Forgiveness for Failure

Saw some channel that talks about arcade games. Arcade game players, undoubtedly being the ones who’ve been shafted most by the trends of both high-budget blockbusters and rinky dink one man crafts, tend to have pretty big and loud opinions and those opinions basically boil down to “pls make gaem more like arcade”. This works better for some genres than others, but the notion is understandable especially in the face of games that get way too overbloated with meaningless shit that detract from the experience.

Typically this will involve arguments for games having more punishing death mechanics. Arcade games often involved such punishing death mechanics that, if you were to fail hard enough, you would be forced to replay the entire game from the very beginning. Also known as ‘permadeath’ these days apparently.

In the olden days this’d be used by arcade games to inspire FOMO purchases. Arcade games were hard and you could die real easily, whether that be simply to a lack of skill at the game or, in the case of something like Street Fighter 2, the AI literally cheating so that it can KO you in a single grapple. Then the oooh scary continue screen would pop up, prompting the player to possibly put in more quarters to finish the game. Don’t pay, then you’re going all the way back to the start bucko, assuming you even bother to play ever again.

These games didn’t have permadeath proper, they just had punishing game design in order to help costs get recouped on the machines. Most weren’t really forcing you to go all the way back to the start, that was a self-imposed challenge or one that came about as a result of lacking quarters. How ‘fair’ this was really depended on the game you were playing, I’m not going to say that arcade games were poorly designed or constantly threw up middle fingers at the player, they were mostly just made to be harder.

More modern attempts at the genre don’t require people to put quarters into their computers, so they leaned more into the idea of permadeath. I’ll use Touhou as an example since everyone knows that, but really you could apply most of what I’m saying to most shmups.

Touhou has a lives/continues system. Die X times (depending on how many lives you set) and you have to spend a continue to go on. Spend 3 or so continues and you’re done and have to do everything all over again.

Touhou is also, like, 30 minutes long on average. The time is variable, but take this run of Touhou 6 for example. This is perhaps the longest you can spend on a run, deliberately letting every single attack run its course without trying to overwhelm any of them with your own attacks. On top of this, he utilizes pause buffering which makes the game take longer than it should. The run still took only 39 minutes. Some games take like 20 hours to finish.

This is the first thing you really need to consider when talking about failure states. Some games are way, way, WAY easier to just restart and keep going than others. Imagine dying at the final boss of something like FF7 and then having to do the entire game all over again.

This is why stuff like saving was introduced into games to begin with. You can’t make longer games with more stuff and unironically expect people to be able to do all of it without at the very least wanting to take a fucking break. These games need progress to be saved, they can’t trim themselves down without becoming fundamentally different games entirely.

That, on a basic level, is where failure forgiveness really kind of begins. Like you fucked up and got a game over but we’ll let you keep all of your bombs and arrows or revert progress back to your last save. Add onto this the increase in narrative elements appearing in games, like cutscenes, and things were becoming much more forgiving because the narrative impact of a cutscene is pretty limited when I see it a hundred times because the boss afterwards is so difficult.

Okay now let’s talk about how this can be bad.

So, there’s been a quote that’s lived in my head rent free since I’ve seen it for the first time. Zach Barth, legendary leader behind the Zachtronics development team, they made some fucking amazing puzzle games, I’ve never finished a single one because I unironically get too obsessed. Following the shutdown of Zachtronics, he did a Q&A on Reddit and was asked why his games seem to have difficulty spikes.

His response?

People who play games tend to come in at a certain skill level and only grow slightly over the course of the game. This is why dynamic difficulty and RPG-style progression are so popular with the designers of successful games. Our games don’t do those things, which means that some people will play them a little and get stuck, some people will play them to the end and find it a good satisfying challenge, and others will never be able to play them at all. It’s not ideal, but it’s maybe unavoidable for games that provide more “real” challenges.

Oh Christ. I don’t know how he came to understand this, I don’t know if this is an idea he found out of a book or birthed from experience, but goddamn it really opened my eyes.

The overwhelming majority of people playing games are not good at them and cannot improve. Or perhaps it’s “will not improve”. But that can’t be right, games are all about difficulty and improvement. If you’re playing a game and not getting better at it then what the fuck is going on?

It’s just the game faking that you’re getting better at it. You, the player, are still the same shitgoblin you were when you began the journey, but your player character got super strong and makes up the difference. For example, let’s say you can’t get 3 hits on enemies without taking a hit yourself. No problem, your player character will just grow in strength to make every single enemy die in a single hit. Easy!

Jesus. I’m not going to say every game with a progression system is like this, it’s entirely dependant on how you create things like that, but I have 0 doubt that a fuckton of these systems exist purely for the sake of being able to have a sense of a ramping up difficulty without actually ramping up the difficulty any. Like, you’ll have upgraded threats but you’ll also have upgraded so much you offset them to basically being normal threats.

This in and of itself doesn’t tie into failure forgiveness, but the concept of people being dorks who don’t improve are. The saving systems became less a tool to segement larger games into properly managable chunks and instead became systems to offset this skill issue.

It’s the AAA game that sets checkpoints right behind your heels 50 times over the course of a 5 minute segment. Repeating somewhere in the range of 30 minutes of gameplay? Try 2 seconds. These games are terrified of punishing people for anything because they’re trying to be as inclusive as possible, and in this process they become boring and meaningless.

Or what I’ve had a little more experience with, western shooter games with quicksave mechanics. The only difference is that now instead of the game putting checkpoints behind your heels every 5 seconds, you do that yourself. Every single minor encounter can be quicksaved after, or hardsaved if you’re super paranoid. There’s typically no limitations on this, just quicksave, quickload, quicksave, quickload…

Obviously you can just ignore this mechanic but at that point the challenge becomes more self imposed. It also begs the question of where exactly the checkpoints in the game should lie, some levels get way too long to simply be restarted upon a game over, especially in the games where losing can be a matter of getting two shot from full health by a 50 ms reaction time robot because you turned the corner at the wrong angle. Cough Max Payne cough

This is probably the absolute worst forgiveness mechanics can get. It’s one thing to be able to save anywhere, it’s another to be able to literally manifest infinite checkpoints whenever you want. If failure means nothing, the challenge means nothing. If the challenge means nothing, then everything becomes little more than a series of motions you have to go through.

That’s broadly where you could end the topic, but it’s worth bringing up that not every single game actually has a use for failure states. In fact I’d say there’s some genres where failure states outright make the experience worse. Puzzle and traditional adventures are two.

Puzzle games usually don’t get anything from failure states. Fucking up and dying is less about messing up in execution and more about not understanding a solution. In traditional adventure especially failure can get really damn annoying. Sierra games these days get mocked for having elements where missing or misusing one random item from 3 hours ago makes the game unfinishable. An interesting concept in theory, in practice it just means you have to restart the game and go through every single motion over again but this time not forgetting to pick up the item you need.

Baba is You is a pretty good practical example. If you run into a death object, or disconnect yourself from the game logic, you die. What do? You just undo your last move. At worst, you can restart the entire level but this is usually because you’ve messed up too many moves and it’s easier than doing an undo.

If there is a true failure state in these games, it’s less tangible than it might be in an action game. It’s simply the idea that you’re not able to solve the puzzles, at least without getting someone to do it for you. There is a challenge here, and there is a chance for failure and to be walled off, it’s simply different.

Like any game, being able to craft an experience is dependant on what kind of mechanics you’re making and how you make them. Some things work in some situations, and make the experience worse in others. Being a good developer is understanding how all of these little bits influence the perception and playability of a game. There are no rules, just tools.