Why do games require you to lose?

Fair enough. My example is uninformed. I would still say however that death should be a tool in gameplay rather than just the result of things outside of the player's control (by outside of the player's control, I mean things the player can't account for at all in preparation or execution of some activity).

 

Not everyone likes Sudoku, some people might find it too dull. Not everyone will see the point of Kendamas. Or building a house of cards. Simple things, frustrating obstacles, why would anyone go through that? Is it the social currency associated with it? Or the notion of self-improvement?
Whatever the case, some people will spend hours, days, years, honing skills for that simple yet specific task, and get higher kicks, than some other kid playing a next gen graphics getting effortless achievements "You bought your first potion", "Talked to your first NPC", "Spanked 100 butts". And complaining that the game isn't perfect.

 

I do not agree with that statement. There are many games, and not all of them need this kind of mechanic (Planescape: Torment, anyone?). Also, as I mentioned "death as tool" approach can be overused to create very ugly railroading, like the sequence depicted in totalbisquit's video.

The idea is not to train player to exhibit certain behavior, you know?

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "this kind of mechanic." Do you mean death in and of itself? I would certainly agree with that if that's what you're saying, not all games need you to be able to die.

But how you describe Dark Souls -

- IS in fact "death as a tool."

Taken to the extreme it becomes this sure (and listening to the devs talk about Portal was a little weird because of this aspect. But that's the extreme.

 

We are splitting hairs here, but:

In that TB video, that death is pretty arbitrary. You don't die because you got hit, or fell off a cliff or whatever. You died because there was a line of code that said:

if (triggerarea && !killedsniper) killplayer();

And I believe that's what @neginfinity means by "death as a tool".

And that's different from having a common ruleset of what kills you and sticking to it.

One method is guiding the player to play a certain way by arbitrary killing them and the other method is "guiding" the player by level design and enemy placement.

If Dark Souls doesn't really want you to go a certain way at a certain point, it places a bunch of tough enemies together.

Benefits of this way are :

-If you die trying to do something, it makes sense within the game's ruleset, it's not arbitrary.
-You can approach that area in a number of different ways.
-Those enemies are in the end, beatable, and you really could go that way if you were skilled enough.

 

And of course when I decide to write a reply, internet gets borked. Anyway:

Dude, this is a semantic argument, and you're trying to convince me that I agree with this idea by presenting different definitions of "tool". I don't agree with the idea.

I do not see this guideline as useful, and I think it'll backfire badly when broadly applied. Treating player death as one of the aspects of game is fine, but trying to use it as a "tool" to do something will lead to problems.

I see the idea as focusing on a wrong aspects of the game.

Yup, however... you can still kill them. The good thing about dark souls design is that everything is beatable at any level if you are skilled enough. While you have a rough idea where you might wanna go (and no idea what you're going to do there), there are no invisible wall of death.

For example, at the beginning of the game you start with a sword hilt and face a tough enemy. The game strongly hints that you're supposed to run away, BUT you can kill the enemy if you manage to pull that off.. And that's what I like about the design.

Meanwhile other games make areas arbitrarely impassable. One example I remembered is borderlands, which reduced damage to enemies if their level was too high to the point that you had no hope of killing them. That's what happens when you try to direct the player too hard.

No such stuff in dark souls.

 

See, I'm thinking of the second example in terms of "death as a tool." But oh well.

I'm not arguing for arbitrary rules being put in place that prevent the player from acting how they want to act (I thought I made that clear, but I'm clearly doing a terrible job of explaining), I'm arguing for creating a system where the situations that lead to player death make sense and the player can see what they did wrong and how to avoid it next time. But this is clearly not going anywhere, so I'll drop it.

I agree that this is terrible.

 

Systems and level design are tools. Death is a consequence. It may make some of your tools effective, but it's not a tool by itself.

You can guide players through tools. Level design and enemy placement can hint at where the player can/should go in a way that makes sense. Example: Starting in Dark Souls (past the "tutorial" area), you have 3 paths to choose. Only one is "correct", but you can go the other ways if you want, it's just super hard because you're both underlevelled and inexperienced with the game at that point. I actually went the "wrong" way (the catacombs) for quite a while before I gave up, but it is actually doable. I even got a couple of cool items kinda early as a result.

Elevating Death from consequence status to tool status, means you're using it as "don't go there because you'll die". Which is the example in that TB video.

 

So true. Dark Souls is about patience. Every single death I ever had was because I over-reached, I went for one more hit or was sloppy on dodge.

It's not even a hard game, it's just, the player is the difficulty really (although manus was a bit much at times).

People shouldn't be discussing games they haven't played. Write about what you know and all that. Dark souls does have NG+ though so you're able to keep getting challenged. I don't know if there's a cap on it.

Dark Souls suits people who learn fast from their own mistakes. The game has very little random behaviour to it.

 

The problem here is that there are two different perspectives. From a developer's perspective, it's not as though death is clearly being used to make a point. From a player's perspective though, the only feedback the player gets on what should or shouldn't be done is by being driven into the dirt like a stake. The point you're trying to argue is that there is no malice to death, but there is no other feedback for the player to go off of.

 

If the game mechanics support "lose hard" you get a very unique experience other games does not offer. For example DayZ's perma death. If you die in DayZ it can take hours to kit a new character. People play more safe and realistic because of this

 

I don't know why people keep saying you can go any direction in Dark Souls. You really can't. Some areas are blocked until you beat Anor Londo.

One example is the Catacombs route. It's right at the start of the game, just turn left and down you go. Yeah, it's hard, but you can beat it. Plus, if you got a divine weapon and came back, it shouldn't be too hard to beat.

Then, you can venture into Tomb of the Giants, which is a bit harder, but a lot of times you can run past the enemy.

But you know what happens then? You get greeted by an orange fog that blocks the boss area. You are then treated with a VERY long walk back to Firelink.

There are a couple other areas blocked off like this, but unless you've played the game, you won't know where they are.

Now, Demon's Souls on the other hand was a bit more open. With the exception of world 1-3 and beyond, you could do any level you want in any order.

 

The important part is that the orange fog doesn't kill you via trigger.

Your post makes me wonder if it would be a good idea to try re-plaing Dark Souls 1 as deprived and then explore the route you described.

 

I've played the death out of both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. I got to the point where I beat them both with a level 1 character. So, I've explored plenty of routes.

It's actually almost worth doing Catacombs early. People forget that beating that boss grants you the rite of kindling which lets you get 20 estus flasks per bonfire. Just get ready for a long trudge back to Firelink.

 

The only things I have learn from this thread is that, I should send my non existent 5 years old to school, with a lunch box sealed with a 2nd order equation he need to solve in order to eat, and then if he ever succeed, he will be met with cold indifference because the effort was the reward.

 

I think the truth I've gleaned from this thread and thinking about this more is that, somewhere along the lines, I've transitioned away from harder-core games and more towards casual. My expectations of intensity and difficulty are much lower and I want my games to be more forgiving. Heck, I was even playing a match 3 game by Oprah for a while.

I've also been playing those little games based on Breakout but with multiple balls, which do cause you to die after a while but not usually after a long period of time because the span of one game is short enough, so it doesn't feel so painful to start over (though it does a bit). Or like, robot unicorn attack is a favorite and each game played through becomes harder and harder which is fine and fun, but thus each play through is done in like 30-60 seconds so you don't mind having another try.

But if I've gone through some game where each level takes at least a few minutes and have been going for like half hour to an hour or more, I don't want to be having to go all the way back to the fricking start.

So maybe this tells us more that, if the level of commitment is higher or play time has been longer, a restart is a much bigger perceived penalty because the progress has been so much bigger. If the gameplay is generally longer, a complete do-over is much more of a slap in the face whereas in a shorter game it matters much less.

Flappy Bird springs to mind, lasting no more than like 10 seconds (lol), extremely difficult control system, but still fun to keep trying. So I'm not saying, don't have challenge and difficulty, I like a good hard shootemup or whatever, but if I'm getting a severe kick in the butt for not being able to move past level 59, with no saves or restart points or whatever, after playing it for 3 hours, then, f that. Take me back a few levels but don't make my reincarnate in a whole new lifetime.

 

What you describe there isn't "overcoming a wall", though, it's "winning by blind luck". Overcoming a wall would be if the player beat the boss by improving at the game.

I remember Ninja Gaiden: Sigma where the first time I played it took me several attempts to beat the first level boss. I wasn't good at the game, and I had to get better before I had the timing and control to beat him. I came back later on a more difficult setting and whalloped him first go even though it was a harder fight, because by then I'd had practice against all of the later enemies in the game. That's "overcoming" something - the way I was playing changed for the better, allowing me to achieve things I could not before.

If, on the other hand, the game was just rolling a dice and he had a 1 in 10 chance of being easy then I wouldn't "overcoming" anything, I'd just have gotten lucky.

 

Or, to summarize:
1. There are games you play to unwind
2. There are games that you play to have fun from the challenge.
3. There are varying degrees of challenge.

#1 would cover light puzzles, walking simulators, etc.
#2 would cover sutff like dark souls

Also some people want more extreme challenge. That's the target audience for "Ultra Hard + Permadeath" modes.

For example, Dark Souls doesn't take away everything from your character. You have checkpoints you can return to, and distance between those might not be too big (Dark Souls 3 had larger number of save points). In original Doom, for example, level usually would take about 15 minutes to complete max, so getting killed on one of them didn't set you abck too far, unless you forgot to save that is.

 

My rule is that the designer of the game should design the game rather than leaving it up to me.

Otherwise, why am I buying their game? @neginfinity pretty much nailed it with his anecdote about not pretending that a story ends differently. Even if I can make up the difference in my imagination, there are other games that better cater to me so why wouldn't I choose to play them instead?

With that in mind, consider why people choose to play certain games in the first place. Why did a whole bunch of people choose to play Super Meat Boy over the other available platformers? There are loads of RTSs, why is Starcraft 2 in particular popular? Call of Duty and Battlefield have so much in common that people not familiar with them have trouble telling them apart... so why do so many players have a strong preference for one over the other?

Not everything is about functionality. Sure, I can artificially make Mario as hard as Meat Boy by manually restarting every time I mess up, but I'm sure you wouldn't tell me that this will give me even remotely the same experience.

I'm sure you also wouldn't tell a rock climber to buy a ladder and just pretend that they're half way up a cliff. No matter how hard you try to pretend, your brain knows what's really going on and the rush just isn't there.

 

Who remember the masocore movement primed by "I wanna be the guy"?

 

I really think the dark souls versus games that don't kill you so often misses the point. Absolute difficulty doesn't matter. Its all about player expectations.

In Dark Souls you expect to die. You expect to have to try each encounter multiple times to get it right. So when Dark Souls hides an incredibly tough enemy directly behind a door that kills you the instant you open it, you applaud the game design. The game is giving you exactly what you expect it too.

In the average FPS game you expect to have constant, linear action. So when the game makes you backtrack through a significant part of the level to pick up an item, we complain about the design. The game is giving us something we didn't expect.

The same is true of difficulty. If a game starts off easy, and stays easy, giving players a sudden difficult encounter is breaking their expectations.

 

Aside from Dark Souls, which I haven't had a chance to play yet, I think Eve Online could be mentioned as another example that presents a steep learning curve for new players and punish them heavily upon a death.

For those who are not familiar with the game, in Eve Online, it is virtually impossible for a new player to catch up with veteran players in every aspects, since skill progression is in real time. And the game's quite unique in that it encourages people to harass or even scam other players, for to which newbies often fall prey.

And when they lose their ships, the ship itself along with all its equipments and cargoes are either completely destroyed or taken as spoils by the attacker. Even though there are quite cheap ships and equipments in the game, it's quite common to see that new players save all their money to buy the best ship they can afford, in a hope that it might help them compete with more experienced players.

To buy such equipments, they either need to do a lot of grinds like mining in game, or invest real money to buy something called PLEX, which can be traded for in game currency. So, when they find a couple months of subscription or grinds worth of equipments evaporates in an instant, many get infuriated and just 'rage quit' the game for good.

I thought it might be worth mentioning of Eve Online, since I think it's quite a unique game in that aspect, and its ruthless manner in which it deals with player death can be seen as a detrimental factor in driving out new players, and also a key aspect that makes it stands out among other generic MMOs at the same time.

 

I actually heard that veteran gamers were giving new players a helping hand, that it wasn't as bad as it could be.

http://www.pcgamer.com/why-free-to-play-could-save-eve-online/

 

Of course, I didn't mean that most of the veteran players in that game were jerks or anything I quit playing Eve Online before it went free and I wasn't really a hardcore player then. Still, I met many people who were friendly enough to help me there.

But even with those friendly people, I think the game mechanic is still quite exceptionally harsh for new players compared to other games in the same genre. And I don't think there to be many games that actually encourage players to scam or assault (that is, without any designated 'PvP zone') each other, which I believe was one of the reason why the game has survived so long, since it appeals to certain type of players as few other games do.

 

I agree with this.
But the original imaginaryHuman's question was why games require you to lose, when it can be potentially so annoying.
Why should games ever expect to die/lose/start over, why would they even exist, or if that sort of game should exist at all.

And the answer is yes, they should.

Always clarifying you don't REQUIRE to lose to have fun. But losing sometimes can add to the satisfaction once you achieve that goal.
There is something about trying to do something you can't do, in repetition, until you master it.

...

There's one aspect of this that isn't being mentioned, is that the sheer amount of games today, actually plays against this.
It used to be a praise to beat older games, because there weren't that many of them.
Some kid would go to school and announce he beat X game, and everyone knew X, some even currently playing X in a daily basis. There used to be a social currency around it. So this added to the incentive to put up with dying several times.

The recipe for games that make you die is a mix of self-improvement, and a manner of exhibiting that achievement to others who can relate to it.

 

I think this isn't right.

When I played I tried my damnedest to get to the next location without getting killed, on the first try.

The reason for that is souls. When you die, you drop them. Then you can pick them up from the spot where you died. If you get killed while trying to pick them up, they're gone for good. "Poof". Souls are used to level up, buy things and upgrade equipment.

The longer you go, the more souls you accumulate, the more death hurts. So, the longer you venture without resting at campfire, the riskier it gets, because dying costs more. However, resting at campfire resets the whole location, and same happens with dying. So whil you get an opportunity to replay, you don't *want* to die and would try to avoid it.

----
So in this case placing a tough enemy behind a door that kills you the moment you open it would be a poor design. I think that this kind of design was employed in Dark Souls 2, which was rather unfun compared to other dark souls games.

 

We played the game very differently. I spent a lot of lives just exploring stuff, figuring out the area, looking for items, and trying multiple approaches to difficult enemies. Most times by the time I finally finished an area I had played it so many times I could complete it in my sleep.

I've only played Dark Souls 1. I remember several cases of enemies that instantly killed me before I knew where they were. I suppose a better player could have been more cautious and located the enemy without dying. But I tended to take multiple attempts to figure out even the simplest enemies.

 

Well, there's two points. One of them is indeed that you should give players what they expect/want. The other is that not everyone expects/wants the same things.

Dark Souls et. al. are commonly cited examples there because they're a common and well known case of someone taking clear advantage of the unmet desires of a significant audience. Following a trend to make games more accessible and increase their audience many games try to make things easier or less "punishing", which reduced the fun for a particular subset of the audience. Dark Souls recognised this as an opportunity and designed a game specifically to address it for that audience, thus giving them what they expected/wanted.

 

There is a third point as well. Players aren't always aware of what they want/like. Or more accurately, don't/can't communicate it. Nothing negative about players, they just often have a very different perspective than developers do.

 

Somehow your statement reminded me of this dark souls video regarding pvp component:

 

The original company I was with that was acquired by/became Disney, was a huge player in the social space, we had some huge games. And we built some powerful realtime analytics tools (which is part of the reason Disney bought us). Because of the scale of the games, and that they were across multiple demographics, meant we could build some fantastic pictures of usage and do a variety of tests with large samples. (the game I was on at the time had 15m DAU, with 5-8m concurrent users). We could tell what color button was more effective for a given demographic at a particular time of day. It was a little insane.

While, the data was aggregate, and based on "model" users (we didn't tie data to individuals for privacy reasons), we DID have a bunch of users (about 2k-ish IIRC), that let us track their usage directly. Which was fantastic, because we knew exactly how/when/what they played and met with them regularly for feedback to get their input directly. Interesting, it rarely matched up. It was fascinating. They almost always way over/under-estimated the amount time they played or money they spent. We would get feedback like the game was "too hard", but when we tuned it to be easier, they would stop playing. (and vice-versa) . I remember one girl who claimed to despise violence in games, but that was all she played, and a lot of it... violently. Nobody appeared to be trying to deceive us, it was more that they were unaware of their habits. There were patterns to it, but generally everyone was off in their own estimations. Our big takeaway from this was direct feedback wasn't remotely as useful (in determining what people like/enjoy) as actually watching them play. Either directly or through analytics.

 

This is exactly why I take my game to trade shows and watch people play it. Dozens of people who aren't us and have never been exposed to our game for the first time. Who plays it? How long do they play it? Where do they stop playing? How do they look at different parts of the game? What do they comment on afterwards?

 

That kind of stuff is sooooo useful. You quickly get tunnel vision working on a game for a long time. Watching real players play can be eye opening.

 

Super interesting. Thanks for sharing.