Failure and Games

Most games involve the threat of several kinds of failure. The underlying principle is that a player cannot enjoy success if there were never a chance of failure. I agree with this reasoning with just a slight difference. For the player to fully enjoy his or her success, there must be a perceived chance of failure. Note the important difference, the player must believe that there is a real chance of failure, there must not necessarily be one in reality. Why not, you may ask. Well, it would certainly be simpler just to allow the player to fail, then to make the player belive that he or she could fail when this is not really the case. The problem with failure is that failing is not rewarding, avoiding to fail is. There are a lot of games out there whose designers have failed to grasp that difference.

There are all kinds of failures in a game. If the player, in a calm moment tries to push a button to call an elevator, but misses and nothing happens is a minor failure. If a player misses a jump and falls into the flow of molten lava below (we all know the abundance of these kind of environments) and die, the it is a fatal failure. The worst kind of failure, that I'll call catastrophic, are failures that makes it impossible to finish the game. For instance, if you did not pick up that key in the first scene, 20 hours ago, then you can't get through the door in scene 64, and there is no way to get back to the first scene. Repetitive failure will make the failure more severe, for instance, if it takes the player more in the elevator button example a full five minutes before he or she manage to call the elevator, then the aggregation of those failures will be much worse than a single failed jump in to the lava.

It might be important to add that when I talk about failure, I talk about player failure. It is a failure that the player could have avoided if he or she would have been more skilled, more perceptive or just plain more lucky. Since it is a player failure, it means that the player is most likely to acknowledge that it was he or she who failed, and being inadequate is never fun.

Each failure comes with some kind of cost. Most commonly this is the cost of the additional time spent making new attempts. This a greatly underestimated cost. Trying to do the same thing over and over again quickly becomes boring and the game loses its entertainment value. The time spent between each new attempt is even more important. If the player has to reload the level, pass 3 minutes of easy obstacles every time before he or she can make an attempt at the difficult part, then each failure will cost him or her three minutes of entertainment and only award him or her with frustration. Some people find great enjoyment in overcoming such a great obstacle, but to me, who's just looking for a quick fix of relaxing entertainment after work, the prospect of trying to make a difficult jump over a lava stream just sounds too much like a duller version of work. In fact, this is painfully similar to Dante's story about a man's punishment in hell where the man had to push a boulder up a hill for eternity (note that this was supposed to be a description of hell, not one of a man having a good time).

The bottom line is that continuous failure is not fun or entertaining, and as long as game designers fail to understand this and work to minimize it, were going to have dissatisfied customers.