The Joy of Failures

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how computer games present failures in an entertaining way that even encourages players to retry the game with a different approach.

Experiencing failures is an integral part of playing computer games. At the beginning of a new game, a player must develop an understanding for the game’s game mechanics which quite frequently goes along with experiencing failures and problems that, in the end, provide the player with valuable feedback about the underlying principles and rules. Once players have developed an understanding for the game mechanics, failures can still be a regular thing when they start to put their skills to a test and/or try to reach the limitations of the game world.

Normally, when we experience a failure in real life, then it often feels like a huge setback. Our expectations, ideas or dreams were proven wrong, crushed or, at least, pushed back thus requiring us to try a different approach which often is time consuming or at least requires additional resources. Although this is not different in a game world, a computer game makes experiencing failures more enjoyable as it is mostly very easy to start over again with a completely different approach. In addition, digital games provide savegames that can be loaded in order to retry a certain approach to analyze the steps that ultimately cause the failure. Moreover, certain computer games also offer a replay function that allows for a direct analysis of the experienced failure for the purpose of learning from the own mistakes.

Furthermore, computer games often demonstrate failures in spectacular ways that are entertaining to watch and sometimes even cause hilarious moments. For instance, a not well designed rocket in Kerbal Space Program disassembles in a rapid succession which, although it also can happen to real world rockets, just looks spectacular and can cause funny moments when some boosters continue to fly in all various directions. This often becomes even more hilarious when players start to test the limits of the game world as, when those limits are broken, it can result in completely unexpected outcomes that let the player fly through the air or end in locations where they do not want to be.

In sum, by presenting failures in an entertaining way and providing features that allow for a quick retry, experiencing problems in a computer game rarely feels like a huge setback and often is even encouraging to retry it with a different approach. Moreover, due to the often hilarious and exaggerated demonstrations of a failure’s outcome, failures can also become an entertaining aspect of the gameplay.