Failure is Rarely Interesting

Or, put differently, in video games, failure is rarely interesting. (The Sims again comes to mind as a game that makes failure interesting. I fail in my friendship bid and now I’ve got an enemy. What other video games make failure a part of the story?)
--- Chuck Wendig, Once Upon a Playtime II: Revenge of the Gamestory

The linked blog post and comments are full of crunchy bits on story, and what makes story in games, and the possible significance of storyworld/setting over actual story. We'll talk about those at another time, including the interesting concept of self-created player narrative from 'blobs' or storylets or bits and pieces supplied by the game into one's own personal story for one's character (which is stuff you can find in gamebooks, Echo Bazaar, certain tabletop RPGs and maybe but not quite Interactive Fiction), as contrasted with the more linear railroaded cutscene forms.

What I do want to discuss is the concept of a failure state being interesting.

Many games don't do this. Game over. The End. You're Dead. Fade to Black. Insert New Coin into Slot to Restart.

(Which is probably how the abrupt, unrewarding failure state developed - through arcade games that wanted to keep you paying for new lives to play.)

But in games in which you now buy a box and expect to be able to play to completion without inserting coin into slot, it pretty much becomes 'reload save game' on death or failure.

Some FPSes and action games have evolved to the point where they don't even bother to make you select a save, they resurrect you at previously demarcated autosave points or at your last save, etc. Some don't even bother with health any longer - as long as you don't take an excessive amount of damage in a certain scene, you're fine and invincible and immortal taking seconds to regenerate health like one of the superheroic military werewolves of my invented fantasy/sci-fi milleu. (Except you're supposed to be a regular Joe in World War II, that is.)

RPGs are less creative on the whole, fail and you reload to replay the last battle in which you or your entire party wiped. Or instead of reloading, you resurrect. Same idea. Planescape: Torment already broke the standard RPG mold when they wrapped this 'breaking the fourth wall' concept neatly into the story. The Nameless One really truly does have many lives (to screw up with) and will keep resurrecting in that dingy morgue until he gets it right or reaches some sort of final end.

Online RPGs or MMOs, rather, lifted the same idea lock, stock and barrel. Die, and you get to go to your own respawn point, often far away from the battle you wanted to fight and that killed you. Innovations here were more developments of convenience. With multiplayer, it meant that certain players could actually resurrect you on the spot, instead of you having to wander your way back to your corpse.

(Of course, the fantasy trope is that only the priests or clerics get to heal and rez. And the amateur designer thought this would make the class 'wanted' or 'desired.' Unanticipated side effect: making all the other classes less wanted or desired. Or the other flaw was that it was just a stopgap 'encouragement' measure for a class that wasn't that interesting to play to begin with.)

Then of course, they got rid of decay, equipment loss and finally corpses because people gradually lost patience with the possibility of losing equipment when your corpse decays. But the bottom line remains. Screw up and you die and get to go back to square one and restart and try it again. The failure state is black screen boring and a screeching halt to any sort of narrative.

It doesn't have to be. And certain games are slowly but surely carving out pioneer paths through this wilderness.

One of the most memorable moments I ever had in an MMO was one of the first attempts at the Terra Volta reactor trial in City of Heroes, when +3 Skyraiders were a genuine scary threat to innocent newbs attempting it at minimum level expecting to succeed. Usually this ends in utter unfun floor-smearing instant failure. We lucked into a team combination that wasn't overpowering strong (not enough damage, tanks + controllers), and yet not utterly weak. Somewhere on the last wave or penultimate wave, a cascade of failure events brought down one tank, then another controller, and then the blaster died and so on until only I was left on the last tank.

Swamped by enemies, with piss poor damage, it was only a matter of time. I had pretty much resigned myself, when a chance comment by a teammate, "Got an awaken?" led me to check my tray and yes, I did have one! Stuck in rooted and surrounded by a mass of Skyraiders like flies to honey, I struggled to the nearest player I could see and shoved him my last awaken. (I don't think I was smart enough at that stage to examine powersets and check who could rez. I might have just asked who could rez and needed it.)

He staggered upright as I heroically attempted to pull all aggro away from him, ran a couple steps away from the fray, ate an AoE and fell smack down on top of another player. Or something like that. Oh no. That was it, I thought. But apparently this close vicinity allowed the other (dead) player to shove him another awaken, or  something like that. Somehow I saw one player stagger upright again. And then another as he got rezzed. And another.

By this time I was close to dying, and I may indeed have died and gotten another rez at some point, but the bottom line was that the team survived, and pulled out the win from the jaws of defeat. It was indeed failure, Terra Volta trials are blindfolded easy these days if you bring overleveled people or stack buffs or just people who know how to play, but it was interesting failure with a chance to recover from it.

This is something I hope works out well for Guild Wars 2. The new 'downed' state offers a middle line between success and failure. As long as a few players survive, they might hold out long enough to revive the group - partial failure, but it offers the chance for interesting heroic narratives - I saved the others. I sacrificed myself for others. Unsoweiter.

The necromancer class in GW2 has an even more interesting failure state. When 'downed,' they get to turn into a spectral form with death shroud and get a number of kickass powers. I'm not sure if they can recover from this state back into life, or if they will inexorably slip away into death like GW1's decaying minions  But damn, who wouldn't want to get some revenge on the thing that killed you before dying? Mutual kill for the dramatic, if not actual, win.

Take Echo Bazaar, the origin of all this failure state speculation of mine. There are negative stats that you don't really want to increase that quickly. Wounds. Scandal. And Nightmare. Ah, good old Nightmare. I was dreading the failure state when Nightmare hit 8 - afraid to find out what would happen to me, and what the hell would happen when I went insane. Would it be irrevocable?

Eventually, I did smash right through the threshold and landed in a new area known as 'a state of some confusion.' When you go mad, you get new storylet choices - the goal of which is to reduce your Nightmare stat to zero, in order to get out and get back to Fallen London.

This is a failure state. You're wasting actions grinding and trying to get out and get back to whatever it is you were trying to do. But it is Interesting with a capital I at the same time because there's new narrative. There's even an opposite sub-goal in which you can try and maintain Nightmare long enough to Track Down the Manager (whose purpose I am still trying to figure out).

By golly, I wouldn't want to go insane from nightmares often, but when I'm there, at least I still have interesting stuff to do and strive for and look forward to. I take it that Wounds and Scandal work in similar ways. I'm not in a hurry to increase those, but when I do fall into those failure states, I am confident they will at least be somewhat interesting to experience.

I am reminded of a few MUDs in which death was a soul-walking experience. One ends up in some sort of maze or netherworld, and one has to solve some sort of puzzle, or contact some cleric in order to help you out of it. They may not have been implemented that well, but the idea was there. Of trying to make death and failure interesting.

More MMOs need to do this.

Rift has a very basic version of this for the player. The first death is a light slap on the wrist, you turn into a ghost that can soul walk and move away from the fray, because you're coming right back to life in five seconds or so. The subsequent deaths follow the respawn at a rez shrine, now hoof it back to your grave model - which is less fun. None of this is actually interesting though, it's more about shortening the inconvenience time.

But what Rift does have, is interesting failure states for their public quest events of Rifts and Invasions. In the sense that if the Rifts are left alone (as they would be if no one bothered, or if players tried and failed and got scared off - which they rarely do), they pump out little invasion packs that fixate on a quest hub, and travel along roads to get there.

If you ignore the invasions, then interesting consequences happen. You no longer get to travel unmolested along roads. It's the mobs' territory and they will steamroll over you if you were blissfully unaware and rode right into them. They walk all over your quest hubs and demolish your wardstone (all your quest NPCs respond and react and fight back and die if you don't help them) and stick their own planar idol in its place. And sit there ravening. Oh, and the planar idol pumps out its own invasion forces.

There is, of course, the chance of recovery back to success or normality. (Without it, it would just be frustrating.) The events trigger and scale to the number of players in the zone. The AI director (to steal a term and example from L4D) knows what the players are likely to be able to cope with.

The rift mobs have been tweaked to be more easily pullable and separated from their groups - which is a crucial strategy for insufficient numbers of players to eventually whittle their way to victory, even if they have to suicide kamikaze each mob, assuming sufficient motivation to. When they all leashed together more tightly during beta, one could see people getting frustrated and deciding to move off after dying too often and not being able to find a tank sturdy enough.

It's a tricky balance point, no doubt. How to make failure interesting, but not SO interesting that people are lining up to trigger the failure states. But one worth looking for.