Goals differentiate games from other types of play and are usually established by the rules. In game design, you don't consider only one type of goal. They might be:
- long-term or short-term,
- explicit or implied,
- optional or obligatory,
- strictly or broadly defined,
- achievable or not.
Victory condition — A rule that decides who wins the game.
Co-optionality — A feature of a game — co-optional game may be played both cooperatively, competitively, or independently from one another during a single playthrough.
The dependencies between these categories are complex. In your game project you might find usage for many combinations, but there also are some good practices, for example, the main goal of a classic competitive game (long-term, obligatory, connected to win condition) is better to be strictly defined, while co-optional games work better with loose goals. And it's worth remembering about gray areas useful in different genres of games, like "middle-term", or "at first implied then becoming explicit".
Implied goals and the first rule of music games
There are some goals that don't result from rules but directly from the situation of playing. We'll mention just two of these that might be the most worth considering when designing our type of game. The first implied goal we may even frame as the first rule of music games:
The main aim of playing a music game is to play good music.
Notice the vagueness of the term "good music", an extremely broadly defined goal — music games may allow participants to share exactly the same notion of what is "good music", but it's not necessary. You can even use the expected differences of approaches between players to your advantage as a designer. Nevertheless, both players and facilitators, should learn and respect others' ideas about "art quality", and this main musical goal will have to be achieved cooperatively.
The second implied goal, following the rules, in many gaming traditions will not be considered a goal, for different reasons:
- in sports — when rules are not followed, most often the game stops, foul play is announced and some penalty is applied (as described in the rules themselves), so, sometimes, the aim of players is to strategically break the rules;
- in computer games — rules are implemented automatically, so they don't need to be explicitly followed (although speedrunners often find and use those that may technically be broken);
- in board games — the game state from before the obstruction of rules might often be recreated, and then the game is continued, "erasing" some part of the playthrough that went after the error.
In music games, due to their real-time nature, the process usually continues even if someone breaks the rules, so you just try to make as few mistakes as possible. Following the rules during a music game is often challenging enough to serve as an enjoyable goal. Your victory in the game may just mean that you were the last to break the rules. Mistakes may also be tied to some downtime penalty with player elimination being the extreme, and unadvised, example of that.
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