Failure in Game Design

Games can be hard. Games can be punishing. How do you make sure that players have fun while they struggle? How do you design for failure? For many games, the lose state is just as important as the win state and designing failure requires great care. Turns out designing games can be just as hard as playing them.

Failure plays a huge part in games. It manifests in the micro-interactions of mechanics, in the macro-pacing of difficulty, and the overarching narrative.

Game Mechanics

Game Mechanics describe the modes of interaction that are allowed within a given game's universe. They can be as simple as a rule (ex: play must happen within the boundaries of a soccer field) or as complex as an entire interaction system (ex: simulating physics). Mechanics are chosen and designed to encourage engagement and certain types of play and are part of the decision for when the player arrives at a win or lose state.

Failure and difficulty go hand in hand. For a lot of games, engaging failures drive the gameplay. Failures come from stepping on spikes, using all of your "turns" before completing a puzzle, or being outplayed in a competitive match. Each of these types of failure is important to their respective gameplay despite drastic changes in pacing or implementation. Many designers now push to introduce difficulty without making the game punishing. Difficulty is the skill required to complete a task; punishment is the negative result of failing that task. For example, some games punish the player for failing by giving them a maximum number of lives before they get a game over.

Platformers are a great example of making this type of failure engaging. Platformers reward players for precise jumps and maneuvers, avoiding death traps, and defeating enemies. Although some games have implemented lives systems other designers have decided to swing the completely opposite direction and make their platformer more forgiving. It has become commonplace to reduce the "reset" time and return the player to the action, ready to try that difficult trick again. Beyond this, some platformers implement coyote time - a fraction of time that allows the player to jump even after running off of a ledge. Making sure players do not fail needlessly is an important step for engaging failures.

For some games (think Call of Duty), game mechanics are directly tied to meaningful failures. For many others though, failure is a key part of developing the game's story.

Pacing and Narrative

Failures guide the difficulty of the micro-interactions of the game through mechanics, but it is also important for pacing the overall game. The "rising tension", "climax", and "resolution" framework applies to games just as it applies to classic forms of entertainment. However, with games, the dimension of interactivity makes writing narrative more complex. The player is in control of the flow of your story.

Some game designers form their game around the idea of story beats, similar to writing a novel or movie. While this can be important for establishing narrative movement, it is often used to pace difficulty and perfectly deliver gameplay teaching milestones. Properly placing difficult enemies and order of levels can solicit emotional responses from the player similar to "climax" and "resolution" without that same strict story movement.

Games can be paced by spiking difficulty and then offering a respite to keep the player from burning out. This requires careful attention to interludes and other moments of relief. Well placed cutscenes and breaks in action allow the player to process and reflect on recent intense moments. As a result, you order your interactions so that intensity increases on average, but not necessarily from level to level. Instead, you want to purposefully challenge (sometimes over-challenging) the player, having them fail, and eventually overcoming their stress. If the proceeding relief is interactive, these moments can also be used to demonstrate to the player their increased ability. The difficulty of relief interactions can eventually surpass some of the earlier "difficult" situations. I strive to create moments like this because I believe they become moments of celebration that drive the player.

Aside: Some games use this kind of pacing as a means to drive more than engagement. Mobile games are notorious for using pacing tactics like this to create situations where the player is likely to complete a micro-transaction. If a difficult level is blocking the player's progression, they can purchase extra lives or bonus powerups to beat this "especially difficult" level. These games can be balanced to make the player fail X number of times before letting them continue, striking the balance between frustration and making a sale!

Meaningful Failure

Failure can be a pervasive tool for game design, whether we are developing story or fine-tuning the difficulty of certain game mechanics. Making these failures meaningful is the final step. My heuristic is to look at what the player could have changed in the situation. Failure is accepted as one of the best ways to learn. Allowing the player to fail means that they can learn from their mistakes and change the way they interact with your game. A failure can be important for the micro-interactions of certain difficult situations, teaching a player how to perform a certain jump for example. It could even operate on the macro scale and setup an emotional background that makes the player interact with characters and the game story in different ways. In this vein, failures allow the player to learn and engage without giving up.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for exploring ideas with me.