I was recently asked to describe and define the concept of "epic." While there are many ways to approach this idea, I first thought of the notion of the Epic Win, likely because of my background playing online games on Xbox Live. I spent a lot of time doing this. Before long, it was crystal clear that what I liked most about online gaming was simply that it gives plenty of opportunites to completly and intelligently outsmart another human. There were certainly ranks and leaderboards and all the classic mechanics in games like Halo, the Splinter Cell series and Rainbow Six 3. But all of that was just filler around the core prospect of facing another thinking being that is constrained by the same set of rules, and understanding the rules (and their implications) deeply enough that victory over opponents became a triumph of wit and resourcefulness.
An Epic Win coincided often but not always with what the game developers had defined as wins and losses, and was even less related to any visible system of points and rewards. This was most evident in my favorite of the series of games mentioned above - Splinter Cell. The multiplayer element of Splinter Cell (when I was most interested in it) was played between two teams of two players, each side with conflicting goals and related but counterbalanced stregnths/weaknessess. Think of it like "gun-toting brute mercanaries" vs "stealthy, ninja-like spies." This counterbalance took shape in the use of different tools that each side had at it's disposal - environments were almost always very dark and the spies could activate nightvision goggles, but the mercenaries could switch to goggles that visualized electromagnetic frequencies (making any spy using their goggles or any other quipment look like a christmas tree). Mercenaries had sonar equipment running in the background of their heads-up display that notified them of any noise or movement, but spies could employ devices that made artificial noise to throw them off. Spies were fast, but the mercenaries had guns. And so forth.
Because of this defined complexity, wins in Splinter Cell were almost always epic. In order to reach your goal you had to genuinely outsmart your opponent. The game was built so that each player had many different tools to use along the many routes to the multiple goals; no one combination of the above was ever best in more than one or two conditional permutations. By 'conditional permutations' I mean to express a fundamental truth about what makes a game worth playing:
Games are about strategies, not points. Strategies lead to points, but points are just the tangible representation of one's choice in strategies. Strategies exist when one has multiple methods with which to collect points, and must choose what they assess will result in the greatest reward. Thus what makes competition fun is not necessarily that you have more points than another player; a competition is fun because you have chosen a strategy that is better than another player's strategy.
Consider a path where at certain points you are asked a trivia question, which if you get correct you earn 5 points. You could call it a game if you had many people go down this path, and at the end the winner was whoever had the most points, but this doesn't feel much like a game.
Consider now that at the halfway point there is a fork that splits the path into three, and each of these new options has the potential to win you more or fewer points, depending on various conditions that could be assessed with a little thinking beforehand. This feels more like a game. Winning is no longer about just collecting stuff (points), rather it is now more about assessing conditions and making better decisions accordingly.
I used to joke about it a lot when playing online games, but what makes a win epic is that it allows you to prove you are smarter than others. This is probably one of those points where you shouldn't get your game design/motivation advice from the self-centered, but it's a deeply satisfying and validating feeling. The ability to collect stuff does not satisfy this; in fact this is one of the reasons leaderboards are only motivating in a very specific, non-epic way.
