When Should You Abandon Your Objectives?

Setting goals is important, but there are three situations where you should consider dropping them.

As a game designer, I’ve often been in a situation where I was unsure if an objective -a project, a mechanic, an intention- was achievable, worth pursuing or if I should drop it. Goals can be annoying to manage: too rigid, blurry, or limited. Still, I heavily believe in the power of setting goals for yourself, and I regularly do so in several areas of my life.

Taking time to set myself on a course and regularly evaluating my progress, method & chances of success is an excellent way to clarify my priorities and stay focused. However, my brain also tends to hate unfinished stuff, which is often helpful and sometimes annoying when I should drop an objective before wasting too many resources.

There are three situations where you should drop an objective. The first is easy on paper and complex in practice. The second is the easiest to spot, yet often poorly handled. And the third is probably the most challenging for the human ego (at least for mine). Let’s dig into it.

Cursed Objectives

“Cursed objectives” are fundamentally flawed goals which can never be attained because they’re built on conflicting premises. For instance, I want to “be a sumotori who runs marathons” has two individual components that contradict on a deep level. Motivation & training can’t always overcome human limits; you have to choose one or the other at some point. (Note: I discovered after writing that a sumotori did try this challenge but walked for the majority of the marathon).

It’s never as evident in the game industry, but we see many of those, probably because there is a galaxy of nebulous sub-objectives behind every objective. The role of the game designer is to establish pillars & intentions for each part of the game using specific vocabulary, listing success criteria and anything suitable. If you skip this part, you risk spending forever iterating towards a utopia. There isn’t always a “third way”, a “sweet spot”, or other expressions managers love to say to make you work harder.

So, you must learn early in your career to spot them. The biggest indicator that you’re facing a cursed problem is if you feel that pursuing a given part of the objective takes you further from the rest. The second trap I’ve often encountered is what I’d call “the eluded basics”: when we start a project, we tend to write down the specific guidelines & intentions about the game but not the mandatory basics (such as “accessible”, “pleasing the fans of the brand”, “memorable story”, etc.) I’d always advocate writing everything, even if it sounds dumb: I can guarantee that many indies would be better off if they clearly stated that one of their goals is to make the game financially viable for the people working on it.

When to abandon a cursed goal? As soon as you spot one! You’ll typically drop a part of the objective and keep the coherent one, giving you a sudden boost of energy, as if you dropped a weight (literally).

Impossible Objectives

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with your goal, but you still won’t attain it because you lack the necessary resources: it’s what I call an “impossible objective”. It’s typically another side of the same not-identifying-properly-your-constraints coin than the above. AAA are often guilty of it: after all, if some other studio pulled it off, why not go for it? I see two main reasons: expertise & motivation.

People often believe that time is the most crucial resource to manage. They can hire to increase man-months or throw some overtime to catch up. List tasks, estimate, and trim around the edges. Too few plan their objectives around expertise, despite being the resource everyone lacks: in the game industry, we’re “discovering” a lot more than we’re “optimizing”. Therefore, we all lack expertise when we constantly face uncharted problems. Your game project has a lot of issues that you must learn to solve because the people who already acquired this expertise aren’t around (and they’re busy with something else anyway).

But … aren’t people motivated to take on new challenges? Don’t creative people explicitly dislike staying in a comfort zone? Sure, but motivation is also a resource. You only have so much before it runs out. Motivation isn’t a “mindset”; you can’t add “more” simply by thinking about it. You have to manage it, or it’ll drain faster than you imagine. Making any project rely on motivation is pure madness: only healthy work systems & habits can take you far. See it as such: motivation is the fuel, methodology is the rails. Both are needed for the locomotive to move forward, but burning fuel without rails won’t get it anywhere.

So, what happens when you realize you don’t have the necessary resources to reach your goal? First, don’t hope to compensate it through “better efficiency” or “luck” or anything. These aren’t the resources you lack; it’s just wishful thinking the problems will magically solve themselves. If you don’t have resources to allocate to a goal, abandon it and celebrate everything you’ve accomplished. Even if it wasn’t the end you imagined, you still have learned something valuable that’ll help you down the line.

Unworthy Objectives?

We all have limited resources in life, yet an infinite supply of possible goals, which brings us to the third case: what happens if you have the resources to reach an attainable goal, yet you don’t want to allocate them here?

I’ve always enjoyed discovering new topics and engaging in a variety of activities throughout the year. I set achievable goals for each, such as participating in a half marathon, building a scale model or learning to play a particular piano piece, which gives me a direction and a finish line. The importance of each varies throughout the year, and I can regularly change focus while still enjoying the satisfying sense of completeness.

However, in the past months, I became unfaithful to this principle as one side activity took over a significant portion of my schedule: writing this newsletter. Sticking to a set rhythm was a fantastic system to support my intrinsic motivation, and I certainly enjoy the variety of topics I can explore. Still, committing to drafting, writing, revising, illustrating & publishing a new issue every two weeks occupies a large chunk of my free time. I do not aim to make my writing lucrative; I already have a lot of my work schedule between kickstarting a new game studio and running a game production.

When it’s neither the goal that’s impossible nor the resources that aren’t available, I think it’s important to ask yourself: what did you really want to achieve with this objective? What is the opportunity cost of pursuing it, aka all the other things you could do if you dropped it? Abandoning such goals may be painful because, deep down, you still believe it’s valuable: maybe there’s a way to reframe it in a less demanding way. It happens a lot in game design. You must learn to “kill your darlings” and trust your gut.

What’s Next

Is it the end of this newsletter? No! But it’s evolving.

The biggest change is going to be the schedule. I won’t publish every two weeks like I did so far and switch to a “when it’s ready” policy instead. I still have many ideas and unfinished drafts in the drawer. In the coming months (and years, hopefully), I’ll share more about my own game company/project, sharing advice & helpful behind-the-scenes.

I’d also like to introduce a new type of issue (tentative name “react”), where I’ll share some interesting articles or videos and share my point of view, why I agree or not. It’s akin to writing a long comment on social media without going through the whole writing process.

To avoid missing out, the best way to be warned of new content is to subscribe. I’m not selling your email, but I promise I’ll send you interesting content about game design, the industry & how to make better games!