What Players Want

Obviously, all players want to win in general terms, and, if the game is being played recreationally, most want to have a good time in the process. However, just as not all players have the same idea of a good time, not all players will agree from the beginning just what it means to win.

Each game has its own victory condition, but for a player, winning does not necessarily have anything to do with victory. It can be much more subjective. A player enters a game with a goal, however subjective and nebulous, and pursues victory as a part of obtaining that goal. Most commonly, the victory condition is there to give players the motivation to play in a way that tests a certain set of skills. For example, rock-paper-scissors is not a game intended to test your ability to fight. As a consequence, the inventor of rock-paper-scissors did not construct the rules so that punching your opponent in the face is a victory condition. Very few players, as a result, are motivated to punch their rock-paper-scissors opponents in the face, which is why this rarely occurs.

Sometimes, though, a player brings his own motivation, to the shock and misery of unsuspecting faces everywhere. It's a very difficult problem. As a game designer, you control players by defining victory and establishing interesting constraints for achieving it. What can you do about players who don't want to win?

It goes without saying that there will always be a certain portion of players who will not be motivated by victory. They have their lives, their little frustrations, and so on, and it's not your place to force them to behave. Additionally, some games can be enhanced, or even based entirely around, finding interesting ways to indulge players' unique goals. Neither of these are appropriate for you to attempt to curtail in your game. Instead, it is better to focus on what turns normal players away from the desire for victory in a normal game.

First and most obvious is boredom, the Ultimate Evil of game design. Boredom manifests itself differently for different players, but insufficient engagement and insufficient understanding of the rules are the general causes. A player who is bored just wants something to happen, even if it means losing. Incorrect motivation is just one of the many reasons why boredom is the enemy.

In team-based competitive situations, especially where players may be playing with strangers, and even more especially where players can be anonymous or play in front of an audience, players are sometimes motivated not to win but to feel powerful or heroic. They will not play strategically, instead doing specific actions that are glamorous but ineffective. Oftentimes they will also deliberately turn on teammates, either nursing a grudge or just in a random act of rudeness. The solution to this situation can be approached mechanically or metaphorically. Mechanical solutions involve penalizing behavior not conducive to the team, making it difficult for the prima donna to successfully act independently, or by providing additional metrics for success that individuals cannot earn effectively. This can be difficult, however, because if the would-be hero were intelligent enough to notice, or care, that his antics are causing himself and his team to lose, he probably wouldn't be acting in that way in the first place. The metaphorical approach heavily emphasizes team-related iconography and scenarios, essentially propaganda, to put players in a cooperative state of mind where they will be more likely to perform effectively. There is a definite art to this approach.

The more that games are played online, the more that the next type of non-winning-motivated player will become important. The griefer, a player who goes out of his way to make the game worse for other players, occasionally demonstrating commendable resourcefulness and cleverness in his methods, is a player which most game designers want to discourage from existing in their games. To the griefer, a game represents a field of opportunities for hilarious pranks. Thus, one deters a griefer with the same strategies used to deter a practical joker: either a policy of swift and harsh retribution (which can give you a reputation for strictness, which is not fun), or a social environment which views the practice as immature (which is harder to foster the more inclusive or popular your game), or a community which remains unfazed by their antics (which can lead to an out-of-control arms race as griefers try harder and harder to aggrieve other players), or a culture of well-manneredness (and as soon as anybody discovers how to reliably create one of these, please let me know).

You can't put an end to all external motivation, but as a designer, a certain degree of responsibility for the phenomenon falls to you.