I don’t want to attempt tackle “goals in LARP” in a single post, so I’m going to try to start small. (I feel a little bad for posting this so soon after my first post, by the way– I don’t want to stop discussion on the first post if people still wanted to talk endgames. But I’m obsessive and therefore am writing lots of stuff about LARP theory.)
Here’s an essay on LARP-writing by Gordon Olmstead-Dean: http://midatlanticinteractivearts.com/essays/short_guide.html
I’ll quote the passage that I want to talk about:
“Motivations – a character acts in a certain way because of their motivations. […] Players usually need to know what their motives are, so that if their Goals become inaccessible, they can figure out how they should change, or react. Motivations are the reason the Player acts as he or she does.
Goals – are what the character wants to accomplish. If a character’s goals are impossible, or very unlikely, it is often better to make it clear that this is the case. Goals are the reason the Character acts as he or she does.”
I’m not going to focus on this particular definition (since I’ve never talked with Gordon Olmstead-Dean about his interpretation of it), but my definition is very much along these lines. Hopefully it’ll become clear through the following example:
