Embracing Death Through Design: The Power of Failure in Video Games
Imagine you’re playing a new video game for the first time. You see your character onscreen, let’s say it’s a penguin.
You infer that you can probably move the penguin. There’s some empty space to the penguin’s right, so you press the “right” arrow key and lo and behold the penguin begins waddling purposefully to the right.
Soon, you come to an obstacle — a block of ice, half the penguin’s size. The penguin waddles in place, unable to progress. You experiment with a few buttons and learn that the “A” button causes the penguin to jump. How fun! You jump over a few ice blocks before coming across a large pit. One more tap of the “A” button triggers a valiant jump, but the timing is slightly off, and the poor penguin plummets to its demise.
You aren’t traumatized, though, because you know the penguin is really okay. It “respawns” back at the start of the level. Perhaps an indicator in a corner of the screen updates to signify that you now have two lives instead of three.
You waddle back to the pit of spikes, take a running start, and make it across.
Death in games is so commonplace that most games don’t even acknowledge it. Nobody mourns Mario when he needs to restart a stage. This is likely because death in games is nothing like real death. The main quality of real death — permanence — is usually absent. Death is instead used as a metaphor for failure. It’s there to teach you to play the game better, punishing mistakes and molding you into a better player. Because it’s such a core, commonplace gameplay feature, it’s very rarely acknowledged by the game’s story itself. Because of this convention, games that do make an effort to justify their death mechanics become noteworthy.
The 1980 game Rogue spawned a genre of “Roguelike” games, RPG’s that are different every time you play. These typically feature “permadeath”, which is an incredibly redundant term if applied to real death, but necessary to differentiate these games from traditional games, in which death is a minor inconvenience. In these games, if you die, your game is entirely over, and you must restart from the beginning. This is more in line with how traditional arcade games used to work, and is quite opposite to the approach that modern blockbusters take, where players can replay sections as much as they need with minimal inconvenience caused by death.
There are a few instances of death in games being acknowledged by the story. In Prince and Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), gameplay is presented as a story the protagonist is telling years after the game’s action. If the player dies, the narrating protagonist simply says “no no no, that’s not the way it happened”. In Katana Zero (2019), gameplay is framed as a plan for an assassination. If you fail, it simply rewinds as the protagonist thinks “no…that won’t work”.
Other games craft story around player death by allowing the world around the player to continue after their death. These games might allow you to take control of a descendent or completely unrelated character to your deceased character. This approach has been used by games like Dwarf Fortress (2006), Reigns (2016), and One Hour One Life (2018).
Games cannot and should not tell stories the same way that books or movies can. In video games, the player is an active participant, learning the rules in a system. The better they learn the rules, the more likely their chance of success, and “beating” the game. Failure is one of a game’s best tools at teaching its player what not to do, and having them improve.
Take FROM Software’s Dark Souls, a notoriously difficult action-RPG and sequel to Demon’s Souls. The game features powerful enemies, hidden traps, and many ways to kill its player. Death is a key part of the game, and “YOU DIED” is displayed on-screen more than anything else. The game punishes you, causing you to lose all of your in-game currency if you can’t make it back to the spot you died in one try.
But you keep trying, and you keep dying, and soon you begin to learn how the enemies attack, and how they move before they attack. You learn to dodge and parry, and you die a lot, sometimes you lose everything, but pretty soon you’re dancing effortlessly past enemies that struck fear into your heart just a few hours ago.
The game never explicitly teaches you how to be better. You need to learn by failing and iterating. In 2011, Dark Souls was a very refreshing challenge amid a sea of increasingly easy popular games. IGN’s review points out that “[m]ost developers take pains to protect you from failure. FROM Software turns it into an artform.”
The embracing of death by games delivers an important lesson on the power of failing fast and iterating.
In coding and software development, failure is usually a key part of the process. We take it slow and fix one thing at a time. Writers often write pages and pages before selecting their best paragraph and starting over from there. Musicians record fifty ideas and select the best ten to build into full songs for their album. Every failure is a learning experience on how not to do the thing.
This mentality is especially popular in entrepreneurship, with Fuckup Nights being held globally where entrepreneurs are invited to tell stories not of great successes, but of failure. Failing fast is a key component of the very popular Agile methodology.
Games and media, in general, are a reflection of our reality, and the embracing of failure as a learning experience by games closely mirrors the sentiment in business and countless other fields. Failure is such a key part of games that something as morose and permanent as death itself is brushed off by gamers as just another hurdle.
When games do take on the challenge of justifying their approach to death, they open up powerful new avenues for creative expression and unique storytelling within gaming. And if they take a risk and fail, they’ll know what not to do next time.
References/Additional reading
“You Are Dead. Continue?”: Conflicts and Complements in Game Rules and Fiction
