Why isn’t failure part of the experience?
Recently, the subject of death in MMOs has been bothering me, so I’m going to make it into the first real post on my site.
We make games to entertain our customers. Although the overall experience varies from user to user, there are encapsulated experiences we can expect every user to share. Defeat is one of those experiences. If it’s our goal to entertain and we can ensure players will experience defeat, then why don’t we make it something players can enjoy?
Naturally, we want players to strive to avoid defeat. Most games accomplish that goal through death penalties and setbacks. While setbacks might be necessary, we should not deliberately create situations where the players feel penalized. I read a great quote from Will Wright in Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions a few days ago, and it gave clarity to my collection of vague and scattered concerns. I didn’t care for the book nearly enough to read the entire thing, but it’s always great to listen to Will Wright. Here’s the quote:
Frequently, the really important thing for the designer to concentrate on is not the success side of these interactions, but the failure side. If you can make failure a big part of the entertainment value of the game, people get a blast out of it. If you look at kids playing with blocks; they build a tower and it falls over and they laugh, and they build it again and it falls over. At some point, if they build it and they run out of blocks, they’ll knock it over on purpose. This is designing the playability of the game.
Failure should be an enjoyable, bittersweet experience. Would anyone play Dominos if they couldn’t topple their creation? Over the past two decades of gaming, I’ve come across a number of situations where games actually made failure into a fun part of the experience:
- Fade to Black: In this 1995 sequel to Flashback, you are treated with a short cutscene with each death. The cutscene changes depending on how you die. As with the adventure games of the era, there are lots of ways to die. Although death was a setback, it didn’t feel punitive because I got to watch an interesting scene. Before long, I would seek out and find all the different ways I could die because I wanted to see the different scenes.
- Sim City: Seeing as how this is inspired by Will Wright, it’s only natural to include Sim City. There was a path to a spectacular failure for every area of the city you needed to work to protect. Disasters, fires, crime, traffic accidents - there were plenty of interesting ways to destroy your city.
- Fallout 1 & 2: Every once in awhile, I’d be talking to an NPC in Fallout and they’d do something to piss me off… and I’d shoot them. Since I’m in a city, that kind of action doesn’t go unnoticed. So the nearby people attack… and I shoot them. Then the guards come… and I shoot them. I run out into the streets and more people come… and I shoot them. Thirty minutes later, I’ve wiped out the entire town in a horrible chain reaction. I knew I was going to reload as soon as I shot the first guy, but I kept playing. Failure gave me a scenario that I wasn’t going to get anywhere else, and it was just fun to try the combat against an entire town.
- Populous: You could destroy your own creation with a volcano. Do I need to say anything else?
- Theme Hospital: This game really put my teenage micromanagement skills to the test. Theme Hospital demanded an impossible large number of tasks from the player, and I loved it all. At times, it would just become too much and I’d get overwhelmed… and I’d witness my carefully constructed tower of blocks come crumbling down. Only, there were no blocks in this game. The hospital would collapse in a scene of purely chaotic comedy. One patient would vomit and cause a chain reaction. A patient with an inflated (literally) head would run around aimlessly and his head would pop. Things really fall apart once a patient dies in your hospital. Although I was horrified watching my creation collapse, but it didn’t matter. It delivered a smooth transition from intense, frantic micromanagement to a distance and relaxed comedy. It made me eager to try it again and avoid the whole fiasco.
- Realms of Arkania: Star Trail: This isn’t an example of a good failure. This is an example of bad failure. Early in the game, you can return to a town that you’re supposed to flee. When you arrive, there’s a major fight where you’re outnumbered and severely outclassed. It’s an insanely tough fight, and it looks very lucrative when you see all the stuff the enemies drop. So I kept trying to beat this fight, over and over. It was so much more interesting than the fights I found outside the city, and my actions were admittedly motivated by greed (loot!). Well, when I finally beat it I was treated to an automatic defeat screen. That’s bad. That made me want to scream. They put a fight in the game that you’re not supposed to be able to beat, but they didn’t make it impossible. They knew someone would beat it, so they put an automatic failure condition if you win the fight. Did I mention that’s horrible? This would have been such a better experience if they just forced me out of the town and let me keep my loot and experience!
After reading all of this, you probably just think I’m incredibly destructive. While these scenarios all involve destruction, that’s not the element they have in common that I find appealing. They expand the game and provide an experience that I could only find by dying, and none of those experiences were punitive as a result.
So, how do we apply this to MMOs? All of the examples I gave are from single player games. Most of them relied on the ability to fall back to an older save. It’s an interesting question, and I don’t have a clear answer yet. I have some ideas, and I’m hoping to explore those and discuss them with my fellow designers on our next project.
–Taelorn