Among its advice for how to create and stage a game scenario, was a decree that has stuck with me to this day: “Failure is boring – the credible threat of failure is very exciting.”


What Laws means by this is that not only can it be frustrating to lose in a game scenario, it can actually become dull. Let’s look at an example situation, in the Dungeons & Dragons context. First of all, if you’re totally unfamiliar, the Dungeon Master (or more unversally, Game Master) is a player that leads the others, by describing the world around them, what they see, and providing the obstacles and adventures the other players encounter. With that in mind, say players are in a game where the Dungeon Master has their adventuring party delving in to a deep, imposing cavern. They fight their way past the goblin guardians, and then, at the bottom of the cavern, there is a locked door. The party has no key to this lock, so it’s up to the party thief character (called a rogue in modern editions) to pick the lock. Unfortunately, his tool to do this is a die roll, and he doesn’t roll high enough. He fails to open the door. Because of this, the party has no choice but to turn back, and ignore the adventure that might be hiding beyond that locked door. It’s failure at a difficult task, and the person who invented that task was the game’s Dungeon Master. It’s also just boring, because nobody gets to see the rest of the adventure behind that door.
I feel like I just opened up a bit part of my DM’s toolkit by giving this advice away, though there’s more where that came from in the book.
I’m merely astonished that, among gaming cricles, the “credible threat of failure” is not a more well-quoted phrase. I feel that it should be right in the game analyzer’s handbook, somewhere next to “ludonarrative” and “series of interesting decisions.”
Yes, I’m talking about video games now.
Pixel-Perfect Pathways
The comparison works best when discussing a video game that has an intended narrative. For example, the other day I remarked to a friend that I had picked up a copy of the King’s Quest Collection at an electronics closeout. This is a game series of remarkable vintage and legacy, but his follow-up question was not uncalled-for. “Why,” he asked me, “do you hate fun?”
Old Sierra-style adventure games involved a lot of dying. In order to prime yourself to play such a game, you have to prepare yourself for the possibility of lots of unfair, uncalled-for failures. Sometimes these failures aren’t telegraphed. There’s no way a player would expect that walking on one certain pixel or entering a screen at the wrong time was going to spell doom for their avatar. Other times, the source of these failures is not apparent at all. Fail to get a necessary item early on in the game, and the game will have no way to further progress. It doesn’t give the feedback that is needed to understand the failure, nor the means to correct a mistake made perhaps an hour ago in the game.
The arcade’s first attempt at story-focused games involved a lot of dying, too. Games like Dragon’s Lair are simple exercises in quarter-munching: fail and fail until the player finally pushes the button, basically at random, that leads to victory. A player could retry a few times, thanks to extra lives, but couldn’t retry forever before seeing that Game Over screen and having to insert more money.
In other words, when we were Prince Alexander, or Dirk the Daring, we didn’t need the credible threat of failure. It was replaced with actual failure, and lots of it.
So the first part of the axiom. “Failure is boring.”
Which, it is.
But it’s often a necessary part of a video game experience; otherwise, the threat of failure is not credible.
Part of the Problem
This brings me to discussing, with apologies, games I haven’t actually played, but read and watched lots of critical review about: the games in the Modern Warfare series.
The common wisdom is that players buy these games for the multiplayer, leaving the single-player campaign as just a one-off exercise. Maybe multiplayer enthusiasts never even touch it; many critics seem to play the campaigns with apologies, stating they realize that isn’t “the point” of the game.
So, to reiterate, I’ve never played Call of Duty: Black Ops. I just think this video is hilarious.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RULv6HbgEjY&w=560&h=315]
The video – which is long, but worth it – shows an annoyed player and his experience with the first mission of Black Ops. It turns out that this mission (which serves partially as a tutorial, but is an enormous set piece of its own right), can be completed without any real combat action from the player. NPCs and AI take out most of the heavy targets, leaving the player to shoot his weapon only during a few scripted sequences, if he chooses. During those sequences, you basically can’t miss, and so while the scene is very cinematic, there is no real challenge. The player, a PC enthusiast, blames console gamers for this cinematic simplification. “If you own an XBox or Playstation, you are part of the problem.”
Last week, John Walker posted an editorial on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, when he said Modern Warfare 3, at least in single player, is an “un-game.” This is in response to Brendan Keogh, who argued with his original review, saying that going along with the game’s story conceit is just how to have fun with it. But Walker essentially says he doesn’t feel like a participant, rather, that the game is often playing itself for the most cinematic outcome.

Paper Dragons
Skyrim was actually the game that made me start thinking about this subject again. In Skyrim, the first real enemy creature you encounter is a dragon, the dragon. It is attacking the site where the player-character is about to be executed, its dramatic timing saving the Dragonborn’s life.
The dragon is devastating. People run from it in fear, as the ground quakes. Once-stoic soldiers scream and panic at this horrifying sight. But because this serves as the game’s movement tutorial, and is played just after character creation, this is a situation a player is likely to play through more than once. On subsequent plays, the set dressing falls apart, starting to reveal the cardboard stand-ups that make failure only a threat. As it turns out, it’s very difficult to die during this sequence. If you are brave, and keep moving, you can run right past the dragon with out much worry. The only truly deadly plan is to stand tauntingly in front of it, and wait to be devoured.
Later in the game, you will fight dragons, and many of them. The first few encounters are exciting and intense. The dragon has been built up in the lore to be a creature of great mystery and impossible power. People scoff when you claim they exist, and run cowering when a dragon appears. However, dragon encounters will soon become mundane, as you encounter them repeatedly, and off them with relative ease.
This makes it all the more bizzare when a random bandit with a greatsword can easily decapitate your mighty, dragonslaying hero in one fell swoop. Why isn’t that guy out slaying the dragons? Narrowly succeeding against a dragon, a beast built up by lore to be the greatest of all monsters: very exciting. Getting beat up by a regular human with a slightly bigger sword than your sword: pretty dull, by comparison. Guess which scenario is more common in Skyrim?
The en media res tutorial is a new trend that adds excitement to the start of a game. It gets past the idea of a game starting up slow. However, this design element risks removing the credible threat of failure early in a game’s play, because it presents a scenario that you will replay frequently. The threat of failure then becomes less credible in subsequent replays. I see a lot of videos on YouTube of people training skills on the unkillable NPCs in Skyrim’s tutorial. Once discovering how this scenario was stacked in their favor, players exploit it for experience points and laughs.
The New Failure
Nobody likes to fail. But if games don’t have a “credible threat of failure,” they become boring, or patronizing, to many gamers. One way of combating this in recent designs is the masocore genre, where you can fail as many times as you need to before you succeed. Another popular design is the one used in hard RPGs like Demon’s Souls, where preparation and planning are the keys to success, but real (if temporary) failure happens often, forcing you to regroup and retry.
On Gamasutra, Margaret Robinson talks about how meaningful she finds the repeated failures in Demon’s Souls, once she is in the right mindset to accept failure. Obviously, some other gamers disagree, returning to the creed that failure is boring. They would rather play games to relax and feel good. No one is really “right” in this situation, but it’s obvious some people can shrug off failure much quicker than others can, and some would rather not experience it at all.


“I’m merely astonished that, among gaming cricles, the “credible threat of failure” is not a more well-quoted phrase. I feel that it should be right in the game analyzer’s handbook, somewhere next to “ludonarrative” and “series of interesting decisions.””
As you wish. It joins my vocabulary as yet another excellent gaming principle.
It’s not easy to find that perfect balance, is it? I’m used to there being no real threat of failure in Bethesda games. I’m more along for the adventure and the character building.
Then there is the polar opposite: Demon’s Souls, where failure is so certain that, for me at least, it removed any sense of excitement and replaced it with actual stress that I would be doomed to replay the same section of game over and over. And I did, and I haven’t gone back since, because I suck.
The first Call of Duty was so genuine at the time because, well, the world hadn’t seen half a dozen Call of Duty games already. That veil was still over our eyes; the action and the threat seemed so real in that game … it was indeed incredible. Knowing what I know today about the Call of Duty series I don’t think I could go back. The sick side of me would just stand there to see if the game played itself, in the process tarnishing my memories.
We’re jaded now; we expect to be lied to. And when those moments of credible threat do come along, like the second dragon appearance in Skyrim, maybe I don’t want to know the truth.
There is, I think a third possibility, and that would be quote from another RPG luminary, Fred Hicks:
” Before you call for a die roll, it is critically important that you stop and do two things:
1. Imagine Success
2. Imagine Failure
It sounds simple, but it makes a difference.
Success is usually the easy part; failure can
be trickier. You want to make sure that both
outcomes are interesting—though “interesting”
isn’t the same as “good.” ”
In the case of your door example, failing the pick lock might awaken a band of enemies on the other side, opening the door to see what’s the racket.
In the case of video games, I guess it’s trickier. But I think we still have to invent a whole set of tools to automate situations like these, and create interesting situations (and manage rythm) whatever the player does.
Great article Amanda.
I agree with xtal’s theory about a lot of gamers being jaded by now. When the original Modern Warfare came out, I was blown away by its campaign. It was kinetic, exciting, with very high stakes and chaos all around. Yet not a single CoD since then has been able to reach those levels again, despite raising the stakes and action every time. It all seems forced and scripted and you can’t help but feel like you have no control over the outcome of the set pieces presented.
I am however a HUGE fan of the Souls series, and Demon’s Souls and especially Dark Souls are just fantastically designed and crafted games to me. And it is because they actually make failure and death meaningful. They completely change the way I play those games.
It wasn’t until Demon’s Souls that I actually began to notice how little meaning games would give to failure or death. Or the very threat of death. Despite how much I enjoy Bethesda games like Oblivion or Skyrim, there is absolutely no tension or sense of real danger. You are saving every 30 seconds, before and after every battle, and if you want to try something extremely dangerous or risky, like attacking a powerful enemy or trying to pickpocket an NPC, you simply save before hand and reload your save if you fail. There is no ownership for your action and definitely no ownership for the outcome if you do not like it. You simply reload the save and try again (or decide against it). That freedom to save anywhere and reload at will has a certain allure to it, but ultimately it hurts my overall enjoyment of the game.
When I first started playing Demon’s Souls I was amazed that I was even enjoying the game. It seemed like the game was trying everything it could to make me hate it. You cannot save when you want. No checkpoints. Dying takes you back to the beginning of the level. Every enemy you previously defeated comes back to life. You are revived in a “phantom” form with half your regular hit points. You lose all the souls you had accumulated up until that point. Are you kidding me?! It was extremely harsh. In most games doing all of the above would make me quit. Yet in this game it only made me want to improve, succeed, and made every action I did carry weight and meaning. Seeing a large, menacing foe in the horizon made me actually stop and really consider whether I wanted to engage him in battle. Because I knew I couldn’t just reload my previous save if I lost. I feel that real threat and actual punishment for failing is what makes the Souls series so special. I am having a great time playing through Skyrim, but it is a totally different experience. The sense of satisfaction and accomplishment I felt while playing Dark Souls earlier this year has not been touched by any other title, and Skyrim’s expansive world and freedom, as impressive as it is, has not come close to feeling as “real” or satisfying as Dark Souls was.
Whoa, did I veer off topic, I can’t even tell! 🙂
Wonderful article, Amanda. Failure construction and analysis could (and should) be the subject of a lot more study in ludology circles, as well as game design circles.
Like Tanis38 I’m a near-worshipful disciple of the Souls games. Their structure and design are so brilliant that the very act of failure becomes almost hypnotic. And the games encourage you as a player to examine your failures and improve. I think of it as the “definition of insanity” joke – you know, the definition of insanity’s taking the same action and expecting a different result? If you’re failing consistently in the Souls games, it’s likely because you’re trying to solve a problem in a way that’s already failed.
Now, I can certainly understand those who don’t like the Souls games. In fact, I’d have thought I’d be one of them, until I played, and yet between the two I’ve easily sunk 150 hours into the series. I keep starting to write something on them for Tap but I can never get far, because I can’t get the tone right.
ANYWAY
Credible threat of failure mechanisms are the sign of really good game design. It’s amazing how many developers don’t do it right. In fact, many don’t even realize what they’re supposed to be doing.
Fun is complicated. One person’s fun is another person’s boredom, but reaction to failure tends to be pretty universal. It seems like maybe developers should focus as much on how failure and the threat of failure is integrated into their games as they do on making the game fun.
I’m so part of the problem, I only bought an Xbox 360 so I could watch movies.
Seriously though, the tutorial in Skyrim was a bit of a disappointment for me, the first in the game. From the moment I was able to walk around I knew I wasn’t going to die. I tried to be convinced, tried to be cautious where caution seemed indicated and hastened where due desperetaly trying to get into the character and the urgency of the moment but it just wouldn’t work. I much preferred the five minute tutorial (not counting character creation) of Morrowind and then being let loose on the world, it being as unsuspecting of you as you were of it.
Write that Souls article Steerpike!!!! 🙂
Great stuff, Amanda.
The Modern Warfare 3 scenario is a difficult one for me. I absolutely get the criticism of it’s heavily scripted gameplay and there’s not really anything about John Walker’s piece that I disagree with as such. Everybody knows what Call of Duty is about by now.
But.. I enjoyed playing Modern Warfare 3. I enjoyed it quite abit, actually. And when I say “playing”, I mean “playing”. There were certainly sections where the game did it’s own thing, but when you were within that experience it always just felt like a part of the bigger picture. When I was engaged in the campaign, I felt a part of it. The “un-game” thing just doesn’t sit right with me. What constitutes a game, at this point? Steam tells me I’ve played 10 hours of Modern Warfare 3, and when my backlog is a little less clogged (yeah, right) I’d like to play it some more. It is a game and it is very possible to die within it, even though the punishment for those failures are rarely ever little more than a respawn.
I think the key is to view Call of Duty in the right way. This time last year I ranted and raved about Black Ops. I hated it. I was bored by it. Annoyed by the formula, tired of the same old crap. It’s the only Call of Duty game I’ve not completed and I promised myself I wouldn’t buy it again this year. But I broke that promise, and this year everything clicked. I don’t take Call of Duty seriously. It’s no more serious to me than Time Crisis. An arcade blast where you witness a series of events and your only response to those events is to shoot the popping heads like whack-a-mole. Online is like a sport now to me, all about charging around shooting anyone in sight, quick respawns and rapid levelling up. It’s almost like a refinement of an old school arcade; that slick and trigger happy formula perfected for a modern audience. I couldn’t care a less about objectives or my Kill/Death ratio. I just jump in when I have half an hour to spare and fancy some incredibly quick and fast paced action.
In the same way that I’d rather watch a “good” film with an intelligent plot and thoughtful cast, sometimes I don’t mind paying my money to sit back in a chair shoving my face with popcorn while a director shoves CGI explosions in my face. I’m glad Demon’s Souls and the like exist, but I’m also pretty happy to get my Call of Duty fix every now and then.
And when all’s said and done, I’ve just got really overly defensive over a Call of Duty game. Heh..
Great article, Amanda. As someone who’s been playing video games and RPGs for over 30 years now, I appreciate anytime someone can bring two of my favorite past times together.
I think the “credible threat of failure” is very important to both. I’ve played RPG campaigns where it was clear no player was ever really in danger of dying and the game got stale. I’ve played other campaigns where we just struggled to succeed at anything and that, too, got boring. It’s always fun to play on that edge where you’re just never quite sure what’s going to happen.
I’ve never really thought too much about the “credible threat of failure” when it comes to video games. I like games to be challenging, but then again I am save-a-holic. I am constantly saving, because as much as I enjoy a challenge and the threat of failure, once I’ve beaten a level or got passed a challenge, I really have no interest in going back and trying it again. I like progress and forward momentum. I like watching the story unfold.
As a result, this is always something I liked about the BioWare games, well, “Dragon Age” and “Mass Effect” in particular. Both games fed my love for good old RPG classics. Interesting stories and characters, a plot, etc. They also had their challenges. When I played “Dragon Age 2”, for example, I played on the hardest level. Despite my many years of gaming, I am not a particularly skillful gamer in most respects, but I liked the challenge. I wanted that “credible threat of failure”. However, there were a few encounters that I couldn’t beat on the hard level. I tried and tried and tried, but never came close to winning. So, I just wratched the difficulty down a level, tried it again and eventually succeeded and was able to move on and turn the difficulty back up. Those encounters made me really think about my tactics, what spells to use, when to use them, etc. It tapped into my strategy/problem solving mind and I loved it. However, without that flexibility, I likely would have become very frustrated and bored with the game. I know I would have become bored with the game if I had to fight six prior encounters every time I wanted to get back to the real hard fight.
Which brings me to… The Souls games. I am not a fan of those games. At all. Well, I’ve only played the first one, so I can’t comment on the second. I love the way the game looks. It’s got an amazing feel and design to it and I enjoy watching people play it. But as for playing it myself? Not a chance. The whole game is about repetition and I hate that. I find it painfully dull and irritating to keep having to do the same thing over and over again. I don’t mind a tough fight, but I don’t want to have to run through the entire level again and kill everything again just to get back there and give it another go. Demon Souls, to me, also had no discernable plot or stroy. It was just a beautiful looking hack’n’slash game with some minor RPG elements thrown in – equipment management, skill and level advancement, etc.
I guess when it comes to video games I like to be the one who has some control over what I consider a “credible threat of failure” in a videogame.
Just last night, I spent a good hour and a half fighting this group of bad-ass slavers in “Temple of Elemental Evil.” I had fight them several times before I finally took them down without losing anyone. I had a blast trying to figure out what spells to cast, which slaver to target first (spellcasters, of course), and how best to use my various skills, potions, etc. I had to go “all out” to beat those guys. It was great. I also had the game saved right before the encounter so I could keep re-loading it without having to fight a bunch of things or spend 10 minutes walking just to get there.
I think another thing that is equally important to enjoying both RPGs and video games is sort of buying into what each is selling. Granted, there are some video games or RPGs that people just wont enjoy on some very basic level. For a RPG it could be a wonky system that doesn’t feel right or perhaps a campaing setting or theme that just doesn’t work for you. Same goes for video games. There are certain types of games that some people just don’t like or some games that are so buggy (wonky system) that you can’t get over them. But pretty much any RPG campaign or video game is going to have its flaws. But a lot of those flaws are pretty easily glossed over if you make the decision to sort of “tune in” or get on the same frequency as the GM or game and try to work with it.
This can be harder for a RPG, since the GM is a person and they are fickle things. But if you can do it, a game can be a lot of fun. When the whole group is dialed-in like that, a game can be amazing.
This goes back to the “Call of Duty” discussion. Let Mat C says, if you you’re going to play “Call of Duty” single player, it’s probably best to know that you’re sitting down and playing the “Call of Duty” single player campaign. It’s going to be flashy, loud, explody and crazy set pieces. In that case, for maximum enjoyment, it’s probably best just to go with the flow and and immerse yourself in that nonsense, kill a bunch of villains and what not.
This is what I do whenever I play any of the “Gears or War” games. I know that when I play “Gears of War” it’s all about crazy battles, chainsawing my enemies and a goofy-nonsensical plot about a bunch of oversized meat-heads with some witty dialogue thrown in on occassion. I totally buy into what Gears is selling and have a blast doing it.
The same thing goes with “Skyrim” or most other games. Instead of stepping outside your character to mock the game or test its AI limits or what not, buy into the fear of the dragon at the beginning. And then, as you become more of a bad ass, become less so. Work with the game’s natural progression or your story within the game.
A lot of it comes down to what you want when you start eating. If I want a burger, and I get pasta, I might be confused or disappointed. I want what I want, and I don’t want to be surprised. Same goes for games. If I sit down to play Skyrim, I want… well, I want Skyrim. I want a Bethsoft game. It’ll be big and buggy and have a certain flavor to it. If I fired up Skyrim and it was Defense Grid, that’d be weird, even though there’s nothing wrong with Defense Grid. It’s just not what I expected.
The Souls games are like that. Theoretically RPGs, yes, but they’re certainly the kinds of RPGs where you make your own story. I remain sort of befuddled by my love of them. Arguably I should dislike them for the same reasons Ajax does. I don’t like “ridiculously challenging,” I do like “good story,” and so on. But man, I would lick those games. In fact, I think I will.
TWO MINUTES LATER
I too have played many a tabletop RPG – often with Ajax in a seat nearby – and can agree with both his postulations: a game with no fear is briefly rewarding but ultimately hollow. A game composed of failure is frustrating and miserable. The best are in between. We play one on and off right now (the participants live in different states, so it depends on availability), and while none of the main characters has died yet, it definitely feels possible. And of course the group has failed in smaller ways, just as it has also seen success.
Many, even most, aspects of game design can be quantified by formulae. Music is like this too. Music is mathematical. It’s theoretically possible to make a piece of music that’s mathematically perfect. A game’s credible threat of failure can, I would think, be mechanically established and baked into the logic of the game itself. Of course, saying something is math isn’t the same as saying it’s easy, or that the formulae always work. But I’ve always loved the idea that things like challenge can be integrated in such an elegant manner.
Wow, great discussion! I’m always glad people are reading so thanks!
@Gwenael: I agree with you totally about the visualization of failure. I think part of the reason that the Souls games are so popular in this department is that not only is the threat of failure credible/real, but the consequence FOR failure is something more interesting than “now just try again,” because of how the game’s death system works (as tanis points out).
@Steerpike: I think it’s true that it’s math, but at the same time, since a game would be different for every player, a game would have to automatically tune difficulty, which is… well, another totally different hot button topic. I think part of the reason some gamers blanch at the idea of “tuned difficulty” is because of the whole credible threat thing… people realize the game is tuning the difficulty to their skill. I think for example Oblivion is a game that got that tuning all wrong, since its auto-leveling bad guys meant no real sense of mastery or progress. You fail a lot, but not in a way that feels right.
On the other hand, a great example of an auto-tuning game is Godhand. Godhand is very hard, but if you are doing well at it, the game “levels up.” The first time I saw it do this, I thought /I/ leveled up, but, no, I stayed the same. Bad guys leveled up, because I was doing well… and then I got my butt handed to me again! The game gives you very clear feedback if its level is rising or dropping, and that is great. But even on the lowest level, it’s so hard that, like the Demon Souls games, it’s not for everyone.
Hy there! (first post, though not first time here 🙂 )
I think that part of the problem is in the way we handle quests and objectives for the player.
In my opinion we have to admit (and show/permit) the failure of mid term objectives! Failure doesn’t have to be death (well it can…), but that just isn’t possible in many/every game on the mainstream market.
If you could just not succeed to save the princess, but have other things to do if that’s not the case then failure would become a part of gameplay, and the courage not to just hit “quick load” would add a great deal to the player’s immersion.
I’m currently making a space shooter/RPG (http://sparklin.org/?tag=alcyon-infinity) with that kind of quest construction in mind.
One concrete (and one of the most extreme yet) example:
your ship crashes onto an asteroid after a chase with some foreign civilisation’s border forces (you can as well surrender to them and enter a totally different storyline). You are retrieved by some space pariahs and given the choice: a) to be transformed into a cyborg b) to die.
if you choose not to go the cyborg way then you die.
That could be just plain silly if I didn’t make it so that every major choice (potentially leading to an other part of space/storyline) can be taken over to go and explore the other ways you could have taken.
I’m currently working on a demo to begin crowdfunding/alpha releasing, hope you’ll be interrested for some review code 🙂
Excellent article Amanda. I started writing a piece about a year or so ago on failure and death and mentioned Uncharted and Demon’s Souls along the way but I could never get to the guts of the subject as expertly as you have here.
I’ve always had a problem with illusory threats and if anything, like xtal says, I tend to check to see how deadly those supposedly deadly moments really are, which is obviously kind of stupid because it only damages the experience, but I can’t stand the idea of a developer making me think something is intense when really it isn’t. It’s almost like I’m having to add another layer of make-believe on top of my make-believe. What about all those times you’ve been told to ‘Get the fuck outta there!!’ before some location explodes or implodes only for you to stand there and nothing happen?
That’s what I love about Demon’s Souls; a threat is always real and requires a mixture of caution, forethought and skill to overcome it.
The real art — and consequently the real difficulty — is making those illusory threats of failure seem so genuine that the xtals and Greggs of this world don’t even think to question it. But even then, the magic is still very easy to dispel if you ever slip up and the game doesn’t punish you for it.
Oh. Well people have already said stuff about Dark Souls and tabletop gaming and stuff. So…ditto.
I can’t easily sort out my reactions to this great piece as it brings together several things all venn-diagrammy I’ve in the past praised to the skies here and elsewhere.
One: Warning Forever. (http://www.hikware.com/Prod/index_e.html) An early and brilliant adaptive boss shmup.
Two: http://dnd.ezael.net/~olep/Drmg093.pdf The best piece ever written on creating a rich world for an RPG campaign, and (indirectly) using that richness to always have options open for the GM to avoid black/white fail states. A “real” world is fuzzy, and fuzzy means there are always outs for both GM and players without leaning on game mechanics. As game mechanics go, though, I do like the old “hero point” system. Rare, to be only carefully used, they allow a creative play to burn one and squeak out of a tough spot. This can devolve into “Verily! I use my hero point to win my next roll!” but needn’t.
Three: My love of western style roguelikes, particularly the non-Hack side of them. Randomized, brutal, you go in knowing you’ll almost always fail but it’s always a new experience. Juggling risk: I had amazing luck getting X item early but…the RNG has vouchesafed this amazing doodad: how far am I willing to push my luck? A good roguelike is the player playing poker against the mechanics. In a classic roguelike the missed bet, sometimes totally unfair in a given gameplay result, is death and back to start over from nothing. Tense as hell.
@Nemrod: I love to look at indie projects! Though it sounds like the cyborg choice is really a non-choice, so I hope it’s just a one-off (like the old Mario RPG choice where you could refuse the quest for a game over.)
@Gregg: hope I didn’t step on your toes! This one took me a while to put in to words it’s true. I’d love to hear your perspective on Uncharted. It does “fake hard” really well, as long as you follow its rules.
@Finkburg: You are a person after my own heart. I love roguelikes (though they don’t always love me). As for the PDF it’s going right in my files. So many classic game authors in there!
Now I must stop commenting because I’m busy watching Steerpike’s brother get maced on my Tivo 😉
@Finkbug: The major drawback, at least for me, with roguelikes is that there is usually minimal story and that dying is certainty rather than risk means there is no real connection to the character. I’ve played a few roguelikes myself and after a while the characters become throwaways. Knowing they will die, I invest less of myself in this, with the knowledge of almost imminent death, means I care less about what happens to them, seriously hampering the tension in the games.
When there is a powerful story and failure only a risk, it’s easier to become invested and that is where the tension comes from.
Excellent, thoughtful article Amanda 😉 . I really enjoyed that video and how it made your point without forcing you into a loquacious corner or explanation. Although I love a good round of TF2 from time to time, my heart belongs to rpgs and strategy games. I’ve always found it hard to apply design concepts of shooters to the games I love and vice versa. You’ve done a great job of marrying the genres with an eye toward player experience.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Zombifying ho!
@Amanda Arthur Collins only wrote a few Dragon articles but they’re the best the magazine ever had.
@Deadyawn Fair enough. I don’t tend to identify much with characters in any game and in a roguelike, while I become extremely fond of a given toon up to its nearly inevitable horrible death, I don’t think of them as roleplaying games but instead as giant semi-randomized puzzles.
[…] la página Tap Repeatedly hay un interesantísimo artículo titulado “The incredible threat of failure” donde se habla de ello un poco más en profundidad. Pero yo quiero complementar su lectura […]
[…] The Incredible Threat of Failure by Amanda Lange (Tap-Repeatedly), 12 August 2011. This is an essay I would probably have written given another couple of years of Electron Dance musings; both Amateur Dramatics and Those Honeymoon Hours signpost that I was thinking along these lines. But anyway, Amanda's beaten me to the punch: the importance of maintaining an illusion of danger. I’m merely astonished that, among gaming circles, the “credible threat of failure” is not a more well-quoted phrase. I feel that it should be right in the game analyzer’s handbook, somewhere next to “ludonarrative” and “series of interesting decisions.” […]
[…] over again, with the help of an extra (and extra powerful) buddy. The ideal game utilizes the incredible threat of failure, by making the player think that he may be punished for failure, but never actually failing. […]
[…] remember Amanda Lange writing a few years ago about how the “incredible threat of failure” was more important than the actual possibility of failure. Players sit up and pay more attention […]