For those who play competitive online games such as League of Legends, Overwatch, or CS:GO (just to name a few), failure is certainly nothing new. A common belief in League of Legends is the "40-20-40" rule, which states something to the effect of "at an appropriate elo, you will win 40% of your games regardless of your individual performance, lose 40% of your games regardless of your individual performance, and the remaining 20% is influenced significantly by your own individual performance." While this somewhat makes sense from a statistical standpoint as a single player constitutes 20% of the team effort, it raises the question of "Why play at all?" given a nearly-guaranteed 40+% loss rate. Do we enjoy losing/does it not contribute to our outlook of the overall gameplay experience? Do the highs from winning greatly overshadow the lows of losing? Is the 20% of the time that we do significantly affect the end-game what ultimately keeps us playing the game?
I found myself in a similar thought process with this week's games; namely, the majority of the time I put into SPENT was to find out if I could even affect the ultimate game state. Once I discovered that the same result appeared regardless of my decisions, I lost interest in replaying the game. On the contrary, my interest in Third World Farmer greatly increased after I discovered in class that it was actually possible to "beat" the game--that there was a distinct difference in possible end-games.
Relating to games like Life is Strange, where failure isn't even possible yet the game is still compelling to play, it seems to me that the games we played this week weren't making a point solely on failure, but rather, the ability for the player to influence and alter the end-game state.
I think this a really good distinction to draw out. Your anecdote about losing interest in SPENT once you realized that "failure" was an inevitability reminded of the point in the Kaufman/Flanagan reading about players being resistant to "overt or obvious persuasive attempts" in didactic games. I think we implicitly understand that every game carries some kind of authorial argument, but we're most resistant to the ones that position us as listeners rather than problem-solvers. I agree that failure is only affective as a rhetorical/mechanical device when there's an understanding that success is possible, even if unlikely. We don't need to succeed - and in fact the procedural rhetoric of games like Third World Farmer relies on the likelihood that…