Failure and Acceptance

On aspect of failure I think was not examined closely enough in our discussion of failure was exactly what constitutes failure. One half of this discussion seems to take place around multiplayer competitive games, where it’s very clear when you’ve failed- these games have a clear winner and a clear loser, and a text prompt immediately lets you know which is which. The games we played in class to discuss failure, however, had a single, inevitable game state which we defined as failure. For example, Ancient Greek Punishment left you pushing a boulder forever, and Dys4ia left the player wondering if it really does get better. Even Little Inferno, which has a more ambiguous ending state with some aspects of success and some of failure, only has the one ending. While you can contemplate whether you succeeded or failed, there’s no way to change your fate- the player is forced into acceptance because there are no other options.

I think another important category of games to consider when discussing failure and acceptance in gaming is the game with multiple options, none of which is a clear success or failure state. In my experience, games like this typically follow a choice-heavy structure. The primary example I think of is Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Although the player is shown statistics of how others chose at the end of each chapter, each choice is so fraught and each consequence so complex that it’s difficult to tell at any juncture, including the end of the game, if you chose correctly or incorrectly. This creates an interesting paradigm of acceptance: the player doesn’t know entirely if they succeeded or failed, and is therefore made to self-assess and think about if it is even possible to do better. Games like this present the player with a real choice about whether to accept or reject the outcome they’re faced with. Similarly, games like Mortis Ghost’s OFF present the player with two complex options. By not allowing any option to be definitively called “success” or “failure,” these games produce a deeper consciousness in the player of what it means to make the right decision and lead players to act in a way they think is right, not merely out of an automatic attempt to avoid failure.