Thinking a bit more about it, I’m wondering if a “false endpoint” is actually just a compromise, or – less diplomatically – a bodge. Many tasks in the real world – as opposed to play, “real” or otherwise – appear to be striving to meet loosely defined criteria with restrictions along several criteria.

I think the loosely defined, or organic, criteria is the key to this – for example, in the creative example you give of an advertising slogan for a chocolate bar, there is no true “right” answer. The theoretical best answer is one that will increase sales to the maximum the economy will support – but does that mean that a critically acclaimed slogan which doesn’t appear to increase sales or brand awareness very much is a “false endpoint”? Or a slogan that triples sales – is that a “false endpoint”?

I think the point I’m trying to make, clumsily, is that there’s very few actual endpoints per se outside of play. There’s improvements, and iterations, and breakthroughs… so we end up setting goals for ourselves, targets, because it means we can actually call something done :)

Creative projects done as a hobby are a good example – in many senses they’re more like the above definition of play than anything else – we do them for fun, and have fun so we keep noodling away the problem to arrive at something better than the first, good-enough solution. But we still draw the line at *a* solution, just to be able to draw the line somewhere – even though we may well come back to it later!

I do think one of the big attraction about many games is that there’s often clearcut metrics of success, which lend themselves to incremental increases in perceived performance – incrementing the false endpoints, as it were, which often appears to actually *enhance* the process of play.

That’s quite enough disconnected rambling I think…