<h2> alternative win conditions </h2>

i've been thinking about this a lot recently, in games with a defined end-goal or win-state, putting an additional
or alternative self imposed challenge on yourself. I don't know what I have to say about them yet but I guess we
can start by putting them into categories, which will obviously have some theoretical possibility for overlap but
it doesn't matter;

<h3> Optimization Challenges </h3>

Optimization challenges are the kind where you still need to win the game, but you're being "scored" on how well
you can do it, be that minimum/no death challenges, or speedrunning, or otherwise doing things "better" than the
game would require you to. These are a little different from the other two categories, since winning is still the
end-goal, but this category fits in because winning the game is not /sufficient/ to complete the challenge.

<h3> Constraint Challenges </h3>

Constraint challenges are the ones where you need to fulfill some additional requirement or manage some additional
resource/goal on your way to winning the game. This sort of groups together two potential "subcategories", which
I'll list to be illustrative

<h4> Extra Lose Condition <h4>

Challenges where you have to /avoid/ something lest you lose imaginary points or outright lose, such
as challenges about getting the minimum amount of money or avoiding it entirely, or not jumping, etc.

<h4> Extra Win Requirement <h4>

Challenges where you have to do an /additional task/ in order for your win to count. This includes the
opposite sorts of challenges, such as collecting /all/ possible money, or killing every enemy possible, etc.

These two seem diametrically opposed, but they can easily combine if you have to avoid one thing and collect another.

<h3> Alternative Challenges </h3>

Alternative challenges is the best name I can come up with for challenges where actually winning the game is
entirely incidental to the challenge itself. This includes challenges like getting every item in a game, or even
ones where you have to intentionally lose in some difficult or interesting way. Worthy of note is that games
/without/ set win conditions will /only/ have these kinds of challenges. Probably

I guess it's important to talk about what a goal in a game even is. I won't be doing that, but I'll say that I
have thought about the implications this has for score-chase games like galaga or whatever. It isn't super important
for the topic.

Most of the readers of this blog post have seen their fair share of youtube game challenge videos, but what really
had me thinking more about this was what it could mean for sandboxes and multiplayer games.

I made a game recently (asteroid) in which there was meant to be no particular end-state but a lot of tracked stats,
allowing the player to decide for themselves what they want to optimize or do the most of. This didn't work.
I wonder if players want to first have a good reason to keep playing before they'll have any desire to come up with
their own win conditions? It makes sense, people only play the games they enjoy, and will likely only invent up an
additional challenge if they've already played long enough to get past the "defined ending", or just a long time.

That's on me, then.

But another thought I've had was for there to be a sandbox card game, what sort of things would be necessary for a
game like that to be fun enough to come up with challenges and things to do without the game spelling them out for
you, letting you explore the mechanics in a way you find interesting. Like minecraft, would this game need its own
"ender dragon" to push players to explore the mechanics to begin with, before they start playing more with redstone
contraptions? That seems anti-historical though, as minecraft was already pretty huge before it had a credits sequence.

And then the other thing, multiplayer. I've seen Simpleflips (and probably other people idk) doing mariomaker
challenges where you go on multiplayer vs mode and then play TO WIN with some absurd restriction. First was his
walk-only challenge where he had to win each match without actually running, walking while all his opponents would be
free to run ahead. He eventually got all the way up to S rank. His latest challenge in VS mode has been to only win
stages after he himself has directly caused the player piloting the Luigi character to fail. This one really got
my mind sparking.

He can get to the end of the stage and be forced by his own rules not to touch the flagpole and claim his success
as he hadn't completed his extra win requirement. The way he has to play it recolored entirely by this. He's forced
to be more aggressive, focusing on player combat more than just playing to get ahead. His actions spawned a few
imitators and variants, people focusing on killing mario or toad or even simpleflips himself. There was another I
saw where the goal was to do the opposite, aiming to make sure that Luigi would WIN, turning it into an alternative
challenge.

It makes me want to imagine what a multiplayer game could be like if everyone had their own agenda and win condition.
You'd be up "against" people who have intentions that don't necessarily contrast with your own, be able to form
interesting alliances... It's a little like TTT and its various custom roles, but the winners are always whoever
completes their goal first. For an example: the marker role is required to shoot each other player with a paintball,
"marking" them, and making the marker immune to that player's combat. As soon as the marker tags everyone, they win,
and the round ends.

But imagine if the game were larger and not round based, and that player simply needed to do that for their own reasons
within the game. It'd interfere with /some/ player's goals (maximizing kills or whatever) but not /everyone elses/,
and the game would go on, with the now "losing" players forced to take some alternate action or forfeit or like, wait
to get a new goal? i dunno theres a lot of ways it can work. It is very interesting to me.

#games #winning #design #categories #taxonomy