There is a belief that a good game never punishes players and only rewards them.
It’s a belief that often causes debate amongst Designers because the phrase is usually reinterpreted to mean “The player must never fail.” and this couldn’t be more wrong. Failure does not equal Punishment and in fact Failure is an intrinsic feature of all games and forms of play.
One of the biggest problems is that failure is thought of as being a negative thing. If you fail the mission then it’s Game Over. This is only a correlative relationship however in that Punishment (which is almost always negative) often follows Failure (which can be positive). “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc” as somebody who understands Latin might say (I don’t I just stole it from Wikipedia to look clever).
Failure is a Positive experience when it is possible for us to learn from it. This may sound a bit like a line from a self-help book but it’s something that is worth emphasising.
When most gamers buy a new game the first thing they do not do is read the manual. Instead they will load the game up and immediately jump in and start trying things out to see what happens. When something works they add it to their mental model of how the game works and start applying that knowledge to future interactions. The same is true when something doesn’t work. With every interaction the Player is refining their mental model and making it more accurate.
Valve found that Play-testers for Team Fortress 2 weren’t as upset when they died if they were shown who killed them (and the surrounding context) and told how they had improved. By providing Players with this feedback on why they just died they were helping the Players learn from their mistakes and reinforcing their own progress. They had managed to turn dying from something that was relatively punishing into something that was beneficial. By dying you were learning.
Take a racing game for example. You step into a car you’ve never driven before and you start out by driving it in a similar way to the last car you drove. Using this base experience you start to develop a mental model of how to drive this new car (and I should point out that it is very rare that the player is actually aware of this information). Both success and failure help you refine this model. You start to take corners faster and faster and with each success confidence in your model grows and similarly if you spin out or hit a wall the failure helps establish the limits of that model. Failure because of over-confidence in your own mental model is a positive gain. The failure is your own and fits within your model. Both Successes and Failures that contradict your mental model result in dissonance and confusion.
Key to this learning process is that once you have failed you are able to test out your new model quickly. If you cannot affirm what you have just learnt then it is very likely that the experience will be forgotten and the failure repeated later. Respawning in TF2 is often very swift and you can nail that corner on the next lap.
This somewhat matches something Clint Hocking said at GDC
In contrast, the consequences for getting kicked out of the execution phase in Chaos Theory has a huge impact — the game is so reliant on the player executing his careful plan, and the game is so slow-paced, that it makes more sense simply to reload a saved game. But in Far Cry 2, that disruption ends up being part of the game, and there is such a level of chaos to begin with that players did not end up feeling the need to reload every time something went wrong; rather, they would adapt to the new factors.
The fact that failure didn’t mean the game ended or that you had lost a lot of time preparing and were now unable to continue meant that Players are much happier with trying something new and potentially failing. The short turn-around on being able to integrate changes into their model meant that failure was a Positive force which helped the player learn.
System’s like Far Cry 2‘s malaria and weapon jamming, which introduce randomness, ended up having much more influence over the final experience of the game than was expected with the initial design. What happened was then that they were the triggers that kick the player out of the execution phase back into the composition phase, leading to the rapid back-and-forth of those two phases.
Failure or a sudden change in circumstance is often a trigger for improvisation. When your plan fails you have to call on that mental model of the game again and respond. Part of the feedback loop that makes games so entertaining. A perfectly executed plan has it’s own rewards but success in the face of failure can be even more rewarding. Being able to adapt quickly and effectively requires many more skills than just solving a static puzzle.
Take Reset by roBurky.
A game that lasts about 3 minutes and never punishes the player for Failure. A game that is very challenging despite not actually having any formal win or lose conditions. You will always reach the end of the game but along the way you will have been subject to both success and failure. At no point does this make the game any less enjoyable as either an experience or a game.
It’s worth noting that I ended up playing the game 5 times just now before remembering to take a screenshot.
Here every time you hit an asteroid or a missile it is a failure. The ships controls alter as you take damage with it favouring either the left or the right which forces you to adapt your model as you play. Each new element is introduced carefully allowing you to experiment with them in relative safety letting you build a model of how the element works and how best to deal with it. Then as all of the elements combine together you are forced to improvise and adapt using what you have learnt.
This game is a perfect example of how Failure isn’t always a negative experience.
- The game is consistent throughout allowing us to learn from each failure and adapt our mental model of the game.
- We are able to put our adapted model into practice quickly because in a few moments there is a new opportunity for us to try it out.
- Failure forces you to improvise and adapt to the situation calling on your full understanding of the game.
You don’t need to be able to lose for a game to be enjoyable or challenging. You just need to be able to fail.
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5 Comments
Some very good points there, Rob. I’m quite surprised you didn’t mention Halo, though. I know that regenerating health is a bit of a “we’re scared of killing the player” cop-out in design terms these days, but Halo wasn’t quite like that.
The regenerating shield not only made sense in terms of the game world, but it also meant that getting down to 15% health wasn’t going to have you reaching instinctively for the quickload, the scourge of virtually all “hunt the healthpack” FPS games up to that point.
Having finite health and a regenerating shield allowed the game to flow much better, and encouraged the player to learn about the way enemies attacked and adapt their tactics accordingly.
I agree with your main point wholeheartedly: failure is good. It’s character-building and makes you a better gamer, because it gives you a chance to learn from your mistakes.
Personally, I think the move to “failure is bad” game design and rewarding the player for the slightest inconsequential thing they do within the game (really, don’t get me started on “achievements”) is a reflection of the cultural shift from the expectation that success had to be earned to today’s instant gratification society, where people expect everything laid out on a plate for them.
I started gaming in 1984, when I was 8 years old. I’m not saying gaming was better then (certainly not from a technological perspective), but we were certainly much more tolerant of in-game failure. Perhaps this is more due to the technical limitations of videogames of that era, that were just making the transition from the arcades to the home, but I do think that there’s a cultural and societal element to it as well. I shudder to think of the reaction you’d get from an 8 year old now if you sat them down behind something as inherently unforgiving as Manic Miner, say.
There’s something in L4D’s developer commentaries that supports your argument nicely. It’s about why they implemented the “three strikes and you’re out” mechanic, which tosses a player into dead-guy mode once he’s been incapacitated three times.
One advantage of allowing a player to die is that he has the opportunity to observe better players as they’re (more successfully) navigating through the chaos. It’s not only about the immediate feedback of “if I do this, I die.” The spectator also gets a look at other people’s strategies for dealing with the given problem.
Great post, by the way. I enjoy this blog quite a bit.
I enjoyed this post very much and lain really said what I was thinking as I was reading the post. That today’s society failure is the enemy and the Greek view that a well lived life is a life of struggle is replaced with a well lived life if a life where I can sit in my comfortable chair and get this false sense of accomplishment while I eat cheetos and drank beer. Not to put down cheetos, nothing better while gaming for me. Anyways, my point being that the beauty behind the struggle and accomplishment through the struggle is vanishing. I wouldn’t say it’s gone, but there is definitly a change. I personally feel like this change did not start with the bigger video game companies, but it sure is being supported by them. Good post, love the blog.
“Failure is a Positive experience when it is possible for us to learn from it.” I strongly agree with this idea, because we as designers usually put so much effort into designing the game instructions, but players do not like reading them. Furthermore, players take the “easy to learn” factor as one of the most important characteristics of a game. Therefore, what it makes us to do is to simplify the instructions and let the players learn about the game during the play. For this purpose, we need to set up a stage, where the players experience failure. After failing the game, they could start the game all over again and add some other strategies to it and see whether it lets him/her go through. The process itself engages the players so much that when eventually they come through it, they experience a sense of achievement.
This is the reason why we need to give to the players: second life, second chance. On one hand, number of lives/opportunities should be enough for the players to make progress. On the other hand, the number should not be too big to let the players lose sense of strength toward each game. For example in the game we just designed, we introduced an element where players after getting that element, becomes much easier to win. Then we introduced many negative elements around that good element. So if the player decides to go for that good element, he takes risk by going through the negative elements around the good one. We think this might complicate the game in a good way.
Breaking the mental model is another important factor in designing the sense of failure in a game. Here is where the creativity starts working. For example board game, we must create different mental models for the users in each game. If in Monopoly it was good collecting cards and spending money, we designed a board game, where it’s better to save your money. When the player enters the game first time, the established mental model drives the player to use the old strategy “spending money buying the cards” then the player fails the game. Then he works out that he should save some money for surviving the battles, and then he might win. This change in his mind as a progress sets into the player’s mind and forces him to play again and again to try new strategies to win. This is basically the core value of the game that keeps the users playing again and again.
Therefore in order to attract the players, we need to set up the rules the way that could allow users fail and start again, then fail again and start again. This is a little bit that people might enjoy: making mistakes that could result in a failure, but you always have a chance to start all over again. Moreover, some players do not play ordinary games again if they play through the game and win, but if we design the game with a lot of strategy in it, then players would be able to experience much more every time they change their strategy. This is the key to fully engage the player into the game.
As for the player, he will be awarded more and more challenges, and be concentrated on engaging into the game rather than the actual winning result.
Great article!
I think that the partial failure is always taken into account in games. E.g. shooters let you restock your ammo and replenish your health before you enter a room full of bad guys or after exhausting boss fight, before venturing any further.
There is a certain type of game where “no failure path” should be thought over and created by the designer. It’s the stealth game. Thief series is a good example for that. The game rewards the perceptive player, who observes the environment, finds a weak spot in a “tight” security and move unseen from location to location. The combat is also possible, but the margin for failure here is really small. Usually you can pick up a fight with one-two guards and you’ll be lucky if you don’t die.
On the other hand, a bad example of a game punishing the player without giving him proper guidelines first is Cryostasis. I wrote a few words about it here: http://t3edleveldesign.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/my-game-design-rants-1-cryostasis/
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