The Ingredients of Fun - Part 2: Failure

These days, people seem to be all about avoiding failure. This makes sense, as no sane person enjoys putting sincere effort into making something happen, only to watch their plans come to ruin as the opposite occurs. Nevertheless, when we fail, (SPOILER: If you're a human, it's going to happen.) too strong an aversion to failure can keep us from gleaning valuable experience from analysis of our mistakes. You've probably heard something like this in the form of life advice, or whatever. But it is quite relevant to game design, as failure is a component of challenge. 

• The possibility of failing defines challenge. Is an activity at which you will succeed regardless of your efforts a challenge? Nope.  
• From our look at the study in the previous post, we know that players prefer to be challenged to the point that they succeed in a game with difficulty. 
• Therefore, they want to experience some failure in the games they play. 

Although failure is generally not a fun experience, it serves to as more than a contrast to triumph. The difficulty curves (gradual, often exponential, rate at which difficulty increases through a game) of the best video games often are designed to require the player to learn from failure in order to cope with the challenge. 

Picture from Google Images

For example: rather than reading in the instruction manual that Mario is capable of jumping X feet horizontally, the players of Mario platforming games feel out the limitations of his acrobatics by failing basic jumps many times. As the player progresses through the stages, Mario's jumping ability becomes second-nature, allowing for the completion of more complex obstacles that would be incredibly daunting without precision jumping skills.

Picture from Google Images

In this way, failure teaches you one mistake at a time, engaging your brain' s previously discussed systems for finding paths to reward. This is where the dopamine kicks in, and you are having fun identifying strategies that work, and those that need to be rethought or better executed. That is, as long as the game is providing the feedback necessary to glean possible methods of improvement, since trial-and-error is only interesting so long as you can avoid unnecessary trial by learning from the error. Otherwise, the game runs the risk of the player attributing their failure to game or its rules, rather than themselves. 

Next post, I will discuss how Attribution Theory explains this phenomenon of players blaming the game for mistakes, and how this frustrating situation can be avoided with good game design.  

Thanks for reading! Did I miss anything? It can be hard to choose what to cut when condensing so much information, so please let me know if anything doesn't make sense to you.