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