What factors make losing (a fight, a contest, a race, an opportunity, or even an entire game) palatable or unpalatable for you? I'm not sure that losing has a positive connotation in any culture, but in observing my own (in the US), I notice that the idea of losing or being branded a loser is laden with a massive amount of emotional baggage. It's no longer that you can just pick up and try, try again, or not how well you played-- what matters is the fact. You either won or lost. What can make people focus more on the experience of playing a game rather than winning or losing it? What factors make you ignore winning or losing, yet still motivate you to play?

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Personally, I have a lot of trouble accepting losing. I'll accept it if I feel like there's a chance to get better, learn, and eventually win. The only exception to this that I've ever experienced has been games that focus on building something up in an open-ended fashion. With these types of games, I may be winning or losing, but the game isn't getting into my face and telling me so. Because of this, I can shunt that obsessive focus on winning that occurs for me to the side, and just escape in the experience. How about you?

If you have lives on a game i find it easier to continue playing.

Say lives x5; you are returned to game without any trouble once you die and once you get a 'Game-over' screen, you realize what one of your deaths got you the farthest and you think of how far you got not how many times you died or how hard it is.

Personally, I don't mind losing games at all if they're really fun. One thing, though, that makes losing really not fun is when you know you've lost for a long time (by that I mean, you are in a situation in the game where it is almost mathematically impossible to win) but the game has to continue for even longer for you to finish losing. Very boring for the loser, probably for the winner too.

It depends on what exactly you lose. Throughout a game, losing an opportunity for something has the most devastating effect on the player, since from then on there's no way to win again, while repeatable quests, races and the like do offer a chance for the player to redeem herself by trying again. While the latter is by far the most common and utilized quite liberally in games, the former's time, place and significance are IMO crucial to the player's sense of self-worth. For example, attaining Zapdos, Articuno, Moltres, Mewtwo and Snorlax were one-shot deals in the original Pokemon series (you actually had two chances to nab Snorlax), but since these characters were at a premium, the risk was justified, and it actually added appeal, at least for me.

Generally open-ended games like The Sims, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon were free-form, but they also had scenarios that you could lose if you wanted to; somewhat of a lazy race. Similarly, in games such as Gran Turismo, it does matter whether you win or lose in order to progress, but that is rather downplayed by the fact that you have time trials and can race over the internet. The motivation there really becomes how you play the game, and not what the outcome was.

The problem with losing in a game is loss of progress. Having to start over can be exhaustively frustrating. Having to retread significant portions of the game because of oddly placed checkpoints, or the lack of an opportunity to save before an unexpected and disproportionately lethal encounter (Jade Empire). This was the brilliance of Halo's campaign: you never lost more than five minutes' play from dying.

Does anybody remember Z? It was a robots and tanks game that when you lost would seriously harsh on you. I have to admit that the first couple of times I lost I wasn't expecting the game would taunt me for it. Fortunately, the game wasn't as difficult as it thought it was and could be beaten with a little work. When you won a level you'd get a huge cheer, but the applause of the cheer didn't match the degree of visciousness of the taunting when you lost.

One factor that motivate me to continue playing a game without regard to winning or losing is the mystery of what lies behind the next corner. I want to see what kind of eye candy the game makers have laid up in the next level or what kind of surprise they will spring on me next.

It depends a lot on the context of the game. For simple arcade games, it doesn't matter too much if you lose, because you can always try again. This extends to multiplayer FPS as well (at least for me); I don't care too much about the score because I'm too busy having fun.

For a larger themed game, such as an RPG or strategy, it gets a bit more complex. I think it can be designed for "losing" to be acceptable, however, as long as you phrase it in the right way. This might be because of my cultural background however; from my own impression of Aussie culture, we tend to respect the loser of a game if they lose graciously (same with winners). We also have a tradition of respecting heroes who try something overly ambitious but fail (Gallipoli, Burke and Wills etc.). In these cases, the loss of the hero still means something to society, even though they technically "lost".

So for those games, if you were to put in some sort of stirring eulogy (say something similar to Hamlet, maybe?), then you could turn a loss into something of a win (at least in dramatical terms).

I believe and I am sure I am correct but a game is a contest which requires the contestent to use their skills, strenght or luck to beat their opponent. The same goes for a computer game. What would be the fun in a game if you can't win and there is no such thing as a game where there is only winners because for someone to win someone has to lose. I find that losing gives me a challenge because if i lose a game i have to work harder on my stratergies to win.

I play a little StarCraft from time to time, and I hate it when my partner in a 2v2 match desconnects when he is on a clear path to annihilation. When I'm getting beaten, I find it very rewarding to expend my every resource in order to benefit my allies in some way. Even after I've lost my main base and most of my unit production capabilities, I'll marshall my dwindling forces and mount a last flanking charge to divert some of the enemy troops and maybe give my allies a shot at recovery. My favorite is filling a few Terran dropships with medics and having a Protoss player I am working with mind-control them, giving him a few dozen very useful units.

On a smaller scale, if I have 10% health in Soldat and my mate is bringing the enemy flag back to our base, I'll rush past him, engaging his pursuers with a hellstorm of grenades and bullets. I seldom last long, and trip on my own grenades sometimes, but I usually slow them down and often make a real contribution to the team with that last gasp.

So, to tie it into your notion of being in it for the species, I'd be okay with losing, having my castle burned to the ground and my fields sown with salt and my corpse dragged through the streets if somewhere, miles away, somebody writes a nice poem or makes a statue of me. I always thought that would be a neat end-game scenario in a game like Pirates, to have your name appear on the roster of hands lost defending Port Royal. A few of my ancestors are listed in the Pennsylvania register of casualties from the Civil War, and it's fairly stirring to see my kin on that list. I imagine that's the spirit behind the Vietnam War Memorial.

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Original post by ZVFisher What would be the fun in a game if you can't win ... and there is no such thing as a game where there is only winners because for someone to win someone has to lose.

Slot machines immediately come to mind as a game you can't win. As for a game of only winners, have you played blackjack?