Designing Feedback & Failure in Videogames
Or: why you should sometimes set players on fire.
When I was first asked to present a plenary talk at the 37th Annual HCIL Symposium at the University of Maryland, I was a tad nervous. After all, I’m a new inductee into the lively brilliance that characterizes our HCIL faculty, and my background is in mathematics and mathematics education. But my last decade or so of work has focused on something we all care deeply about: failure.
In particular, I have focused on how failure tied with feedback create good learning experiences within games — that is, how do we design our videogames such that doing something wrong (according to the internal rules of the game), teaches us how to do something right? In my game, Rolly’s Adventure, doing something wrong sets the entire level on fire — with an accompanying adorable squeak of dismay from the player’s avatar — but the feedback is tightly tied into that failure. See the golden block embedded within the fire? That is the feedback, hiding within the fire of failure, and that’s how players learn how to play Rolly’s Adventure.
There are a wide variety of types of failure in video games, and setting the player on fire is just using a big (but very useful) mallet — after all, nothing signifies “you did that wrong!” quite as well as a fiery death paired directly with feedback. But there are also other types of failure, such as quiet and gentle microfailures, failure that provokes the player to seek feedback, and failure without feedback. Here, I’m going to describe how two different types of failure were designed into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, my new favorite weird little game. If you’re a designer, a teacher, a student, a gamer, then this piece about the nitty-gritty of failure, feedback, and learning is for you!
Failure that provokes the player to seek feedback
Remember the fiery death paired with feedback example I gave from Rolly’s Adventure? AC:NH has almost completely avoided that type of cheap-and-easy failure, and instead aimed for sophisticated and complex types of failure and feedback. Below, I focus on how even their “death” equivalent is richer than most games manage.
In AC:NH, there are many trees. And in those many trees, sometimes there are wasps. And sometimes when you shake those trees, you get stung. So, as my professor wizard avatar is going about her day, she shakes a tree:
Ow, indeed!
Failure is indicated here by the clear dislike of the avatar for getting stung, and the swollen-shut eye on her previously symmetric face. Then, as the player wanders around and talks to villagers, she gets advice and feedback:
The villagers give her a treasure trove of information within their casual conversation (from left to right): that wasps are in trees, that the ill-effects will wear out in three days, that wasps are a frequent occurrence, and that medicine will cure it instantly. After talking to a bunch of villagers, Keaton finally takes pity on her, and actually gives her medicine — because apparently, in the chaos of being stung, she didn’t realize that something else fell out of the trees with the wasps: their nest. And that nest is the primary ingredient for making medicine.
In other words, AC:NH paired their failure experience (getting stung) with the exact tool needed to overcome the penalty for failure. The medicine doesn’t help with preventing failure the next time wasps get cranky — but we’ll get to part of this failure and feedback rodeo on a second. First, I’ll share the closest to fiery death that AC:NH gets — by sharing the video of what happens when I don’t let my avatar take the medicine so kindly given by Keaton, and she gets stung again. (Also, notice how obvious the wasp nest falling down is, now that you know to look for it!)
My poor professor wizard actually fainted! And woke up back at her clifftop home with no penalties other than lost time — and a sense of irritation that made her immediately take the medicine. And the niggling feeling that there’s got to be some way to avoid getting stung… Which leads us directly to her actively seeking feedback — in this case, that feedback lies in putting together several pieces of previous experiences.
First, the catching bugs with a net is a fact of life in AC:NH — so my professor wizard knows that bugs can be caught with a net. Second, in previous work I’ve talked about adapting Brousseau’s pedagogical contract to games: as game designers, we promise that the player can successfully play the game with the resources we have designed into the game. In this case, AC:NH would have violated the pedagogical contract if there was no way to prevent wasp stings — because shaking trees would sometimes result in arbitrary and unavoidable punishment. So my professor wizard knows that, according to the pedagogical contract, there is some way to prevent getting stung by wasps, and according to prior experience, the net might work.
And ta-da! It works! (After many false tries — trust me, my professor wizard made that look a lot easier than it actually was.)
So, to recap: a normal AC:NH activity (shaking a tree) results in failure, and that failure is paired with casual text-based feedback from the villagers, plus visual feedback about how to undo that failure (the falling wasp nest). Ignoring the failure results in the ultimate penalty (fainting), provoking the player to try to find a way to prevent that failure in the future rather than just fix it after the fact with medicine. So the player puts together their previous activity of catching bugs with nets, with assurance from the pedagogical contract, and learns how to prevent future wasp stings.
The very complexity of failure and feedback designed within AC:NH simultaneously gives multiple successful paths moving forward — the player can just fix their wasp stings after the fact, forever, or develop a new strategy out of disparate pieces of past information to prevent that failure in the future — teaches the player about the ultimate failure (which is much more sophisticated than fiery death), and provokes them to seek options of failure and feedback (or, in this case, success and feedback). All of the various parts of the scenario above involve feedback, though — what does failure without feedback, that doesn’t violate the pedagogical contract, look like?
Failure without feedback
This type of failure could also be called “secret failure” or “Easter eggs” — since players don’t even know they’ve failed! AC:NH excels at this type of feedback, which is a large part why — for me, at least — a game that is all about picking fruit and planting flowers is so darn addictive. As I meander about my island, doing my “dailies”, little strange new things pop up that I don’t understand. And if I engage with that strange new thing in one way, nothing happens — island life goes on as normal. And I have, quietly and secretly and unbeknownst to myself, thoroughly failed. If I had engaged with that strange new thing in another way, something else would have happened — and I would have realized that I’ve been accidentally failing all along. Let me introduce you to my favorite example, the Money Tree!
That first two panels in the little comic strip above shows such a strange new thing: a shiny gold spike of light shows up on your island, and when you dig it up, you get 1,000 bells, and get a little closer to becoming a bellionaire. Then, if you’re me, you close up the glowy golden hole and go upon your day — and you have failed, but there’s no feedback from the game that says, “Hey, you, you just failed! Here’s what you should be doing!”
If, however, you engage with the strange new thing in a different way (the remaining panels in the strip), something completely different happens: planting money back into the glowy golden hole gives you a tree that (slowly) GROWS UP TO GIVE YOU MORE MONEY. So failure without feedback could also be called “success paired with feedback” — it’s only when you succeed at doing the right thing that the game tells you that all your previous attempts were, in fact, failures.
Closing Comments
I’ve been studying games, learning, failure, and feedback for a long time — and plan to continue doing so for years to come (whether my favorite subjects, math and math learning, are involved or not). When AC:NH dropped just as the self-isolation began, I grabbed at the chance to live on my own deserted and peaceful island, where a little bag of Medicine will fix all that ails you or your loved ones. The slow pace of AC:NH is my safe place— it centers and relaxes me in the same way my (more physically fit) friends rave about yoga. In particular, the patterns of failure and feedback designed into the game force a slower, more languid approach to the experience— and the tendency of the gaming community to theorycraft for efficiency is dramatically impaired. A friend sent me a review of AC:NH that suggested a variety of modifications to the game, purely to increase the rapidity and efficiency of the gameplay — and thus this article was born! Because adding those features to AC:NH would fundamentally change the failure and feedback components of the game, and the resulting AC:NH would be a fundamentally different game. A good one, no doubt, but not the game I want to play — because then, unfortunately, I’d have to take up yoga.
Some of My Favorite Resources about Games, Learning, and Failure
- My curated (and always increasing) list of digital media for learning and playing
- Williams-Pierce (editor; free PDF)- Teacher Pioneers: Visions from the Edge of the Map
- Dennis Ramirez - Epic Fail (TEDx)
- Jesper Juul - just about everything by JJ
- Constance Steinkuehler & Yoonsin Oh - Apprenticeship in Massively Multiplayer Online games
- James Paul Gee - What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
- Williams-Pierce & Swartz - Learning by Design: Teacher Pioneers
- Williams-Pierce: Designing for Mathematical Play: Failure & Feedback
