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.