Why Gamers Are Gluttons for Punishment

Being punished never feels good.

Everyone has a memory of paying the price for at least one error in judgment. Getting grounded. Getting a ticket. Getting a full leg cast because that tree branch was a little less stable than you judged.

We remember these punishments with a grimace. That’s the point, right? The punishment must trigger enough unpleasantness that you (hopefully) won't repeat the mistake. Or at least disagreeable enough to serve as a stark contrast between it and the sweet spoils of success. Punishments and consequences are essential because they allow us to appreciate said success when it does eventually come.

But there exists another category of punishment that most people reading this probably feel more ambivalent about. Losing your gear in a pool of lava in Minecraft. Using up your final life and being shuttled way back to stage 1-1 in Mario. Making yet another long, boring corpse-run in World of Warcraft.

None of these experiences feel good either. But I feel differently about these memories than I do about time spent in detention or other “real world” punishments. Failing in a game just makes me more motivated to succeed. I get back up and try again.

This is not a coincidence. Without a punishment or penalty for failing, what’s the point of play? What’s the purpose of overcoming a challenge if nothing is actually at stake?

It’s worth pointing out that a game being punishing is not the same as a game being difficult. Games can be (and often are) both, but there is an important distinction. A punishing game imposes a significant penalty onto players when they fail. The game itself can be easy, but it whacks gamers heavily when they are defeated.

If I have to run back through Westfall one more time...

I think about video games as a series of rewards. It’s a rush to earn a badass new weapon. To level-up. To open up new areas to explore. But the truth is that video games almost never work if they only offer The Carrot. Great video games also know how to make good use of The Stick. It’s a tightrope-balancing act that game designers must walk. If your game is too punishing, gamers will give up. If it’s too lax, they will grow bored.

All of this might sound obvious. Of course when you miss a jump and hit some spikes, you’re punished with a lost life and forced to restart. This is just a part of the contract of video games. Right? But some games subvert this formula for failure and play upon people’s expectations. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time let gamers literally rewind time and try again. Failure in that game, then, is just a warning. “Don’t do that again.”

Brutal 8-Bit Memories

By making NES-era games so punishing, game developers were increasing the game’s value to the player. Games like Super Mario Brothers, Castlevania and Mega Man are fondly remembered for offering hours upon hours of fun, spread across weeks and months of play. But these three games are actually very short. They used their extreme difficulty and their extreme form of punishment (start the whole game over!) to make up for their relatively short length. The challenge and nasty punishments didn't arise because game developers were masochists or didn't yet know how to tune their products. The titles were punishing out of necessity.

Of course, coin-op arcades also played a role. It was in a game's (and by extension, the arcade owner's) best interest to keep gamers staving off failure one quarter at time.

At home, the very same element that frustrated young you to no end in Castlevania (Go back to the beginning! AGAIN!) is also what made the game such a classic. Imagine if you could rewind time and amend your mistakes like Prince of Persia. You would have destroyed Dracula within a single afternoon. Sure you might have popped the cart back in once in a while to experience the awesome graphics or to replay the adventure, but would gamers still consider the title such a classic?

Castlevania-ville this wan't.

The penalty for failure contributed to Castlevania’s epic feeling. It made the boss battles much more harrowing. It caused you to shout out in joy when, on the brink of death, you found a hidden turkey. It made the adventure lengthier and more epic. Gamers might have hated it. But the game needed it. Without the looming threat of being sent back to the start, the turkey means nothing, and no one wants a meaningless turkey. No one.

Like Like many gamers, when I was young I would endlessly complain and moan about a game’s extreme punishments. But sometimes gamers like me can’t be trusted to accurately pinpoint what we want from a game. Even if a gamer insists they want an easier path, I believe what they really want is a challenge worth overcoming, and a penalty they fear enough to give them a rush when they avoid or overcome it.

In this same NES era, advances in technology allowed developers to push the entire video game category forward. As games grew in size, length and sophistication, it was no longer feasible to expect gamers to happily trudge back to the beginning when they failed. The increasingly complex nature of video games suddenly made the most accepted and established method of punishment (start over!) too severe. The punishment didn’t change; video games had changed. Game developers had to adjust.

What worked before simply wasn’t an option for games like Final Fantasy, Metroid or The Legend of Zelda. Luckily, through sheer ingenuity (password saves) and technology (battery back-up saves), game makers were able to soften the blow of failure and allow games to continue their slow march towards greater size, complexity, and ultimately accessibility.

 

When Games Lost Their Bite

As the game industry grew up and transcended the bedroom of teenage boys, in-game punishments lost their teeth. There are exceptions – for every friendly, take-you-on-an-adventure game like Journey there are shrewd, exacting experiences like Dark Souls. But generally speaking, games have had all their sharp corners rounded into nice, smooth curves to help ensure no one gets hurt.

There are examples everywhere you look. If you died in EverQuest in 1999 you were forced to return to your corpse to recover your lost items, and you also lost a big chunk of experience. By the time World of Warcraft launched in 2004, dying imposed no penalty on the player other than a small amount of repair money and a few minutes of downtime. A poorly handled engagement in a shooter like Doom of Half-Life would leave you permanently damaged and vulnerable, potentially causing you to lose a future firefight for a mistake you made many minutes before. But now permanent player health has been completely replaced with rapidly recharging health systems in virtually every major shooter.

I actually really don't have time to bleed.

The above examples are observations, not value judgments. I don’t yearn to return to the days of quicksaving every 30 seconds in Half-Life 2 to ensure every battle goes perfectly. Recharging health offers an elegant solution to the out-moded littering of every FPS level with health packs. And besides a few very specific exceptions (like arcade titles), the idea of actually starting a game over from scratch as a viable form of instructive player punishment seems ludicrous. Modern, more player-friendly gaming is undoubtedly an improvement in many ways.

Of course every rule is also made to be broken – plenty of incredibly successful high-score games like Temple Run and Super Hexagon force full restarts onto unwilling players. But it is undeniable that video games as a whole are friendlier now than ever before.

But it can be hard to judge how far developers can take player accommodation before something important is lost. How easy is too easy?

World of Warcraft was widely praised (and made Blizzard billions of dollars) because of its much more player-friendly policies. Bonus XP, rapidly recharging health, relaxed death penalties and more “user-friendly” designs contributed significantly to the game’s success. Professional gamers and casual players alike praised the changes. But how far is too far? In WoW, if instantly resurrected on the spot after death, wouldn't most people simply ask “what’s the point of death?” – obviously some sort of penalty is an absolute must.

And yet 2012’s Guild Wars 2 lowers the death penalty even further. Players can resurrect just a few seconds away from the fight and sometimes can re-join the same battle, essentially making failure impossible.

This trend obviously isn't exclusive to massively-multiplayer online games. 2006's Prey notably sent players to an undying purgatory of sorts to fight your way back to life. 2008's Prince of Persia reboot literally rescued you from death anytime you fell. Gears of War allows AI and co-op teammates to revive each other, and even the just-released Borderlands 2 features a "fight for you life" mechanic which allows you to return to partial health and leapfrog death if you score a kill before you bleed out.

 

What Happens When Failure Isn't an Option

To truly examine the impact a complete lack of punishments and failure states can have on video games, players need to look no further than the rise of Zynga and other social game makers. It’s not a coincidence that core gamers have such a deep and intense disdain for the entire category. It’s true that you hear complaints about how they make their money. You hear complaints about their spammy nature. But what underlies all of it is a low grumble that “they aren’t even actual games.”

This complaint is the perfect window into the mindset of a true gamer. It’s the perfect summation of why the potential to lose, and the punishment and inevitably follows, is absolutely essential to our enjoyment of games. Even though we don't like losing. Without the possibility to failure, there can be no success.

My crops may die, but I never will!

Despite the naysayers, Zynga’s games are actually incredibly complex. They feature elaborate storylines, detailed artwork and offer up collaboration with friends and strangers on a grand scale. What’s more, they give players an almost unprecedented level of freedom for self-expression. Despite all this, many core gamers don’t consider FarmVille a game because it is literally impossible to lose, even if one were to work at it. Try as you might, the game will keep giving you more coins. Your game will never truly be over. The worst you can ever experience is a farm plot full of withered crops.

Yet these “little” flash games with their lack of failure states or player punishments have managed to eclipse anything the else games industry has ever accomplished. At its peak, Zynga’s CityVille had 100 million active players.

But the verdict is still out on whether this truly represents a sea change for the video game industry. Zynga is on rocky ground, with many professional pundits beginning to wonder if the entire social game category is materializing into a massive fad.

The meteoric rise of Zynga, born on the backs of games that appease the player at every turn and never allowed them to fail, sent traditional game companies scrambling. But it now looks more and more likely that the basic psychology of failure used by game designers for decades hasn't actually been upended after all.

When I was little, I was once allowed to eat whatever I wanted for dinner. Eight-year-old me picked cookie dough, and I ended up with a terrible stomachache that lasted all night. It was too much of a good thing. It turns out I only tolerate cookies after a real, balanced meal.

Zynga’s recent fortunes might be proof writ large that game players don’t know what they want from a game’s difficulty. Just as eight-year-old me picked cookie dough for dinner (and would have picked an easier, friendlier Castlevania), Zynga’s casual game players have picked the company’s friendly fare over the more punishing titles the traditional game makers produce. It is very possible that the waning interest in social games is the latest proof of the maxim that players can’t be asked what they want – they sometimes need to be told what they want.

In one version of the future, a generation of gamers may never see a screen like this.

 

Why Fear is Good

 

Gamers want to be challenged. We want a game to bring us directly to the peak of our abilities and push us into a flow state. But I believe that this alone isn’t enough. Without a fear of punishment, a victory over a game feels hollow. Everyone absolutely loathes losing rare gear to the aforementioned unexpected patches of lava in Minecraft, but without that fear of loss, there is no tension. Exploring the creepy, blocky cave wouldn’t be as fun. Even though we don't like it, it makes Minecraft a better game.
Game makers have been pushing more “user-friendly” consequences and punishments onto players for as long as video games have existed. But this trend can’t continue indefinitely. If you follow that thread to its end, it terminates at the Zyngas of the world, with a library of “games” that aren’t games at all. They are colorful interactive distractions.

But if '80s gamers weaned on Castlevania and Mega Man were to skip ahead 30 years, would they view Gears of War or Uncharted any differently than gamers today view social titles? Both shooters feature the recharging health and checkpoint systems that gamers insist they don’t want to live without. But do we truly know what we want, or are we just eating too much cookie dough?
 

by Justin Davis

September 20, 2012

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/20/why-gamers-are-gluttons-for-punishment