Something that can often start a bit of an argument in board game circles, both designers and players, is whether winning is important. Even if you can agree it’s important, you might disagree on how important, and important for why. I’m going to discuss my take on it, which has to do with the magic circle.

The Magic Circle

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, the Magic Circle is the term pertaining to the mental and social space you enter when playing a game. When you step into the “circle,” everything else is irrelevant. This isn’t necessarily about escapism, though it pertains to that. Basically, everything you do in life feeds into each other, but once you’re in a game, only the game affects the game. You, personally, may have more money than another player, but right now, in the game, you can’t buy more food than another player. If you are in the circle, only other things in the circle affect it.

However, you do bring yourself into the circle. If you have skills that pertain to the game, then those might help you win. The amount of money you have may not affect the game, but if you got that money by making good purchasing decisions, then that might transfer over to a resource management game. In social deduction games, you ability to recognize when someone is lying may be powerful, and though you may know that other player outside of the circle and know when they’re lying, they brought that in, too. However, while on the topic, I’ll say that some people don’t find the difference between being in and out of the circle that significant. If someone in real life is mad at you for lying to them in a social deduction game, then this might be why. Personally, I find the two quite distinct, and appreciate the ability to do things I wouldn’t do outside of the circle.

Winning

One thing that hugely seperates the inside and outside of the circle is winning. In life, you have goals, but not win states. Yes, you got the job, or completed your latest work of art, but that’s never the end. Life goes on.

Games don’t have that. In a game, the only things in the circle are what the game provides and what you put in. So what do you do in a world that is unrelated to the world outside? Well, you do what the game tells you. That’s all you’ve got to work on. Games need goals so that you have some reason to manipulate the objects and systems in the circle.

Goals

Winning has one strong but different corollary: goals. Winning is the primary goal of any game as defined by the game. Some players have their own goals when they play a game, like some condition they want to happen (like making everyone laugh) or something they personally find enjoyment out of (like getting a bunch of sheep), but there’s more to it than that. While winning is the end goal, trying to win is the mid-goal. If I am not trying to win, then I am not doing anything. But if I get as close as possible to winning as I can get, then I will have succeeded at my goal of trying to win, regardless of whether I actually do.

Fun

So now that we have our words defined, we need to answer the root question: is winning important to enjoying the game? Well, I could say that depends on your definition of fun, but that’s going to be true always. The important tidbit is that achieving goals is satisfying. Is satisfaction the same as fun? To some, maybe, but it at least feels good. So games needs goals in order for people to feel good about playing them. Winning is the main goal put before us, because it’s what we expect to see when we enter the circle, and it’s the metric by which we can determine our relative success. I want to do well because being good at something feels good. If I don’t want to win, then I don’t want to succeed, which means I am aimless and restless, and won’t enjoy the game.

Conclusion

Every game needs to have some way to win, or at least some way to succeed. You can still have fun even if you aren’t winning, but you at least need that anchor point to know what the magic circle you stepped into is based around. Without it, you’ll just be lost.