What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (Jull on failure in games)

I just read an interesting essay by ludologist Jesper Juul.

He set out to find the answers to two questions:

• What is the role of failure in video games?
• Do players prefer games where they do not feel responsible for failing?

He built game prototypes to examine different types of failure (loss of lives vs ‘energy’ loss) and used Attribution Theory to frame player interpretation of the reasons for failure.

Players were also asked to rate the game out of 10 and he mapped player performance (and attribution of failure) against their ratings.

Interestingly (and consistent with some other work that I can’t recall at this point) he found that players who failed sometimes found the game more fun.

players who fail sometimes enjoy the game more

Funnily enough, players are more likely to attribute failure to the game rather than their performance whereas with success, they are more likely to take responsibility.

Also, it seems that players did not view chance as being responsible for failure.  Either the game was too hard or they made a mistake.

Jull concludes by discussing the apparent contradiction between the observations that players want to win and yet they seem to prefer games where they lose sometimes.  He raises the seemingly oppositional considerations.

1. The player does not want to fail (makes player sad, feels inadequate).
2. Failing makes the player reconsider his/her strategy (which makes the game more interesting).
3. Winning provides gratification.
4. Winning without failing leads to dissatisfaction.

Which he suggests can be understood by viewing games through two frames of reference.

Aesthetic vs Goal Oriented frames of consideration

So gamers do want to win the game and that is their goal, but they also have an appreciation of the game from another perspective where they appreciate the challenge.

The article essay covers some other interesting ideas regarding casual games and the reasons for their success or failure but I thought these findings were interesting on their own.

This week I carried out a playtest of the e-Bug Platform Game that targets 9-11 year old pupils.  In the previous playtest, they had unlimited lives and there was no real way to lose the game.  Players expressed that they enjoyed the game but that it was too easy.

I had another problem with some players completely ignoring instructions and running to the end of the level without reading instructions.  Because the level design didn’t allow players to get back to the beggining, those who did this had not achieved the level objectives and as such, were stuck at the closed exit point.

To fix both of these issues, I implemented the concept of player life loss through contact with bad microbes.  They player was always able to be hurt by these microbes but there was no consequence to life loss and the player didn’t have to restart when lives < 0.  I also added a fairly generous timer to each level which caused the player to restart the level if s/he got stuck.

The playtest group seemed to enjoy having to restart the level upon death.  They exchanged banter “that one killed me!” “I died there too” and the timer achieved its objective in one situation where a player was in a situation where objective completion was impossible.

However, as the session continued, things went pair shaped.  Players seemed to exhibit very little sense of self preservation.  They threw soap at microbes to wash them away but the still ran straight into them before they were ‘killed’.  By 20 minutes into the session, every player was stuck in an endless cycle of restart, play, die which was painful to watch.

So by the end of the playtest, only one of the six testers had actually made it past that level.

It seems that in an effort to increase difficulty, I swung the pendulum too far to the difficult side.