Has failure in videogames become too trivial?

How important is ‘failure’ in a videogame?

If you fail to infiltrate a super-high-security secret evil organisation's moon base, then you're doing something wrong and should be slapped on the wrist, yes? What if you fall during a fierce battle against a gigantic half-griffin, half-dragon, all-bastard creature - how harsh should the punishment be for such a heinous crime against the virtual fantasy world you're inhabiting?

I’ve been playing a lot of different videogames recently but a small clutch have caused my mind to linger upon this dark and chilling topic in these dark and chilling autumnal evenings, alongside a warming hot chocolate of course. Musing on failure and death just feels right at this time of year. But with that said, they're probably not the games you think I'm thinking of.

Yes I have been playing two games that are notably cruel to players who lack ‘the skills’. The Binding of Isaac and Dark Souls are two of the harshest games to be released for years. No, the games that have had me pondering the subject are actually Dead Island and Gears of War 3.

Doesn't matter if he hits you love, you'll just re-appear nearby with your inventory in tact.

Growing Pains
First up, Dead Island. Now I know Techland’s zombie paradise isle is more of a Diablo/Borderlands-like experience but when you put zombies in your game people, well, I expect scary survival horror. So why, as soon as I died once in Dead Island, was any potential future fear dispelled?

Before that first death I was absolutely terrified of copping it. Me and my co-op buddy would be creeping around, jumping off the sofa at any noise even vaguely resembling a moan. The sun may have been bright in the sky but pulses were running high.

Then, as is par for the course in a zombie game, you slip up. I was surrounded. I was dead.

Then I pinged back to life five meters away and lost a smidgen of cash.

Suddenly the fear of death was dispelled. Knowing that losing all my health entailed only the absolute minimum of repercussions effectively destroyed any desire to avoid it. I became fearless, the atmosphere and tension were gone, and my drive and enjoyment of Dead Island evaporated along with it.

Then there’s Gears of War 3, also known as the ‘let’s go kill some damn Locust because they’re ugly and stuff’ game.

I’m likely going to expand on this more at a later date but the finale of the Gears trilogy doesn’t sit right with me, and I’ve worked out that much of this feeling comes from having four gun-toting, adamantium framed super soldiers fighting side by side simultaneously.

If you go down in Gears 3 help is rarely more than five seconds away. A few clock ticks spent awkwardly shuffling on your knees and then a shoulder tap from one of your three buddies means you’re back up and hurling bullets at your enemies with barely a care in the world. I'm inclined to believe that all the COG are doing on the floor is scrabling for their contacts.

Even on Hardcore difficulty Gears 3 becomes less about adhering to the game’s bedrock stop-and-pop rules and more a case of ‘no worries, I’ve got three buddies to help me out when I go down’ run and gun 'fun'.

Having your health chipped away and being dropped to your knees should not be acceptable, it means you’re playing badly, you should be punished. Imagine if you played through Resident Evil and health regenerated after a while, no, the game is designed to punish dumb play; get bit and you endure the pain, live with your failure, learn to adapt. Learn to play the game. And yet anyone can effectively roll through Gears of War 3 without truly getting to know its core gameplay, because being rubbish doesn’t really matter.

Remember Gears of War 1? Remember how much harder it was? How much more tense it was?
 

Fail State
The concept of being garbage at a modern videogame has become so eroded by mass marketing bods that failing in a contemporary title is more often an inconvenience than anything else. A reason to sigh, slump back in your chair and check twitter while you wait for assistance or a loading screen to rewind you ten seconds.

One could argue that this 'issue' was propagated by the concept of the checkpoint, but this is not the case. The checkpoint, a gaming standard since Halo, was merely a translation of the PC gamer's favourite, the Quick Save button.

No the ‘checkpoint’ is not to blame. This golden nugget makes games more easily beatable but still challenges the player to become aware of, and indulge themselves in a game’s systems to ensure they can carry on. You can't herp and derp your way through Halo on Legendary, you need to learn to fight the Elites.

The true villains of this tale are those videogames that provide players with a hundred-bazillion assists to ensure death is never seen as the failure it is, the sort of game made using the mould that 'as long as you hit your head against the wall long enough, the wall will come down'. Eventually. Just keep trying dear. Once more. There you go! Have an 'achievement'...

You could argue that this means many more players will reach the credits and taste success but I argue that this type of system actively fights against a player’s potential immersion and satisfaction of a game.

If a title breaks the player’s requirement to learn by behaving like an over-protective parent and never taking the training wheels off, then this means further involvement in the game becomes a moot point. Once the player has learned all they need to learn about an individual experience then most will want to move onto the next new release.

The lack of punishment for playing badly disturbs the essential equation of challenge to play. A healthy mind is a challenged mind, a lack of challenge means that the mind wanders and looks for a new activity to satiate its desire to learn.

Raph Koster explains in his book ‘A Theory of Fun for Game Design’ that a good game is “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing”. The important word here is 'teaches'. If a player becomes jaded through a lack of challenge then they are subverting the natural concept of a good game because, well, they can win without learning, the player will grow tired of it and leave before learning everything about it, and thus the game has failed to live up to Raph Koster’s explanation of a gaming ideal. 

Imagine if your clarinet teacher came into an exam with you and feeding you hints (D Major has two sharps, F and C, go go go!) and handed the examiner a fiver everytime you hit a bum note. You'd walk away - you're not learning, it's not interesting; you're on autopilot. That's what these games are doing. These games don't demand A students, you can pass with a U grade.

Too many skeletons, your death is your fault. Learn and improve, that is the Dark Souls way.
 

Die Hard
There are games out there that nailed the marriage of checkpoint and difficulty.

Games such as Max Payne and God Hand featured adaptive difficulties to ensure that players never got stuck on a challenge while still having the concept of failure as punishment.

Consider how much more involving Bioshock is without the cheat-y automatic-respawn-with-no-punishment Vita chambers.

Another one - Dead Rising 1 does survival horror far better than most with its one save, no checkpoint ideas that ask the player to truly consider how they spend their time and where they spend it. Contrast this with recent cash-in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, which adds constant crowd-appeasing checkpoints, and you'll see that, as with Dead Island, this only works to the detriment of the game's survival horror roots.

Obviously there are some games that take things in completely the opposite direction. Games like Dark Souls and The Binding of Isaac declare that death is paramount. By making failure so meaningful it has an impact on the player's experience it means that every moment needs to be considered. Every hit is felt. Every success is savoured. Anyone playing these games is required to invest themselves more fully and the effect is they get more ‘in’ to the game, and while it hurts far more when they fail, it means much, much more to them when they succeed.

One could even argue that Call of Duty’s multiplayer innovation of the Killstreak made dying in a multiplayer game meaningful. You want to survive when you play these modern multiplayer games as you want your killstreak. However, this also propagated excessive camping tactics, so that one’s a double edged sword and one not worth wasting time with right now.

Of course for everyone who loves this pressure there are just as many for whom games are purely played for entertainment, and I admit that this incredible pressure can be too much.

Dead Rising's save system was unconventional but meant the game retained that essential survival horror tension.
 

Under Pressure
One could argue that we need the extreme cases of diminished 'barriers up' challenge as seen in games like Dead Island so that the nails hard, grit-your-teeth-and-stick-with-it designs like those seen in Dark Souls can be experienced in contrast. They’re the dark and twisted Yang to the 'entertainment first' mantra of gaming’s Ying.

But there’s another potential root to this problem, and that is the fact we live in an age of constant positive reinforcement and ‘everyone’s a winner’ concepts. Just look at schools, look at jobs, look at achievements systems, look at Facebook likes. We live in an age where your next happy, jolly, warm feeling of self-satisfaction should never be more than five seconds away. It will all be in pill form before you know it.

In this modern climate, the thought of someone feeling slightly down about anything is frowned upon. That’s just wrong. The concept of failure, and the subsequent drive to do better, is an essential part of life and everything we do. Every piece of media we digest. Every lesson we learn. No matter how throwaway something is it's always helping shape us as human beings. Doing things badly and learning to improve is important.

 
Indie flash game One Chance only let you play it once. Harsh yes, but absolutely unforgettable.
 

Failure in videogames should always mean something. Challenge is a big part of drawing the player fully and completely into the world; taxing the player demands their attention more fully and they will take more away when they put more into it. Make your game ‘easy’ and your players will become more fleeting with their focus, and the game will feel less fulfilling as a result.

Perhaps all this is just a massive Freudian slip on my behalf, haphazardly stumbling around the fact that I’m just a massive sadomasochist. Regardless of this I feel that failing in games should mean more than just handing over a wad of cash and popping back to life somewhere nearby. If it were up to me then everytime you died in a game you’d have to play a round of Chess against the hooded harbinger. And if you lost that game? Well, let's just say that Dark Souls looks like a sack of cuddly Koalas from here...

Words by James Bowden (Twitter: @Dalagonash)

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