Seeing failures differently in games

The failures in Spent and Let’s Play are something I have never experienced before. I have played hard-core games that took a lot of failures to get through one level, such as Dark Souls, Metroid, etc. Yet, the point of failure in those games was always to teach me new skills or get familiar with the enemies & maps, hence enabling me to get through the levels. Yet, failures in real life are different from those in games. We don’t have respawn point, upgrade system. Failures didn’t necessarily mean success. As described by “Games to Fail With”, this view is not only prevalent in games but also in the social culture. Optimism is good but an illusory optimism only gives people more disappointment or lets them unable to stand in shoes of people who fail due to outside factors but think they didn’t try hard enough.

Both Spent and Let’s Play argued against this bias in games by emphasizing failure itself as a goal. In Spent, it taught players difficulty of poverty by letting players fail again and again. And we talked about in class that even if players “beat” the game, they only see the same situation and problems will appear endlessly for the poor. More extreme in Let’s Play, the game programmatically disallows players to win and it even counts failures as points players get, unlike coins or successes in normal games. They let players understand that, sometimes failure can’t be beaten and hence push them to think about the bigger picture outside the games.

However, I think Spent did a better job in letting players absorb this idea and contemplate it. Let's Play makes players fail repeatedly but then most players will just quit the webpage without thinking the meaning behind failures. Actually, the first time I played it, I interpreted the game to be like an encyclopedia that teaches players Greek mythologies. On the other hand, Spent is able to combine the seemingly self-contradictory goals of letting players fail and letting them not be antagonized by the game. It is designed visually & mechanically to still be accessible to the players. And the concrete storyline and problems it presents let players recognize that this game is about poverty and they are thus pushed to think about these problems.