I find that I really dislike games that you cannot loose. I just dont see the point to them. For you to actually win, there has to be a scenario where you loose. Now I dont enjoy overly difficult games, where you loose every second and can never figure anything out. But if the game just goes forever, your going to loose interest in it after a while.

I find it strange that nobody has mentioned the Burnout series. I don't normally play racing games, but I absolutely LOVE Burnout3, and when I get the cash, I'm getting Burnout:Revenge.

In those games, the crashes are so spectacular that you don't mind flying off a cliff or watching your car crumple into a concrete pillar. I don't know if you'd call that "losing", since you're still in the race.

I agree with Oluseyi about the frustration of losing progress. I like the way it's handled in Soul Reaver. For those of you who haven't enjoyed the Legacy of Kain series, you don't really "die" in Soul Reaver, you're already a ghost anyway. When your health bar is empty, you just shift back to the spectral realm. You have to backtrack a bit to find a gate back into the physical realm, but you don't lose any progress.

Balancing loss is something that most designers are not good at. It's either unforgiving in the NES style, or it's so trivial that you might as well be invincible. For the latter, look up Lego Star Wars.

If you can make me afraid to lose, but not hurl a controller when I do, share it with me, because you've got gold!

I'm a fighter in life, and I can say that losing -sucks-, but in video games as well as fighting, or =anything=, I'm usually happy if I put up a good fight.

If you get flat-out steamrolled and there was nothing at all you coulda done to stop it, had no chance at all to win, there's nothing fun about that. The fun about losing is saying "you can't take me without a fight, <insert explitive of choice here>!!!" and making them work their booty off for it. ;)

[edit] Just thought about it, and actually, the reverse side is true, too. Winning without working for it is usually never satisfying.

Losing is tolerable provided two circumstances:
-I was not forced into the conflict.
-There was a solution that I failed to recognize.

Almost all games will break one of these two rules when progressing towards a conflict of any sort. Either you are pushed by the game and it's story into the conflict(bosses in most RPGs, for instance) or the conflict is difficult enough that no solution is opportune(the early Final Fantasy games were thoroughly punishing if you didn't grind a few levels here and there).

A great example of a game genre that creates a high amount of losing without feeling hopeless or abusive is roguelikes. ADoM, Nethack, Angband, etc. In almost every case of losing, you had the option to enter the conflict - and you were given variable solutions to it(even if a solution might be to retreat until stronger).

Lose game and death is a big issue in all the games, specially in MMOG, because players need THE END risk to feel thrilled, but dont want to die themselves. And there is aways that stupid player who try to face the Huge-Demon-From-The-Depths-Of-The-Burning-Hell with just his level 5 character.

There is simply no way to balance it, as this preference is personal to each player.

I myself am a very hardcore player, and prefer the final death and lose everything, specially in an MMORPG. I know most players highly disagree with me, but not dying just allow a permanently growing horde of top-powerfull chars, wasting the new and casual players gameplay. (Because they dont stand a chance and will aways be a weakling in the game)

We should think deeply about that issue here and try to find answers to please (or piss off less) everyone. Not just the "oh, I dont like dying, so lets make the game like Soulheaver so the player dont loses anything" stuff.

The fact is: people today (in general) DONT like to lose! Not they like to get any punishment for they defeat. Just the word DEFEAT or YOU LOST just pisses them.

But removing this from the game will take all fun off, because that way all players will win or become all-powerfull eventually (even the major sucker one). And you must remember that "lose game" is the same problem to all the other challenges in the game: the people like tougher challenges, but dont like to lose from it.

Whats the answer: removing all the challenges? Be ultra-forgivable to the player? Remember the game should do the worst punishment to the player who lost/died the game.

This topic certainly caught my eye! I was expecting a bunch of insults directed at gameDev members! Phew!.... : )

Losing a game is ESSENTIAL,
with the exception of interactive story time games (LOOM and Seventh Guest come to mind, there are more recent examples, I can't seem to think of, as well) where you may get stuck, but never die, but the enjoyment comes from seeing the story brought to conclusion.

In all other genres the ability to lose is needed. With no risk there is no gain. No feeling of accomplishment or fulfillment comes to the player unless they know they managed to overcome the odds. Without it, it's like playing (insert favorite FPS here) in invincible mode. Sure its fun for a few minutes, but tires quickly.

The real difficulty is the price of failure, if when you lose you can always start up right where you left off, well that's just like not losing in the first place, but if you are forced to do everything again from the begining, well that can deter a player from starting again... It really depends on the genre. For arcade or pinball style games where all you are trying to achieve is a high score, well starting over is fine.

In longer games such as adventure or rpg, I think there must be a method of saving your game, so the player can backtrack without having to redo potentially hours of labour. Also when approaching areas where players are very likely to perish, hard coded save points can be handy (for those of us who often forget to save until it is too late.)

The toughest decision comes with MMPOG's when someone may have spent days (or weeks, months, even years) developing thier character (or empire, or what have you) to loose it all and start over can be quite nasty. At the same time most of the games I have experienced are far too gentle with player death. Also it could be said that penalties for dying in non-PvP games should be harsher than their PvP counterparts. In these games you can choose how much risk to subject yourself to, where in PvP games invariably you will end up with that power-gamer hiding right beside the "entrance portal" picking of newbies.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator 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?

Way back in college I studied several other cultures and how they handled (among other things) success and loss.

The US (and to a lesser degree all Western culture) is based on a competition mentality. I win or I lose. You win or you lose. Maybe we can both have a win-win situation. Etc. I'm sure you're familiar with this mentality.

There are many other views on competition, I find the oriental view compelling beca.... well.

That's not why I'm posting. [oh]

One of the "more primative" cultures I studied had social competitions. One was essentially a log race. The men in the village would run a big race carring two giant trees on their shoulders. Western anthropologists were confused because when one log-team fell behind, members of the other team would go over and join them until they caught up. Both teams would continue to race as fast as they could, but the individual members would change sides to the opposition, if you will. The races always ended up in a near tie with everybody trying to be the winner.


I got to thinking about what I do.

I realised that most of the competitive things I want to engage in are not unpalatable.

I realized that the times I feel stressed, anxious, and otherwise unhappy are when I am in a competitive situtaion where I have a risk of losing, and get increasingly stressed, anxious, or otherwise unhappy as the probability (and magnitude) of failure increased, getting into a bad cycle.

Going through your list of being a loser...

Socially, when I play games the game is just an activity to give the friendship a shared experience. It's nice to win occasinally, but it is not why I play.

Socially, when I feel snubbed in any contest, it is intolerable, and I tend to just leave the social group.

When I play computer games, I get very frustrated when a single level in a game is extremely difficult. When I finally give up and have to look online to see that the only way to win the level is to do a very specific set of steps, I often feel anger toward the game and the company.

When it comes to an opportunity that I wanted, I try to keep it in perspective. As I mention when we see the "I got a job interview!" posts come up, I need to remember that other people are trying to get the opportunity as well. It is possible that nobody will actually get it. If the person who gets it happens to be me, then great. If it's somebody else, then good for them. It probably isn't because of something I do or something I am.

As far as games go, I play them for entertainment and social interaction. I don't mind losing horribly a few times, being taunted, and then winning, AS LONG AS IT IS ENTERTAINING. I don't think about it in the terms, "You either won or lost", as you put it. The only way to lose is to not meet the reason for playing in the first place.

If a game is not entertaining (regardless of the difficulty) then I feel it was a bad value and a personal loss. If a game is entertaining or taught me something valuable (even if it's a super-cheesy game with no difficulty), then I will generally feel the time spent was worthwhile.

Sadly, I think this is just a view that develops as people get along in years. ... [grin]

frob.

I don't think losing directly has a positive impact on a given social structure, I think the important part is the winner. A winner from an evolutionary stand point is stronger better faster smarter W/E. If you believe in evolutionary theories, then you realize that the goal of evolution is to perpetuate the strongest of a species thereby ensuring its survival. The downside to having a winner, is that there is a "loser" someone who's given trait is not so desirable to pass on.

As an example I'll use my favourite game Quake3 (I love this game). If we think of clans as social structures (since they are social structures) a given clan wants to collect the best players because it will ensure the clans survival, or at least ranking. So a given group of people play a scrimmage or two, and a clan thats recruiting see's someone who is obviously far better then the rest of the people in the game, so they approach them. The losers however in their lack of skill are undesirable because they would weaken the clan not strengthen it.

Of course we all know this already... I just like making large posts about arbitrary stuff.

Oh and no I'm not in a quake3 clan.

I think part of the problem is that, in a lot of games, losing isn't really part of the game. By which I mean that, in the reality that the game promotes, your death simply isn't a possible state, and so any time you die you have essentially broken the world, and now some outside mechanism has to come and clean up your mess. You either have to reload, or restart, or put in more coins, or whatever.

In large part, I think this is caused by the linearity of most games. The game has already chosen your destiny for you, and by failing, you've changed the reality of the world and that simply can't be allowed.

In that context, I don't think it's really a surprise at all that players hate dying. Essentially, you're just disrupting the player's gameplay, and how can she have fun playing your game if you're constantly saying "no no, things didn't happen that way, now we have to restart"?

Of course, there are some noticable exceptions to this. The best I can think of is Prince of Persia, where dying meant your character had to rewind time and fix things himself. Which was a really good thing, because you die a lot in that game [wink]. Incidentally, I thought it was clever of them to add that voiceover of of the main character saying "no no, wait, that's not how it happened".

So, to answer your original question, what makes dying palletable to me is when it's part of the gameplay experience itself, not a corrective mechanism hacked on to a game where dying is strictly forbidden by the story/laws of the universe.