Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games
Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players
A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players
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Some time ago, when most video games gave players a limited number of lives, or retries, the difficulty of a game could be measured by how often the player failed in a game. In this paper, I will argue that since video games moved toward giving players infinite retries, the amount of time the player loses when failing is now a better measure of how difficulty impacts the player. To fail in a game, whether failing at the whole game or at a minor task, means that some of the time invested towards the goal has been lost. This is the cost of failure in games, measured in time. But not all goals are the same, and so time can be invested and lost in different ways. When running out of energy in BioShock and being respawned at a new location, some time has been lost, but the goal of completing the game is still achievable. On the other hand, if losing a multiplayer game of Modern Warfare 2, the goal of winning that particular match is forever lost. The former type of goal is permanent; the latter type of goal is transient and tied to that particular instance of the game. The meaning of a player's time investment in a game is different depending on the goal type of the game. Finally, the paper argues that the cost of failure has a psychological component determined by how failure is communicated and by the extent to which replaying game sections is repetitive. Combining this psychological component with the time lost by failing results in a general measure of failure cost.