Failure in Games

Why do gamers want the possibility of failure when they play a game?

I've been talking about this a lot with friends over the past few days and here's what I've come up with:

In a game, there are rewards. The win screen, the next level, new abilities, the hopefully engaging story, whatever. The player wants that reward.

It's pretty easy to get that reward by other means. Cheat, download a savegame with everything unlocked, look up the ending, watch someone else play it, or any number of methods, depending on which part you want.

Why don't people do this if they just want the reward? Well, many people do. Especially as games become more complex, presenting stories and ideas that appeal to a wide variety of people. Maybe the story stands on its own; for example watching a Let's Play of the Metal Gear Solid series could conceivably be interesting (if very long winded). Maybe the joy of running around with a fully powered up character surpasses any joy the mediocre story manages to evoke.

But, there's a second reward that persuades people to play the game: the challenge. More specifically, the feeling of triumph when you rise to that challenge. Games have a requirement from the player before the player is allowed the rewards. Figure out how to run, jump, avoid enemies, defeat bosses, complete objectives. Do these with the right timing, in the right situations. Essentially it's a puzzle. What sequence of actions results in success? It's not just that the player wants the reward, it's that she wants to work for it.

On top of this, many games add punishments. The most common punishment is the practice of sending the player back if she fails. In other words, she's actually farther from success than she was at the moment she failed.

This can go between various extremes. Nethack, for example, wipes all your progress. Period. The longer you go, the more progress you're going to lose if you die. Half Life 2 only sets you back a few minutes, due to frequent automatic checkpoints. You're never risking more than a few minutes of progress. Typically you're sent back to the beginning of "the level", which in this context is just a means of noting where you'll be sent back to if you fail.

The reason games do this is to give the player the excitement of risk. It creates tension when she comes close to failure, because failing means she's going to lose some of the effort she spent. She's actually gambling some of her progress to get more progress. She says, "I bet X amount of progress that I can complete this next section." She gets a rush of relief when she succeeds, because the gamble paid off.

But she also gets frustration when the gamble fails, or the challenge is too great. There's a balance between making it so easy it's boring, and so hard that it becomes frustrating. This balance has to do with a lot of factors and is a whole post by itself. Any designer can make a difficult game, but can they make a game where working for the rewards is fun?

One way to reduce potential frustration is to minimize punishments. Remove them entirely; then it's back to just being a puzzle. Figure out and execute the correct sequence of moves, and the player wins. 

Braid is a good example, failing doesn't actually cost anything, it only means you're not moving closer to winning. 

This doesn't make Braid easy, you still have to work for the rewards, but it does make it pretty mellow. You're never losing progress; at worst you're just not gaining any. It takes away the frustration of failure by making failure not cost anything. But you also lose the excitement of risk, because you're never risking anything.

Does this make Braid (or any other game with very low cost failure) a game not worth playing?

It depends on whether you want that excitement of risk.