The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for failure — and commensurate motive to improve at the game. This created a somewhat loaded context for subsequent game development: Home console games were still largely patterned after the ideas created for coin-operated arcade games, so for a decade or two afterwards games still had vestigial lives, credits, and scores, increasingly meaningless as the form shifted towards longer more narrative experiences.
There were other approaches. PC games in particular frequently allowed arbitrary saves and reloads of the game state, with failure at any point merely requiring a reload of the most recent save. This very permissive system allowed retrying of challenges with little to no delay, but meant the difference between a failure which sent you back moments and one which sent you back hours was just how aggressively and mindfully the player exploited the save system. This was also quite unsatisfying, making it optimal for players to approach challenges, not by understanding them and judiciously using the game’s systems to surmount them, but by saving and loading at increasingly high frequency to effectively simulate perfect luck, allowing them to serenely drift, Mr Magoo-like, through waves of gunfire and bloodthirsty beasts and emerge unscathed at the other end.
As storage became faster and cheaper, games started to split the difference between these methods using soft checkpoint systems. In these, failure only sent you back a short way, with more permanent saves used to keep progress between play sessions. Around this time a question started to emerge: What is failure for? Who is failure for? What role does it actually play in the game’s design? Is a failure of the player actually just a failure of the game designer to make a sufficiently accommodating gameplay experience? In the late 2000’s, there was a great deal of discussion around how to minimize or eliminate failure completely, to create systems to always maximize the “challenge” the player experienced while never allowing them to reach a true failure state. This discussion rubbed me the wrong way at the time and still does — what is a challenge that cannot be failed? One problem with this approach is that it only understands failure as negative, as a cessation of enjoyment, as a downer and a frustration — and, indeed, while failure can be all of these, it can also be funny, can be illustrative, can be poetic or impactful in ways that extend the meaning of the playing experience beyond the feel-good designed successes and empowerments that are most immediately and obviously satisfying.
There was a sort of backlash, which we are still in the reverberations of. First, the resurgence of roguelikes and explosion of variant subgenres. Roguelikes bake failure into the experience of playing, make it normal and unexceptional, divorce it from shame, and make each choice feel consequential because it could so easily lead to disaster. Second, the “Soulslike” sub-genre, difficult games which, crucially, wrote failure into the narrative of the game, making the player’s story one of persistence through catastrophe, rather than rolling back to saved game states whenever the player fails. Third, shortly after, came the Battle Royale — a competitive genre where, by definition, only somewhere between 1-5% of the participants could emerge victorious, where failure was all-but-assured on each attempt, and where much of what determined this outcome was luck and happenstance. Between these, failure came back in a big way.
These sorts of oscillations in taste are commonplace, but I find the timing of this shift quite interesting as it seems concurrent with a shift in societal expectations. Perhaps this observation is ham-fisted, but it’s worth noting that the resurgence of failure as a design trope accompanies numerous economic crashes, unemployment crises, pending apocalypses, and so forth. The world I grew up in tacitly promised that if one “played the game”, did everything the way one was told, followed the path laid out, then prosperity was assured — and we have, over the course of my lifetime, seen these premises dismantled and exposed as fraudulent. (Of course, ever having these expectations in the first place was an artifact of privilege and propaganda, of comforting lies and misleading narratives, but I digress). It is now accepted that our lives are substantially shaped by circumstance, that failure is nearly impossible to completely avoid and that it’s unhealthy to be too scared or ashamed of it. Failure is no longer the exception but the expectation, so we increasingly tell stories about persevering through failure, about learning from it, accepting it, being shaped by it and finding new definitions of success that can survive failure.
There’s a sort of backlash to the backlash, albeit a more subtle one. Roguelikes, once defined by a harsh failure state that sent the player back to the very beginning with nothing to show for it but hard lessons, have increasingly diverged into what some call “Roguelites” — a genre defined by slowly accumulating resources across each failed run. In this format, where the player becomes more powerful on each iteration, failure becomes less and less likely over time and, in some cases, victory becomes near-certain. The use of the term “Roguelite” to highlight this division isn’t common, though: Both tend to colloquially fall under the “Roguelike” umbrella, with the same term used to describe games with almost completely opposing philosophies on failure. In one, a failure is simply one step in accumulating an irresistible power, presaging an inevitable success that may not yet be in reach; in the other, failure is absolute defeat but success is always equally reachable on each attempt.
These “Roguelites” present an appealing narrative, the long arc of history that bends inevitably towards justice. We reposition ourselves outside of success and failure into a third state, one of learning and accumulating for the future, safely hidden from the burdens of victory and defeat. It can be nice to think that, even in our weakest moments we can accomplish something small, something significant, towards our future. It can also be tremendously disempowering — why should we even bother showing up, bother trying, if our eventual victory is assured, if our momentum is so irresistible? Here we see two competing visions of progress, one which requires constant examination and effort and one which simply happens inevitably over time.
This, too, might reflect interesting divergences in cultural expectations. Are we reaching out for stories that extend beyond our successes or failures? Reassurance that whatever story we are part of will not end with our lives? Do we want games that react to our new counter-solipsism, a wish that our lives will not be the end of our existence, that a world will continue on without us in it but affected by our presence for the better?
Maybe. Or maybe they’re just games, and all of these deaths we experience aren’t practice for the real thing. Still, one can’t help wondering what needs we feed in our dreams.
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