In the new area of downloadable casual games, 3 there is a movement from life punishment to energy punishment, with many games featuring energy bars, timers, or other types of soft evaluations of player performance as with the timer in Big City Adventure: San Francisco (Jolly Bear Games 2007) (see Figure 1).įigure 1 : Big City Adventure: San Francisco - a timer gradually runs out. As a recent example of this design principle, after reaching game over in Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo EAD Tokyo, 2007), the player loses of coins and collectables, but not overall progress in the game. Whereas early video games in the arcade, on the home console, or for personal computers, tended to force the player to replay the entire game after failing, many home games from the mid-1980s and on became much more lenient by dispersing save points, allowing the player to save the game at will, or letting the player restart at the latest level played even after game over. In this perspective, all failures eventually translate into setbacks, and the player’s use of time and energy is the most fundamental currency of games. Losing energy brings the player closer to losing a life, and losing a life often leads to some type of setback. Setback punishment: Having to replay part of the game losing abilities.Game termination punishment: Game over.Life punishment: Loss of a life (or “retry”), bringing the player closer to game termination.Energy punishment: Loss of energy, bringing the player closer to life punishment.We can distinguish between different types of punishment for player failure: 2 1 Failure and Punishmentįailure can be described as being unsuccessful at some task in a game, and punishment is what happens to the player as a result. I am writing here about single-player games. To examine this, I will look take a closer look at the role of failure and punishment. Nevertheless, these two perspectives still present opposing considerations – the goal-oriented perspective suggests that games should be as easy as possible the aesthetic perspective suggests that games should not be too easy. Closer examination reveals that the apparent contradiction originates from two separate perspectives on games: a goal-oriented perspective wherein players want to win, and an aesthetic perspective wherein players prefer games with the right amount of challenge and variation. In effect, this sharpens the contradiction between players as wanting to win and players wanting games to be challenging: failing, and feeling responsible for failing, makes players enjoy a game more, not less. Players clearly prefer feeling responsible for failing in a game not feeling responsible is tied to a negative perception of a game. This study strongly indicates that this is not the case. Question 2: Do players prefer games where they do not feel responsible for failing?.The study shows that players have quite elaborate theories of failure as a source of enjoyment in games.Įven so, given the negative connotations of failing, would a game be better received if players did not feel responsible for failing, but rather blamed failures on the game or on bad luck? This is the second question: In effect, failure adds content by making the player see new nuances in a game. The study of players discussed in this essay indicates that failure serves the deeper function of making players readjust their perception of a game. The simplest theory of failure states that failing serves as a contrast to winning, that failure thereby makes winning all the more enjoyable. Question 1: What is the role of failure in video games?.This is a contradiction I will try resolve in what follows. If this seems self-evident, there is nonetheless a contradictory viewpoint, according to which games should be “neither too easy nor too hard”, implying that players also want not to win, at least part of the time. Winning makes you happy, losing makes you unhappy. It is quite simple: When you play a game, you want to win. Wolf & Bernard Perron (eds.): The Video Game Theory Reader 2. Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Gamesįrom Mark J.
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