold of the plans for this weapon. Let them try to destroy the weapon, and make it something they can accomplish. It really does very little to end the reign of the emperor; it does feel like a great blow for the resistance. It gives the players that little token reward that inspires them to keep going, like winning French fries or free lottery tickets.
It does something else, too. If your games are such that the players might ultimately fail–that is, if it is possible that they could get to the point that they are confronting the evil emperor and prepared to bring him to justice, but they’re not up to the task and die gloriously in the final battle without changing the world–these token victories along the way will have given meaning to the story. Maybe they didn’t see the death of the emperor; they did destroy his killer space weapon, unite the scattered resistance into a formidable opposition army, and rescue the princess behind whom the people would rally. Those token accomplishments might mean nothing ultimately–the only thing that really matters is whether the emperor is defeated–but they will be remembered as victories along the road, and will have made the game worth playing even if in the end they failed to grasp the brass ring.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
