Behavioral Souls
On the topic of failure and our relationship with it
Live, Die, Repeat
Video games represent a new realm of opportunity in storytelling; the tested tools of Show and Tell supplemented with the relatively new Do. While interactivity within a system doesn’t necessarily mean agency, the player’s actions and impact on a game’s world and story allow for a different modality of story than more established media.
This modality of Doing is more demanding on the audience than passive forms of storytelling; there’s a performative aspect in which you are not able to progress unless you succeed in certain challenges. As such, the medium is inherently less accessible than others, but for this same reason is able to have a unique if not distinctly deeper effect on the player.
Most games, regardless of genre, are fundamentally structured in the following way:
If the player succeeds, their reward is to move on to the next challenge:
If the player fails, however…
The player hits an end state, known more commonly as “Game Over”. Most games tend to have an explicit Game Over screen:
This screen exists separate from the fiction of the game world, it’s a departure from the narrative suspension of disbelief back to the menu. The options presented to the player at this point can vary, and in the days of arcade gaming tended to be only to ‘Continue’ if the player put in more money.
Contemporarily, players are usually given the option to ‘Load Game’, in which the game world itself reverts to a ‘saved state’ that represents a point in time prior to any sort of failure:
Some games take the opportunity to provide negative feedback to the player, to reinforce death as a negative outcome for the sake of motivation or setting the tone:
This system is perfectly functional — it creates segments of gameplay and sequences of challenge that are satisfying to succeed at after subsequent attempts. It’s also highly practical in that being able to save your game and reload it at will is far more convenient and saves time compared to using pre-determined checkpoints or having to finish entire levels in a single attempt.
It represents an evolution in how we played video games, moving away from trying to optimize for the player to keep trying (and feeding quarters into the machine) and towards something that people want to return to time and time again in the comfort of their homes after having made a large initial investment.
This meant that games needed to provide longitudinal satisfaction moreso than before; and so Saved Games as a means of avoiding and mitigating player frustration were popularized.
Saved Games aren’t a bad thing, but by their nature they create a degree of dissonance for the player. Coming back to the fundamental model:
There is an implicit binary for each distinct sequence in a given game. Either the player succeeds in the challenges laid before them, and moves on to the next sequence until the game ends, or the player fails along the way.
In the event of a failure, the story cannot canonically continue. In many cases, this literally equates to the death of the protagonist in a given game’s plot. The logic of the story cannot have the main character die midway through the first act, and so in the event that the player fails and causes this to happen, the game needs a way to erase those events from its canonical timeline.
This is again, perfectly functional. It allows the player to make another attempt, and prioritizes their enjoyment over the game ‘making sense’.
But this reliance on time travel and being able to quite literally erase one’s mistakes undermines the cost of failure — and by extension, the value of success.
Dark Souls: Continuity and Death in Canon
Dark Souls is special. It’s a fantastic video game, but it does something unique even in the realm of videogames. It lets the player die, and doesn’t pretend like they never did. And this is very important.
More subtly, but no less importantly, Dark Souls doesn’t have a distinct Game Over screen:
The screen says YOU DIED, and it certainly feels like a state of failure. So what’s different?
There’s no ‘Load Game’, or ‘Continue’ button. The game does not stop you after you fail to make sure you want to try again, but rather assumes that you do and pushes you forward.
Functionally, this is subtle.
Cognitively, this is huge.
This switch makes it ever so slightly more work for you to quit, rather than continue. Quitting in Dark Souls is a separate action and decision from Failing. You’re not given the option to Quit when you fail.
Additionally, the lack of pause with options to load game or quit means that there is no cognitive friction between attempts. The player is not forced to stop and consider with each failure whether they truly wish to continue; the decision to continue is made into the default.
This article will not cover the lore of Dark Souls, but an additional element of its success is that within its own story and canon, the player’s deaths and failures are accounted for. There is no logical dissonance of storytelling when the main character dies; the plot of the game is about their curse of undeath and its effects.
This lack of time skipping and reversion creates a more cohesive and cumulative sense of success as you work through the game — the player is not magically resetting time each time they fail in their endeavors, but rather fluidly moving from one attempt to the next.
The game’s level design also contributes to this feeling. Challenges are strung together in grueling gauntlets, and the lack of Saved Games means that players are forced to rely on established checkpoints and tackle challenges in predetermined chunks.
In most other games, each distinct portion or enemy would be its own challenge, with the player being allowed to save in between. This would be vastly easier to get through, but the feeling of success would be limited to the single encounter, rather than the entire ordeal.
The combination of Dark Souls mechanically derived forward momentum between attempts and its level design and pacing creates a sense of accomplishment and achievement that few other games manage.
The decision to treat failure as a transitional stage within a broader journey rather than a dead end timeline with no hope but to revert is profound, and has a deep impact on players as they experience the game world.
Gitting Gud: The Externalization of Failure
The Dark Souls playerbase is also unique in that as a community, it prides itself on having achieved a level of mastery at something challenging but unlike many other communities simultaneously holds the belief that the game is in fact *not* particularly challenging. But rather, that the player is simply bad at it and needs to improve if they complain.
This is fascinating from a motivational standpoint as it demonstrates the rare instance of a community of practice that has externalized failure. The state of ‘gitting gud’ in Dark Souls does not refer to any particular level of play, but rather a mindset achieved by veterans of the series in which they do not allow themselves to be discouraged by failure.
Someone who has ‘gotten gud’ will attribute their failures to their own mistakes; a lack of timing or poor execution. This externalization of failure is deeply tied into someone’s motivation; if the failure is able to be attributed to something outside of oneself, then it is feasibly addressable in the next attempt. Conversely, someone who has internalized failure interprets their mistakes as reflective of their intrinsic quality or ability and is more easily discouraged between attempts.
While these processes are internal, Dark Souls takes efforts to facilitate the externalization of failure. The lack of distinct game over screen and subtle momentum towards additional attempts over quitting prods the player towards sticking with it, while the plot and canon establish the expectation of failure as part of the journey towards success, rather than a theoretical state you’re ideally never supposed to reach.
There’s a greater takeaway to be had: That acknowledging, accepting and contextualizing one’s failures by means of externalizing them make up the mechanics for motivation and success.
The framing of failure as either a state of being, or a moment of time makes all the difference.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Anton Zadorozhnyy. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
