Storyboard: Go for the goal

We've all got goals. Some of them are short-term objectives (get lunch, figure out how to get home early today, don't get eaten by that tiger) and some of them are larger in scope (cook better lunches, work on a flexible schedule, develop an anti-tiger field), but they're an important part of our day-to-day activities. Knowing a character's goals is a clear way to make it pretty clear what your character wants out of any given exchange.

If it weren't already obvious, today I want to spend time talking about goals. We've talked about motivation before, but goals are the tangible results of what keeps your character motivated in the first place. And while I was originally going to use one of my characters as a model for mapping goals, I realized that I've got a much better example I can use, one that helps demonstrate just how relevant goals are to real people. So I'm putting myself under examination as we talk about the many, many aspects of goals as they apply to characters.

Active vs. passive goals

One of my long-term goals is to lose weight. This is due to my longstanding desire not to look like a shaggy ape emerging from a prehistoric slumber, and weight is the one thing that I can actually change without resorting to expensive voluntary surgical procedures. Another one of my long-term goals is to build my writing into a long-term career that can provide for my family, even if said family currently just consists of myself, Ms. Lady, and a cat. These are both large goals with a great deal of similarities, but they have one important difference -- one is passive and one is active.

Losing weight is something I have to actively work on. It requires me to alter my behavior in order for it to happen at all. Building a writing career, however... practice is certainly important, but there's also a lot of waiting for opportunity and capitalizing on it when it comes up. Cold submissions don't come off well, so I largely have to hone my craft and jump on the opportunities that do arise.

Active goals are things that you get up in the morning and make discrete progress on. Passive goals are those that you work on as you get the chance -- not necessarily because they're less important, but because you don't have the advantage of mathematical discretion. I can run for half an hour every day and mark that off as progress toward losing weight, but just sitting and writing words for half an hour might not get me any closer to my career goals.

In roleplaying, active goals are the sort of thing that your character will more readily say that she's trying to accomplish, like being a master fencer. Passive goals often tend to coincide with social interactions -- looking for love, family, friendship, and so forth -- but they can also coincide with situations that don't come up regularly. Your character might be a scholar with a stated active goal of researching all the alien species she can find in Star Trek Online, but a passive goal of learning to communicate with non-verbal species can give her something to do when you encounter something a bit farther off the beaten path.

Immediate vs. prolonged goals

Yeah, I could have just gone with long-term or short-term goals, but that doesn't really summarize the split. My immediate goals as I write this are to finish the column, get something to drink, and maybe read more of Catching Fire. Prolonged goals, however, range from the aforementioned goals in the previous header to goals like improving my relationship with my living parent and getting to bed at 11 with some consistency.

Prolonged goals are the sort of thing you want to accomplish in a few months or years or whatever, and as a result they're usually more conceptual. Immediate goals, however, are the ones that pertain to your immediate emotional state. They also tend to be less focused on in roleplaying, and I think that's a shame because there's a lot of verisimilitude to be mined out of your character's having immediate goals.

Seriously, think about it. If you want to have your character resemble a real person, there should be times when he's lonely or sad or scared or bored or happy. Sometimes he wants a warm meal, sometimes he wants a nice shirt, sometimes he wants someone to say something nice to him -- and sometimes he wants to work on being the greatest chef in the world or finding his lost father. But not all of the time. Trying to work on constructing immediate goals based on physical needs can help make your characters a little more three-dimensional, even if sometimes that means they might feel a bit less heroic for wanting a nice talk and some tea instead of a dungeon run.

Hey, when I was out of power for a week, losing weight wasn't on my list of things to accomplish. I just wanted a home-cooked meal and a hot shower. Creature comforts aren't always low on the priority list.

Resolvable vs. interminable goals

Let's go back to one of the first goals that I mentioned: losing weight. That's the sort of goal for which I can set myself a benchmark and then walk away. If I say I want to weigh X pounds, when I weigh X pounds I can stop working on that goal entirely. On the other hand, I could also say that there's no specific amount of weight that I want to lose, that my real goal is to just keep behaving in a healthier fashion and losing weight as best I can, and that I'm not going to be done as long as I still keep shoveling foods stuffed with cheese and beef into my feed-hole.

Resolvable goals are often more immediate ones, but not always. The defining characteristic is that you can reach a certain point, nod, and be sure that you're done. "Defeat the Emperor" is a resolvable goal. Interminable goals are more along the lines of "defeat all evil and injustice." There's no realistic way that you can actually expect to move that goal into the finished pile, just lots of ways that you can try to make progress at the overall direction.

The reason I picked out losing weight there, though, is that it's a prime example of how some goals can really go in either direction. You can pick an end point for your goals, or you can just keep soldiering on as long as you can. "I want to make money" could be a goal for your character -- but does he want to be a millionaire, or does he want to just make as much money as he possibly can at all times? When he says that he wants love, does he want one person to love him, or does he just want to keep finding more people to date?

Perhaps an even more powerful tool in your hands is knowing which one is the truth and which one the character believes. It's possible that your Final Fantasy XIV character thinks she just wants to be famous in Ul'dah and that's all she really needs, but you know full well that even if she manages that, she's still going to want more adulation. That gives you an interesting set of internal conflicts to play up -- does she realize what she really wants? Does she claim she wants to pursue a new goal?

Or does she just get tired and want a nap before moving on? Because that's always an option.

I hope you enjoyed today's column, since that's certainly my... aim. As always, feedback is welcomed in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week, I'm going to tackle a sticky issue: taking a war beyond words and into the realm of the physical, something that's easily handled in more or less no MMO to date.

Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.