So, it took a little while to get back to it, but...
Well I thought a little more about how goals can bleed backwards into the process that achieves them, in the domain of gameplay. I think that anyone who has studied the relationship between means and ends in production systems would have a lot to say here. Essentially, the path along which one approaches the goal of an activity can begin to dominate one's perspective within the activity. A metaphor which just popped into my head is the hill-climbing false horizon. Most hills have concave sides, thus when climbing to the top one's shortened line of sight results in seeing a horizon that isn't actually the peak.
As with large, >1 man, software projects (which I'm sure we've all been involved in), playing a game is a matter of achieving many short term objectives along a definite path towards a given goal. But fortunately for game players, they almost never have to plot the path themselves, nor update it in a change control process, nor adapt to reductions in their agency*. I suspect if they did, the number of game completions would drop through the floor.
The point being, management of goals isn't a prioritised skill-set of game playing, which is one reason narrative is so important to games. The natural human tendency is to deal with what's in front of us and put the rest off. Too much complexity can completely shut a person down, render them incapable of action. I think there is a hierarchy of player goals, atomic actions forming the easy-to-process bottom layer, above that situated actions/reactions, then tactical, strategic and finally narrative layers.
So I contend that the gameplay process is actually a process of transference in this hierarchy, the player's attention forming a wave moving through the medium of the possible foci for her attention - that is, the medium of goals. And the transference occurs continuously, as players complete atomic actions, that lead them through situations, each of these requiring tactics that serve a strategy. Since narratives are mostly linear and pre-designed (so far: even GTA just allows you to ignore the narrative at will), these are out of the player's control and thus form the anchor points of the wave, keeping it from becoming too chaotic and unraveling. Not that game devs could provide that much content anyway!
The goals in each layer are aggregates of those in the layer below. From this perspective, we see that players embark on an activity for which they know there is a goal, though they don't quite know what it is, and they follow a process in order to get there, although they haven't specified the process since they don't know where it's supposed to lead them. Instead, they work toward the nearest specifiable achievement, using the means given to them by the game mechanics, seeing it as a reliable method of finding new achievements to aim toward. You climb the hill in order to climb the hill. And (hopefully) finding this experience to be an optimal one (i.e. they enjoy themselves), the player memorises the pattern of cognition and/or kinesthesia involved in the activity. This reinforces the pleasure derived by the brain from experiencing it again, so long as enough variety remains to permit a level of novelty that matches the individual's taste (correlating to their capacity for processing complexity).
A game doesn't end when you produce something, it ends when there's none of it left to do. Maybe, there are no goals to games! *(I wonder what kind of game that would make - where progress is measured by power-downs, kind of like aging backwards. If you start off as the Destroyer of Worlds and progress down to Imp#5276, would you be bothered playing?)
