Set Your Goals: Results vs Process Goals in Gaming

Setting goals when it comes to gaming is one of the most natural things there is. Most games are structured around various goals: reaching certain save points, finishing up a quest line or an act, getting a new item… You know the drill. When you start focusing on competitive games, those goals become winning matches, reaching certain ranks, topping a leaderboard, and those are all great goals to have, even if sometimes they may seem out of reach.

That said, those aren’t the kinds of goals we want to discuss today… We want to outline the concept of goals that you can train around, and how those can take the edge off of the grind of improvement.

The problem with results goals is that you don’t always have direct control over them. There are just so many variables that come into the mix… For example, if you’re just trying to climb ranks in online matchmaking, you’re at the mercy of whatever teammates are queued onto your team, the quality of opponents you run into, technical issues that could leave your team at a massive disadvantage, and so on and so forth. You’re putting in the work, you’re putting in the effort, but the results may not reflect that, and you shouldn’t view that as a failure. So let’s change up the goals.

Results Goals… Or Process Goals?

As we covered above, a results goal is one you’re trying to achieve. Alternatively, a process goal is something that you will do to earn those results. It’s the “friends we made along the way” joke turned into training reality. Maybe the real goal was the goals we set along the way, right?

You can make a choice right now about what you’re going to work on in your upcoming training and gaming, how you’re going to approach your play, and what behaviors you’re going to try to repeat consistently. These are things you can instantly change by deciding to do so. You can’t simply decide to hit 100% headshots in your next Counter-Strike match; that’s just not realistic, but you can decide to stop repeeking the same angles, as that tends to get your own head shot off.

Shifting from results-based goals to process-based goals sounds really easy, maybe even a little silly in its simplicity, but holding yourself accountable to those changes and ensuring that they stick is easier said than done. That’s the challenge.

Let’s Break That Down

So how do we put this into a practical, functional system? Well, we can start by working backward from those bigger goals, breaking them down into smaller, more manageable windows until you settle on goals that are more realistically attainable.

We start with the big picture, such as a goal that’s a year out, and even then, you’re looking at 365 days. Then you can break those down into three-month segments. So what does a quarter of consistent progress actually look like? What could you realistically accomplish in that window that feels like you’re on track to hitting some higher rank goal by the end of the year?

Then we can break that down even further, such as, what does one month’s worth of that progress become? What does a week on track look like? Is the system starting to make a bit more sense?

When you’ve been able to boil these goals down into something like a three-day window, you are looking at something that is so much more manageable and attainable. More importantly, a three-day window means your goals need to be more tangible; instead of something that’s bigger picture like “I want to improve my tracking,” you’re looking at something like “I’m paying more attention to my crosshair’s smoothness when I’m tracking a target.” You can assess this behavior and train it so that it plays into those big picture goals.

Fitting This Into Your Training

A practical starting point for this kind of system in your training would be using your Benchmarks of choice, whether that’s the Aimlabs Official Benchmarks or something else. If you’re not checking in with your Benchmarks or haven’t for a while… Good, there’s the first step. Once you’ve got a baseline read on where your aim stands across major categories such as flicking, tracking, and switching, you now have some goals you can outline and check in on periodically with the Benchmarks.

From there, you’re building up that three-day plan we mentioned before. What categories are you working on? What subcategories are contributing to those issues? Are there behaviors in your aim that are holding you back on those subcategories? The three-day window is the perfect opportunity to dial in the gameplay behaviors that contribute to those bigger questions.

Set those goals, check in with those goals in those time frames, and see what you’ve accomplished. If your efforts moved the needle, that’s awesome… Build on that. If you missed the mark, we need to go deeper, find the underlying causes, and target those in your next goal window.

What’s the Bigger Picture?

Training is all about systems, and that’s what we’re developing here. These systems are the train tracks of progress that you’re going to be steaming along on. We’ve outlined how to set better goals and ways to break them down further into bite-sized sections you can keep achieving and growing from. That alone is a goal worth seeking out, because seeking out improvement as a whole can be overwhelming in its own right. So, hey, look at that, we’re already making progress, just with the concept we’re outlining in this article.

We don’t want to discourage you from setting bigger goals; those are important too. You have to know where you want to go to motivate yourself to get there. This is all about setting goals that you can see consistent progress with, even when those loftier goals may seem more and more out of reach. We want to give you the feedback loop to actually understand that you are growing, even if you’re not becoming a Top 50 player in your game overnight. Those bigger goals and achievements aren’t going anywhere… we’re just outlining a more realistic path to get there.