Let's Make Failure Fun: Part 1

There is an oversimplified idea in game design that, in my view, has done enormous damage to the quality of games. It's the idea that failure causes frustration and frustration leads to quitting, so the way to get people to like your game is to protect them from failure for as long as possible.

This idea contains truth, which is why it sticks around, but it includes a couple fallacies.

The first comes comes from lumping all failures into a single bucket. Certainly, I've experienced the ultra frustrating failures from unreasonable difficulty spikes (Battletoads hoverbikes, anyone?), unfortunate RNG (You have a 95% chance to hit, and you missed three times in a row), confusing mechanics (I was playing...and then I died), or many other things that made me want to throw my controller and never play that game again.

However, I've also experienced failures that made the game more interesting. The failure is exciting, sometimes in the moment and other times only after a later success. 

The other fallacy is looking at difficulty as an independent variable that can be changed without affecting the rest of the game experience. What I find instead is that difficulty massively influences the way you experience a game. Your level of focus, your efforts to understand mechanics, your emotions, and even how you experience the story are different when a game is harder or easier. Cheat codes aren't a big thing anymore, but if you can find a survival horror game with an invincibility cheat, try it out, and you'll find out quickly how much less fear the game can generate.

If executed correctly, games that allow early failures can engage players much more quickly than those that don't. So now let's talk details.

What Does a Good Early Failure Look Like?

First off, the failure needs to come from an environment where the player is making meaningful choices. If you are running them through a tightly scripted experience and simply make one part of it way more difficult, this is probably a bad failure.

With that premise established, what can failure do that results in the game being more engaging, rather than less:

1. Educational: Either the player learns something right in the process of failure ("Oh! I guess grenades shouldn't be used at close range") or the failure indicates to them that they have to consider changes to their approach ("I just spammed the attack command, and the monster ate me. I'd better take a look at my other abilities.") The key here is that the game must be designed so that learning from failures is intuitive.

2. Shows that Choices have Meaning: In my experience, there are two ways games mess this up. One is that they avoid giving you gameplay choices until you've played for a significant amount of time ("I stand still and throw fireballs because that's all my character can do"). The other is that they make the game easy enough that you'll succeed with any remotely intelligent choices. Either way, for many players, this feels like the illusion of a game instead of an actual game. They may be engaged in your story or graphics. They may even be excited about their numbers getting bigger as they level up. But they probably aren't engaged in your gameplay because there's really nothing there.

3. Setting and Foreshadowing: Suppose you're playing a fantasy RPG and you wander down some side path where you find a giant dragon who easily kills you. Are you frustrated or excited? You've just been shown something cool about the world, and you have likely already made yourself a goal to either come back when you're more powerful or try something clever to take him down now. The game just got more engaging.

4. Enhances Intrinsic Story: If you've read my piece on Intrinsic Story, this needs no further explanation. If you haven't, that's what you should be reading right now, as it's the post I most often reference in everything I write here.

What Makes a Frustrating Failure?
1. Poor Communication: This is where failures are not at all educational. If the player can't tell why they failed or isn't aware of the options to explore that might lead to a success, the failure tends to be incredibly frustrating.

2. Failure is not Based on Core Gameplay: A commonly cited example of this is combat-based games with occasional difficult platforming. Another is when a player encounters 1-off mechanics or minigames where the only thing they can learn from the failure is how to get past that exact part of the game. 

3. Excessive Repetition of Content: This is a complex one. It's actually going to be the subject of Let's Make Failure Fun: Part 2 where I go into a deeper analysis of death penalties. But on a basic level, the more time the player loses getting back to where they were, the more frustrated they will be. There are cases for this to be in place anyway, but it's too big of a tangent right now.

We Only Learn the Mechanics We Need

Another flawed idea is that you make it easy while the players learn the game and then you start ramping up the difficulty. If you're talking about a ten minute tutorial, that can be reasonable, but for anything extended this is more likely to be a barrier to learning.

Lost Ark recently released in the West, and my gaming group decided to give it a try. Basically, for the first several hours, the game is just piles of meaningless info. We had a bunch of abilities, which none of us bothered to really learn well because any number of enemies could easily be defeated by just hitting whatever wasn't on cooldown until they all died. The game offered mechanics like crafting, but why bother? Who cares what stats are on your gear when every fight is effortless?

Eventually, it started getting difficult, and we even managed to die after enough hours of reckless gameplay. And so we started learning our abilities and paying attention to stats on gear. I don't think I even bothered distributing points from leveling until after I died the first time. Why bother learning systems that are irrelevant to your success? It's like living in the tropics and trying to understand how to drive in snow: An intellectual exercise for a theoretical future use, but nothing that offers clear results.

Am I just projecting my own experiences onto other gamers? Certainly to a degree. It's worth noting, though, that most mega-hit indie games I've seen require effort almost immediately. Would Dead Cells or Slay the Spire be better games if they forced you to go through hours of really easy stuff to really "learn" the game? I have a hard time believing that many people would answer in the affirmative. 

Conclusion: Don't Fear the Reaper

Failure and difficulty is not a problem to be solved but a tool to be used.