You Just Lost The Game

For anyone that's ever been in one of my ProjectFun classes, they've all heard my spiel about how a lose screen should never be mean or cruel toward the player. If your game's lose screen says something along the lines of "Lolz, you suck teh n00b sauce!" then your player's reaction will be something along the lines of "Actually, this game sucks." We always want to encourage our players to keep trying - to keep playing. That's why I've always tried to convince ProjectFun students to add in the important line, "Try again!"

Sometimes though, "Try again!" isn't enough. Sometimes you need to skip the lose condition altogether. For example, Wii Fit Plus has a bunch of short games that are quick and simple. All you need is a bit of balance and/or rhythm and you're good to go. Sadly, I lack both of these traits, so failure is nearly assured. When you lose, they play a jingle and go to the scoreboard, which takes all of twenty seconds before the options "Quit" and "Try Again" appear. That twenty seconds can be very demoralizing and infuriating when you only get about twenty seconds (or less) of gameplay between failures.

The problem here is that it takes so long. This gives you an escape from the game, releasing you from the experience. It could just be that Wii Fit Plus isn't exactly a cohesive experience type of game. However, the fact still remains that I was getting very frustrated at it, mainly because it cost me time whenever I lost. Time is a valuable investment, and twenty seconds is an eternity in games. Really, go pick out your favorite game, play around, and count to twenty when you're not just standing there. It takes forever.

So how can we make losing a less frustrating experience? Let's remove the heavy cost of losing, in fact, let's make it practically nothing. The player will never want to stop playing our game, right? Sadly, it's more difficult than that. If losing has no impact, then the player has no reason to care. If the player doesn't care about losing, then why would he/she care about winning? This is the case of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. When you die, you lose some of your currency/experience points and respawn nearby, but it's not enough to matter. "Oh noes! I lost 500 moneys, I only get 1000 from killing that storm trooper over there!"

So we want losing to have some impact on the player, but we don't want that impact to be truly negative. We want them to learn their lesson and still care enough about losing to try to win. Moving to my first good example, we have Silent Hill Shattered Memories. It's a really cool game with an interesting plotline and some intricate mechanics about psychologically profiling you, but it does have some pretty severe bugs. It's soft-locked on me numerous times and even once deleted my entire save file (never save photos!), but I've still played it through five or six times and watch two of my friends play through. That's impressive.

What does it do right about this losing thing? You have a fair amount of health, but there are graphical effects to make you think you're worse off than you actually are. The main character even limps in a very believable fashion after you've been injured. When you do get overwhelmed, your character collapses and the monsters gather around you. The screen goes white - and then you see Harry standing back up at the start of that section. You lose ground, but you gained valuable knowledge on what path to take when you're running frantically (oh, I forgot to mention that you can't fight back). The music kicks right back in, keeping you tense, and you know you've only got a moment to gather your wits before you need to run. It's short, sweet, and effective.

Along the same lines, we have BIT.TRIP RUNNER, a fantastically awesome game that you should go buy for your Wii now. Don't worry, this post will still be here when you get back. I can wait. Now then, RUNNER is, well, a running game - a game in which your character is always moving to the right. CommanderVideo has a few tricks, like jumping, sliding, blocking, and a kung-fu kick! (exclamation point included), but he's always running. Your goal is to dodge any obstacles in your path. Since the BIT.TRIP series uses music and rhythm as an added layer of immersion, all of the obstacles come in time to the background music - as do the pickups, like gold. Certain pickups progress the music, but it's all still in time.

We have a very similar story here. When the player loses (by hitting an obstacle), they see CommanderVideo flying backward to the start of the level. The game never tells the player to try again, it just makes them. As soon as he's on beat, CommanderVideo takes off to the right. The game never stops. The music never stops. It's completely continuous. Again, the player has learned more about the level and is better prepared to tackle it's challenges, but that knowledge cost them the progress in the level. There is cost, but there is gain.

When the player loses, there needs to be some cost so that the player will still care about losing, but there should also be some gain - usually knowledge of how they met their demise. The cost and gain should balance each other out, such that the player doesn't feel cheated or frustrated. They should be able to have a realization of "Maybe I should try this instead." Losing should not break the player out of the game's experience, but should pull them deeper into it.

As a final thought, I've never liked when games ask if I'd like to change the difficulty to a lower setting after losing a certain number of times. If the option is always there, it's fine. Otherwise, it feels like an insult, much like "Oh, you're just not good enough for hard mode. You should try normal."