 I'm Rin. I'm Emily. I am the host of Geeknives. It is a podcast. If you enjoy anything that happens in the next 55 minutes or so, then there are thousands of hours of my voice on the internet, along with a guy named Scott who couldn't make it here today, and I will just leave it at that. And I am one of the art leads at Stignes Entertainment. We're working on a remake of Colossal Cave Adventures, so yay! If any of you went to the Adventure Games panel yesterday, that's my boss up there, so that's very exciting. But yeah, so I make games. He talks about games, then... Most importantly, I talk about games, but I don't actually make them, so take a little bit of what I say with a grain of salt. But today, we're here to talk about music, and I would like to start with the game. How many of you have never heard of or played or seen a game called Dwarf Fortress? All right, a few people. So if you encounter someone who plays Dwarf Fortress, what you will find is that they will tell you these amazing stories. These epics, these huge adventures of, you know, glory and death. Here is this tale of 10 years of my children's lives in this game, and Hydra, we'll talk about this like it is Game of Thrones time Star Wars. But then, you might think, huh, that game sounds kind of interesting. I want to have those stories, and you go to play it, and it looks like that. To be fair, they did do a graphical version recently. Yeah, there's a... I won't say better. I'll say updated version on Steam. But this is a game where if you show this to a person who plays the game, and you show them that, they know that something horrible is happening. But the thing about Dwarf Fortress is that you cannot win it. It is a simulation of a bunch of dwarves digging deeper and deeper and deeper and building this sprawling sim city-like empire until eventually you encounter fun. Now, Dwarf Fortress people like to define fun in a very special way. If you go to their own forums, they actually make jokes about how they have a weird definition of fun. Dwarf Fortress games usually end with your last dwarf weeping, bitter and alone, locked in his room. All of his friends are dead. The civilization is in ruins. The orcs are pounding at the door, and he breathes his last breath, and that is the moment when a Dwarf Fortress player will say, I had fun. And that is what we're going to talk about today. Failure and losing and why it's necessary in order to have fun. Failure? If nothing else, failure is entertaining. If you've seen this movie, Snatch, isn't that a bunch of thieves who are all terrible at what they do? They do nothing but fail. The few people who succeed do so by accident. This movie would not be good if everyone succeeded at what they want to do. So can we all agree failure can be entertaining? I mean there's the whole phrase, a comedy of errors. So if failure is entertaining, then I have another supposition for you. I would argue that games should be fun. Does anyone disagree that games should generally be fun? It's like, why do we do them if they're not fun? Exactly. Because they're not work. But games do include losing. Therefore, logically, losing should be fun. This is logical. And this is the fundamental thesis of this talk. This is our hypothesis that we are going to set up to prove it. We will come back to these slides later on, so I hope you are taking notes. But we do have to address something. In a lot of game talks, people like to have a big whole section talking about the definition of the word game and the definition of the word fun. And extremely terrifying nerds will follow you around, trying to tell you that what you like isn't a game. That's not a game. Games require like this, like the Berlin interpretation of road lines. People will get very, very sweaty about this. So what is a game? I mean, patty cake is a game. We could play patty cake right now. I would say let's play a game of patty cake. So already I'm using all those words. Yeah. One of my, well, actually not one of my favorite games, but a game that I enjoy. I had a hockey on that slide before. But that is also a game. I guess Settlers of Keptan is a game. And Dungeons and Dragons are games. But these things are also games. So very wide definition. Can you lose patty cake? I mean, I guess if you really, really struggle with it, but let's go even further. What is play? I play a piano. I play a game. It's like, I feel kind of like game is the noun and play is the verb that's associated with it. And like right there, you see two very different interpretations of the verb to play. So in nature, a lot of animals playing actually leads to survival skills. It's a way where like here the yellow wolves or we have a bunny at home. And you watch when they are having fun, they tend to do things to practice survival skills like hunting or escaping or agility in a safe and enjoyable way. And is that not what we're doing playing games? I mean, what I'm playing do, I don't actually want to die if I lose. But I want to experience what it would be like to have that challenge even up to losing. So I learn as a conscious being, that's kind of how we learn how the world works. That's how wolves learn how the world works. Rabbits play with each other by chasing each other and jumping around. And they also play with foxes by running away from them. It's the exact same. What if they lose in that context? So play and games and all these definitions, if anything really hard about what definition of game would we use in this panel? And I remembered in Richard Garfield's book, Character and Sits of Games, he had a pretty good quotation around this. Now, full disclosure, when I was putting together the slides with Emily, I didn't remember exactly what he wrote, so I left this placeholder slide in the panel. But then I realized this is actually really funny and this is what we intend to say. I do have the actual code here and I'm not going to read this good thing, but what he effectively says in this book is that generally, you can't have a very precise definition of a word like game because generally, people like gatekeepers, they want to control the narrative. They want to exclude things in order to kind of uphold their own definition. And so our basic thing is, we're going to be pretty loose about the idea of game and don't be an insufferable pep. Exactly. So what do game designers like, actual game designers, the people here, you're all to see it pass. Some of you probably are game designers. What definitions did they use? Generally, you'll find that almost every game designer on earth uses one or two of these very simple definitions. They're very broad. This is a pretty big umbrella and it will cover most of our definitions. Like you could put sports under the third one and you could put a non-competitive game under the first. Exactly. And these are the core. These are the roots. You're making a game. You think about, what is my game? Am I testing a skill? Am I giving the player a series of interesting and or meaningful decisions to make? Is it just an interactive amusement? Is it just patty cake in VR? Is it narrative? Is it non-narrative? All these things kind of apply. But to go even further, we can actually take a page from the industry because ESA, a trade organization dedicated to video games. We've all heard of ESA. Many of us have good opinions and bad opinions and mixed opinions about them. But do you know what ESA stands for? The Entertainment Software Association. So for the next 45 minutes or so, we're going to be talking about the history of losing in entertainment software. So for most of the history of video games or entertainment software, it couldn't really win. Almost every early video game was inevitable loss. You would play until you ran out of quarters. You would play until your parents keep you off. You would play until the game literally became impossible. There was nothing you could do other than get a high score and lose. Not or lose and lose. It was always lose. I mean, my favorite game as a kid, Kaboom, that guy just keeps hucking bombs down forever. There's no way to stop him. There's no narrative when you climb up there and stop him from throwing bombs. Though he will, there is one slight narrative beat. That little guy up there, if you get to a certain particular high score, he stops smiling. But he keeps throwing bombs. He's like, come on, lose already. I want to go home. In fact, a lot of games, they're ended up being a de facto ending, partly because designers never expected anyone would actually ever get that far. But I know, what's this look like? This reminds me of something we saw earlier in the panel. What's going on here? I would argue that this was more compelling than everything else up to this point. We didn't have narratives. You can't win, Pac-Man. But imagine if you hit the screen and the internet didn't exist. What the hell just happened? That's a legend you tell to your friends. You found a scene of high drama that the dwarves would approve of. So we played these games, like, despite the fact that losing is inevitable and losing isn't uninteresting. If anything, losing meant I ran out of quarters, I had to go bug my mom for another quarter. But if he gets the high score, then losing, you lose what you win at the same time. Well, did I win? I very rarely got the high score, but I unplugged the arcade cabinet when no one was looking. But then things changed, and this is where we can start to dwell. This is where things get interesting, because games started to have narratives. Games started to have a story. They started to have something you could achieve or you could say, I have defeated it, I have beaten it, I have won. A concrete victory condition, basically. And you would see this out. You want to know what happened. You want to know the story. You want to see what happens to Mario. Does he ever save the princess? Is there even a princess? Which, as a kid, I wasn't sure there really was a princess in cars, because there were stupid toads. Of course, these endings, as great as they were, in fact, I think I remember we were talking the other day about how when I was a kid, I might have used a landline to call my friend Joe Ogilvy to tell him that I've beaten Final Fantasy I. Not Final Fantasy IV, but Final Fantasy I. And he didn't believe me, because no one can beat that game. That was kind of like Scott being like, you know, when you were playing Zelda II, and maybe it was just like, you said it in front of the whole anime club, and he was like, you're lying! There's no one who beats Zelda II! Beats that game. But of course, these narratives were not necessarily always compelling. Bonus points if everyone knows what that game is. So you get all the way to the end, and it's kind of like, well. But this is the meat of it. This is what the games we're talking about look like. This is what we are doing. The deaths, the story of Mario is not. Mario falls into a pit six seconds in, and literally dies game over end credits. Goomba got him. Yeah, the second Goomba, or the third Goomba, or the fourth Goomba, or the large Goomba. These losing states are undifferentiated. They're basically Mario can die any number of ways, but they're all kind of equal in terms of gameplay. Yep, it's not like you see Mario fall into the pit and something happens down there. It's just, it's over. Losing just means you stop. You are kept away from that victory. It's a barrier on the way to winning. But like we said, we played these games. We all played these games. We still play these games. So let's forget about victory. We could talk about why I cared what happens to Cecil in Final Fantasy IV. Why did I care about Mario? Why did I put up with losing so much? A game could have a compelling story where we want to see what happens. I was very invested in what was going to happen in Undertale. I really wanted to know what the deal was. A lot of games you put up with losing because it's like the carrot at the end of it is the narrative. You want to see the ending of the game. Yep, and arguably if there was nothing in your way, then that is a very different kind of game. It's more like a movie. It's a different kind of entertainment software. So you get this sense of victory of I achieved this. It might just be a compelling world. Think about how beautiful Breath of the Wild is, but think about how scary it is when you see a whiz robe for the first time. There's danger. You don't know what that guy's deal is. There's an interesting world that you're exploring, but the danger in that world makes it more interesting. It provides a challenge while you're exploring. Yep, and even though you keep falling off the logs and getting shot off your horse, each time that happens, you're sort of just exploring this world and the peril guides you along toward eventually beating the game. You're learning too. You're learning how to exist in the world. So you see a whiz robe and you're like, I'm going to go poke at that guy. And then you're like, oh my God. Oh, so we have a friend who will not be named, but let's just say this friend at a Megfest long ago, we were at a convention, might have had a lot of a particular substance that comes from a certain plan and went into the other room and started playing Breath of the Wild for the first time. Dude did not get off the tutorial island after like six hours. He was on that plateau and just vibing. But he was having a grand old time because the dying and everything that was happening was still compelling. A challenge. Some people do, it's a good challenge. Yeah, you were like, this is difficult. Therefore, I want to attain mastery over it. Yep, and the harder it is, the more you fail, the more sweet that victory feels. In fact, Super Meat Boy is a fantastic example because Super Meat Boy did something so clever it turned losing into a proportional reward. If you have not played Super Meat Boy, the way this game works. When you beat a level. Yep. Once you beat the level, it shows you a simultaneous replay of every failed attempt you had before you beat it. So you see this wave of meat boys gradually being winnowed out as each of them die various ways throughout the course of your play history. And so when you see that final little guy get to the end, you're like. But it's sort of very satisfying. You're sort of like investing in it. Like, you know, the later it is, it might be 3am, but you really got to beat that level because every meat boy you've added just makes this so much more worth it. That can go a little too far. There are definitely games that test the patience of even the most skill driven player. But I think there are some people who are really into that. We talk about, there's this, I think it was from a tweet or something. But the idea of type one versus type two fun. And we talk about that. We like to do a lot of sports like hiking and cycling and stuff where sometimes you get to the point where it's a bit of a slog and your legs hurt and you're just like, oh my god. But you really want to get to the end to reach the top of the mountain to finish that bike ride. And that's what I would consider type two fun. So type one fun is you're just having a good time and the actual activity in and of itself is just enjoyable the whole way through. Nobody has type one fun in the Silver Surfer ever doing that. Nobody. Type two fun is the journey might be a bit of a struggle. And during the activity you might be just like putting in a lot of effort. You're running, you're like running that marathon. You're just like so tired. But then you get to the end, you're just like, yes, that was awesome. Imagine being the speed runner who can beat this game easily and what it feels like to have achieved that. You don't think that much about what it took to get there. I mean, I've heard some people talk like that about Dark Souls. That game is so cruel to me, but they like it anyway. It's fun. What about just a compelling experience? Journey is just some entertainment software that literally takes you on a journey. And this is the opposite, right? It's not about the ending. It's about the journey. And I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you've never played this game you can't really lose at it. You can't really die. There's a big asterisk there. If you've played the game, you know exactly what this game is about, but you should play it and see what's happening here. You can't win, you can't lose. You just experience it. So I put punishment in quotes for a reason because the gameplay of a game like Five Nights at Freddy's not that fun, not that directly compelling, but the jump scares on why people play these games. I would argue that people who play Five Nights at Freddy's are playing it because they want to be punished. They want the jump scare. Well, it's like watching a horror movie. You want to have that scary moment. You want to be scared on purpose. And so in this game, losing and being caught by Freddy is basically kind of the point of the game. Otherwise, if you just sat there in that little booze with nothing to do for the entire night, what? There's a link to the slides, and we'll share that at the end. But there's a video essay I put together years and years here about the detailed mechanics of how this game basically takes an adult who doesn't believe in ghosts or aliens or anything. Hard to scare me. Put me at a haunted house and mostly laughing. But like Louise Belcher in Bob's Burgers, I want to be scared. And this game mechanically was able to scare me because of the design decisions that were made along the way. And it is a fascinating topic that we just don't have time for today. But that is on YouTube. I remember very specifically when you first played this game, you yelled so loud, you scared me by proxy. I had my back to the game and I was like, whoa. I did play the VR version of this game and I might have jumped into the wall. But that's what I'm there for. It's not punishment. The people who play these punishing games, they're into it. They are absolutely here for that. They want to lose. But then things started to change again. We all know Chrono Trigger is one of the most beloved games to have ever been made. There's a reason no one has ever really made a credible sequel to it that captured the same audience. You can do not just a panel, you can make a whole convention around Chrono Trigger. But what did Chrono Trigger do? What was the thing that made it so good? We've added something. We're starting to explore the top of this chart. The depths are still the same. When we play Chrono Trigger, if you die to a random encounter, it's just game over. Nothing interesting happens. But suddenly, you find Cynestar along the way, and now you get the bonus Cynestar in there. There's different paths. There's different victories. It's like a victory plus. You can have a victory A, victory B, and there's more narrative choices. There's more going on. This is where most video games have gone. This is like, this became the future of video games when games started doing this. But if there is a victory plus, that implies that there is a victory minus, that there could be an ending, that is not as good. Obviously, you want to save her. I guess spoilers for Chrono Trigger if someone hasn't played it. You don't have to save her. You can save her. But it changes the ending of the game. And it's like, I distrust people who don't save Magus. Oh no, you can't save Magus. Does anyone here kill Magus as opposed to saving him? Good. But this started to really open up what you could do with games. The idea that you can explore this narrative, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about negatives. We're talking about death. We're talking about losing. So the idea of final states being branching, so an ending being branching and being different is an important one because this is really where it started to grow in terms of games. So I want to take you on a brief journey. We're going to go from victory plus to a narrative of victory minus to a narrative of death. So if you've never played Shadowgate, which was released on many, many, many, many different platforms, but I'm going to use the NES one as an example, this is a game where you'll encounter a wraith. What do you do? Well, let's say I try to use the broom on him. Dad. What if I throw the skull at dad? What if I try to burn him with my torch? Dad. So how do you get past this wraith? Well, it turns out on that death screen there, see I've got torches three. And then I've got just a torch. Something weird about that torch. You know the old game logic? That torch kills the wraith. Why? Who the hell knows? But as you play this game, pretty much everything kills you. But not only that, everything that kills you, kills you in an increasingly gruesome way. A very unique fashion. I mean, dad. Bellamy's like a fool. You leap off the bridge and into the blaze. You're instantly fried. This game you can literally say like jump into fire and you jump in and dad. The game anticipated that players would do stupid things on purpose. That is not a puzzle. I hope that is not a puzzle. I hope that you don't look at this room and think I should jump into the fire. That is definitely how to solve it. But the game designers realized that having a variety of deaths and also that exploring those deaths could be fun. Since you're playing a game, dying in a bajillion different ways in this scary spooky dungeon is, you know, it's of no consequence to you personally. It just becomes a fun thing to do. Be like, oh, what happens if I poke the evil lich with the broom? In fact, maybe players were into meeting our boy here because this is a particularly interesting day. You finally set your hair on fire. The rest of your body soon follows. This scene, if it happens to you, is when you use your torch on yourself. And if you do it once, you sing yourself and the game tells you, yo, that was a bad idea. If you do it a second time, the game is like, you've got second to reverse. You really shouldn't do this. But if you are filled with determination and you continue to use that torch on yourself, eventually the game is like, you know what? Fine, you're on fire. You're dead. And the answer was yes, we were ecstatic. Even before the light broke your body, the lake will be filled with your blood. You can't even scream because you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx. Our boy was very prolific and I must stress, this game was for kids. So what was happening here? Now suddenly we got something really interesting about that. We got victory plus. We also have losing plus. You would play this game to see every possible gruesome way you could die. That is how I played this game. That's how everyone I knew played this game. Imagine if Mario won, every kid had a different horrific gruesome death that was rendered out in the game for you to explore. And in some ways that kind of relates back to our earlier talk about play in nature and the ability of creatures to explore danger without actually experiencing it personally. Yeah, what will happen if I see that giant vada acid and I just start drinking it? Well, guess what? Death. So many games explored this concept. Out of this world, a full-motion video game ish from a long time ago on the SNES, this game had terrifyingly elaborately animated deaths. If you so much as touch the controller at the wrong moment, you die and you get to watch it in terrifying gory detail. This was basically a dumb blue snuff though. It was like, how do we see beautiful theatrical quality animation of this poor knight getting killed all these different ways? So. But I think the notable part here is the rise of streaming in YouTube. One, I took a screenshot like eight years ago, so I think this video has more than a hundred thousand views. But even in like 2013, a hundred thousand people wanted to watch this guy just die. Over and over and over again in that lush dumb blue animation. Yeah. Sierra games in particular. So these types of adventure games, deaths serve a bunch of different interesting purposes. So for example, the games have obtuse puzzles. That's like one of the hallmarks of a lot of the early adventure games, a lot of modern adventure games. And these games, the death sequences, they'd be gory or funny or something, but they also give you a hint effectively. They tell you, all right, the direction you were trying to go with that lantern was not the right way to go. And yes, it killed you, but maybe you've learned your lesson. So, I mean, not to name drop or anything, but we were having dinner the other night with my boss, Roberta Williams. And one thing she was talking about is the most important thing about adventure games is letting the player explore. And that exploration also means the ability to fail and letting players just kind of poke at stuff and gently saying, oh, maybe that's not a good idea. Sometimes that will lead to death, you know. In this case, this was not a Roberta game, but this was, you know, you try to pick your nose. Yeah, the games I was mooching to that were adventure games when I was a kid were the Quest for Glory series. But they had a mechanic where you could learn how to pick locks. And of course, they did this for a lack. If you use the lockpick on yourself, it tells you to delicately insert the lockpick into your left nostril. And guess what? Death. Unless you level up your lockpicking skill. So if your lockpicking skill was above a certain point, instead it just tells you, you have successfully picked your nose and it gives you some xp. Adventure games would play these deaths for laps. They'd play these up for a lot of different reasons. Game mechanics, like there's this whole world of death in adventure games just for it. There's comedy to that. There's also teaching, right? You're letting somebody explore their environment and also by using these failure states, teaching them the right and the wrong way to use these different items or to solve these different puzzles. Yep. You ever play a game where you have a bunch of items and you want to try the items out? Everything you do in the game is just like, you can't do that. You can't do that. It's way more fun if every time you try to use an item it kills you or it does something funny. So this game is unfortunately not playable anymore. RIP Flash. On the internet. It is called what you think it's called, but don't flip your pants. And this is a text adventure. I want to point out this. No, it's graphical. Well, it is text input, but it is a graphical adventure. It is described in the survival horror genre. And this game is exactly as straightforward as you think it is. You have one goal. And that is to not flip your pants. You've got 35 seconds to not flip your pants. And guess what? It is really easy to not flip your pants in this game. However, once you successfully beat this game or fail at it, there's achievements. The game is basically saying, poop your pants at least seven times. In a myriad of different ways. Let's see. We promise it'll be worth it. It's the curiosity about how, how in these branching narratives here, how can we explore failure to successfully go to the bathroom? So my favorite adventure game is UFO 5440, which was a choose your own adventure book. These books are games. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong. But these games were notable in that they did usually have a good ending. I say the average choose your own adventure book had between zero and one good ending. This one's a zero. That's what's notable about this particular one. You've never read UFO 5440? There is no escape. There is a page you can read that takes you to this like eight page you find paradise like the good ending. There is literally no way to get there. The path is blocked off. Except by cheating. But how did we play these games when I was a kid playing this kind of game? What I would do is when you get to a page and it is like, well, do you take the safe well lit path toward your destination? Or do you use that rickety ass looking boat that looks like it's about to sink and there's a scorpion in it? And of course, what did we all do? We put our fingers in the face. We go read the gruesome death where the scorpion boat kills us. We laugh at it. Then we back up and then we continue with the story. These literally were the first safe states. You would miss out on a lot of the book. The book would be a very fast read if you just chose the safe path all the time. Usually it would be like right in the beginning it would be like, you don't open the magical door. You go and do your homework and then the story's over. Oh my God, there's one I remember. I forget what it was called where there's a mad scientist doing something and the first decision you make is do you open this door and see what's up and you just ignore it. And if you just ignore it, the world ends. You die. You never find out what happened. The end game over. So put your finger in the page. You flip through the book and that's how a lot of these electronic entertainment software will play out. And much like with Shadowgate, these books tended to have terrifyingly gruesome deaths because at least as a nine-year-old that's kind of what I was into. I think a lot of nine-year-olds are into that kind of thing. So The Stanley Parable is not the first game to do what we're about to talk about. But it's a very good example because suddenly there's no more line. Well I guess there's literally a line but it's yellow. Suddenly there isn't a narrative of it. You can't win this game. You can just play it. You can just experience it. It would be very hard to even define what winning means in this game. There are points in this game where it tells you you won and you will feel like you did not win. But what if we try to impose a narrative on this game? What if we say that you have won this game if you find every possible path? You play the longest possible route through this narrative. You even find the secret pipe that one of our world was up to. That's a bad ending. You find absolutely every ending? Even then, have you won this game? Have you lost this game? Or did you much like Journey just experience this game? So we're not actually going to go too deep on multiplayer because we want to get into tabletop role-playing games. But I will say straight up first what do we mean by multiplayer entertainment software? Richard Garfield does actually have a very specific definition for the kind of game we would talk about. Orthogame. That is what we use, the word we use when we want to talk about a competitive game. And I was going to say these are often easier to define in terms of losing because of that ranking aspect to them. You can say you win if you are number one in the ranking and you lose if you are less than number one in the ranking. Yep, but I don't think we'll have time to talk about these games today but what I will link you to is we gave a talk at PAX Australia 2014. It's about 20 minutes long and it covers literally anything we could say about orthogames and losing. And yes, that's a shameless plug. Like and subscribe. Talk about sports. But we do want to spend most of the rest of this talk talking about tabletop role-playing games. To this day, I don't know if our friends realized that I've been using the same photo of our D&D crew. This picture from like over a decade ago. That picture is from between 2005 and 2009. Bunch of nerds. But tabletop role-playing games are a really interesting space because you really shouldn't be able to win them or lose them. Yet if you go to pretty much any place where people can type words online, teravinder is a type of lot of words about that. So when you play a role-playing game, you've got the story. I know we all love to hear our friends tell us about their D&D campaign and their epic story where they saved the day and saved the princess and everything was great. But you really want to hear that story? Like are you really interested in what fag the barbarian was up to for over the course of four hours? How often do you find you and your friends not telling the story when you beat the campaign but telling the story where you burn waterdeep down by accident? The struggle and strife stories. The stories of your failure conditions often are more interesting than the stories of, yeah, and then we beat the lich. I mean, how many of you have burned down waterdeep or the equivalent of waterdeep in one of your D&D games at some point? You definitely tell that story because remember, I'm skipping ahead, failure is entertaining. So in a role-playing game, shouldn't we be speaking failure? That's where things start to get a little interesting. So we're going to take another definition. This is a definition from a talk we gave back in 2008 also at PAX Australia. Now we gave it at PAX West in 2008. We gave it again in PAX Australia in 2013. This is a definition that I like to use when we're talking about role-playing games to head off those sweaty notes. They all they are is a mechanism to use to resolve conflicts about what direction the story is going to go so that you and your friends can together tell a collaborative story. So yeah, so we were talking about branching narratives before. Tabletop is a space where narratives by their very nature are always going to be different, are always going to branch, and there are a myriad of different ways they could go. So you need to kind of figure out, okay, do you fail or do you succeed? I mean, some people they'd be like, yeah, I roll a 20 every time. I knew a dude who cheated at D&D and he had a D20 that was weighted. It would always roll a 20. He's the other one that would always roll on. But what's the point of that? Because in order to have an interesting narrative and an interesting thing that I've actually thought about a lot because I'm also a writer is that you have to have a certain amount of conflict and a certain amount of failure in your story in order for it to be satisfying to have an ending where you feel like something has been achieved. And we're talking about role-playing games. So if we just role-play, that's improv theater. You can go improv theater forever and that can be fun. That's a lot of things without roles. If you just play a game, that's just rock and sock and robots. There's not much of a compelling narrative there. The whole point of role-playing game is that you and your friends aren't just going to make up a story. You don't actually know where that story is going to go. Or at least you don't all know where it's going to go. You don't know the details of how it's going to get there. It's emergent. So if failure is entertaining, then we need another corollary when we're talking about tabletop role-playing games. Failure is not losing. That is something that the person at your D&D table maybe is the problem. We all know the person at the table who is the problem. Oftentimes they have conflated their character succeeding with them succeeding. They have conflated their character succeeded with meaning, dungeons, and dragons. I think that is in almost all cases, toxic. Well, they're certainly kind of cutting themselves off through a big part of the experience. Actually, again, putting yourself aside and making it so your character is not you, but you're able to fail safely and fail in ways that are entertaining is a big part of telling these collaborative stories together. So I don't know if any of you are a Star Trek Deep Space Knight that recently did a rewatch. So this is very fresh in our minds. Usually I'd lose Dark Vader on the slide, but did Marco Limo lose at the Star Trek role-playing game because Gal DeCot failed? No. It would be really fun to play Gal DeCot, to play a character who is evil, sucks, and loses. But it's still fun to play that character. That's the whole point of D&D, to play a character, to embody a character. So losing really doesn't have... The only way you can lose D&D is if your table is toxic and you're not having fun. That's it. Not having fun is the key thing. So what are we seeking in our role-playing game? We're seeking a compelling narrative for us. We're telling our own Star Wars. We're telling our own Deep Space Knight. Now I'm thinking of... We were playing a burning wheel game years ago. Oh, yeah. I know where you're going with this. So, Dwarf Fortress, right? We decided we wanted to role-play Dwarf Fortress. And if you're thinking that sounds like a bad idea, we'll strap in. So we used the burning wheel system. We got characters. We started playing this game. We're trying to just role-play Dwarf Fortress. And it's not going well. We are failing. We tried to port one type of epic game to another type of epic game. And it didn't quite line up. Like we're trying to make our Fortress succeed using the mechanics of a particular role-playing system. And it's getting worse. It's getting worse. We're not having fun. And eventually we're just like, you know what, screw it. This will be the last session. We're done. During that last session, partly because no one cared about winning in the dark. Because failure was ever present. We got a little weird. Two of the Dwarves went off and murdered like all the people in the nearby town. It ended to skip a long story of, let me tell you about my damp campaign. The last two Dwarves who were alive are rolling around half naked in the mud during a magical lightning storm, trying to choke each other to death. But here's the thing. Since the way that what they built the characters was not in any way like a fighter character, they were too weak and could not succeed in killing one another. So it was absolutely as a spectator, it was hilarious. I do not remember what those last two Dwarves were even fighting about. What they were mad about. Is them rolling around in the mud failing to choke each other to death. But that ended up being the impetus for the rest of the game. We're suddenly rising out of those ashes. We told a really fun story together. We almost had to fail before we could succeed. So I want to walk through a few examples of some role playing systems and how the mechanics make failure and losing interesting and fun. Burning Wheel might be our favorite here. We play a lot of Burning Wheel. A lot of our campaigns are in Burning Wheel. And one thing that's so interesting about the Burning Wheel system is I talked about how failure in the real world can sometimes lead to learning. Like you make a mistake and in your human brain you say, well I won't do that again. So this kind of codifies it. And the way you level up is not by winning dice rolls. But in a lot of cases by failing dice rolls. So think of this one mechanic of this game if you roll the dice it matters. There's no such thing as I try to pick the lock. I fail. I can't pick the lock. I try to pick the lock. I fail. You do pick the lock but there are guards on the other side. Every failure drives the story. It makes something interesting happen and every die roll matters. If the dice don't matter you don't bother rolling dice. So couple that with the fact that to get better at something you have to speed at easy tasks a small number of times. And you have to fail a few times. So you have to practice. If die rolls matter always and you have to fail to advance how do you get better at sword fighting? You lose a sword fighting. Imagine if D&D rewarded you for losing a sword fight because that was the interesting thing to happen in that scene. I remember specifically because it's very skill based and you have a number of different skills for your character. And in one campaign we were playing like the kind of country bumpkin town guards. Oh my god we were like the city. We were the dumb ass sheriffs of life. And basically I remember one of us got put in jail and they were trying to get a message out. And I think only one of our crew was literate or had the right skill. And so you had one character failing to write a letter and then they finally get it out and the rest of the people we were all guys well you failed to read it and that led to almost half a session worth of shenanigans. A failed write test followed by a failed read test is one of the only things I remember from that game. I have no idea what the contents of that letter were intended to be what mystery we were trying to solve. But I remember Scott losing his foot in the swamp. Oh so Scott the codes is not here. He uh he just basically wanders off into the swamp to find clues and gets frostbite and his foot froze off. But this was also accompanied by the GM giving him these various tasks and these failure conditions and rolling very poorly and Game Master's life is pretty cold out there. Are you sure you want to do that? Cool. Another thing this game does that's really fascinating is that there are mechanics where if you have a trait, a character trait so like you know you write your backstory for your D&D character like yeah my uncle was Kelvin Blackstaff and I have a beard too. That doesn't do anything mechanically. My aunt is an FS. Your Game Master definitely rolls her eyes and says uh-huh Kelvin Blackstaff sure and that's never going to come off again. In this game when you make a character you can spend points to say no Kelvin Blackstaff is my uncle and suddenly he is. They cost like 15 points to make a character like that related to you. You get a minus one point discount if they hate you. So you get the relationship this often narrative based very helpful relationship at a discount if it's likely to lead to negative consequences shall we say. Yeah there is the other trait so you have a trait or an instinct instincts are upon the counter so you can basically write little macros for your character like if X then Y like if I'm startled draw my sword. Let's say I have that instinct that will protect me from encounters where you know we encounter some goblins I can say regardless of what was happening I had my sword out that was my character's instinct. But you get rewarded if it gets you in trouble. So let's say that same character is presenting his case to the king. We're in court in front of the king and then my hated enemy comes in with surprise witness. So it comes out. King's none too please. I don't have to draw my sword but if I do draw my sword I will get XP. Mechanically you get rewarded for things that are narratively dangerous. Mechanically causing trouble rewards you is one of my favorite mechanics in all role playing games. So many modern role playing games do this and it's almost leaning into this idea of metagaming. A lot of you probably think oh don't metagame in your RPG. I would argue, we would argue that metagaming actually makes any role playing game better because the writers in the DS9 writers room in Star Trek they knew what was happening they knew what the characters were thinking they knew what the story was going to be but they would still write to make sure that the dramatic moments happened. It's way easier to hit those dramatic moments to hit those epic failures if you all are trying to get to them on purpose to get it. A great example of this that I've seen many times is the the old idea of Emily's got the one ring in her pocket. I don't know that. I am trying to get the one ring because I am evil. My character does not know that Emily has the one ring in her pocket. Emily does not know that I am the one seeking the one ring but our players will know that the characters will know that. We want to make this happen this conflict we want to fight with each other basically. I saw a panel at a PAX a long time ago where two people are brought from the audience and given the scenario until we'll play it out and they kind of just very carefully walk past each other and that's it that's all that happened. So then the first friend of the panel said all right play that scene again but uh metagame and the person with the ring just walks by whistling and like flicking the ring and like it's gone. So metagaming to make your character fail metagaming to make sure the players at the table know your dark secret so they will play to it that will make your game so much more fun than playing D&D like an ortho game. Sometimes that can be adversarial. Inspectors is a fun little game that basically is Ghostbusters the role playing game but it doesn't have the word Ghostbusters in the title. In this one it's almost like player versus game in a way because it's if you roll well you and the rest of your party get to kind of control the whole of the narrative. You succeed and say yeah and we totally trap that ghost but if you fail the GM gets to decide and they write the part of the story and guess what just like a writer in a writer's room they want to give the characters a little bit of chaos and strife. And you see this in a lot of more modern RPGs where oh you got a good role tell me what happens that's now canonical got a bad role I'm gonna tell you what happened and you have to react to it that is also canonical. Blades in the Dark is a game that I'm playing a lot lately and it's basically it makes snatch happen it is you're a bunch of thieves doing your thief thing it's a fantastic role playing system but it has a mechanic that I think is just so perfect for this panel so we can play this game throughout all of the COVID pandemic through this point like every other week on Discord and we leveled off and our thieves gang is going pretty well and everything but we failed and at the end of the last season of the game we lost we all got arrested we all went to jail the game goes to prison this game basically has rules that say oh so your entire gang got arrested they went to prison and you have lost turn to page 128 now you're playing in prison there are mechanics for being in prison like it's a whole other side of the game I gotta tell you trying to get out of prison or maybe trying to stay in prison and run the gang from prison probably more compelling than anything we did up to that point in the game so this game actually directly has a rule that says if there's a TPK total party kill now you're in hell fight your way back to the surface let's go so there's another talk we gave again like a subscriber whatever but this is an hour-long talk we gave years and years ago that goes into extreme terrifying detail on mechanically exactly how these kinds of role-playing games drive this kind of storytelling drive this kind of play and why it works and if you can't get that QR code before I cut to the next slide do not worry because we have a link to all of these slides already available on the internet but we want to spend the next 10 minutes winding down where do we actually go where do we take you on this weird journey because we covered a lot of disparate topics like failure losing negative game states but are they really negative it's basically like if you are having fun if the losing makes the winning that much more sweet and if you in the middle are failing at something find something to laugh about with your friends something to enjoy it's something to tell people later then I would say that losing can be fun logically so first losing is contextual the concept of losing means very different things and very different types of games and very different types of life sometimes losing is being killed by a whole bunch of spiders sometimes losing is watching the character that you played for 10 years and this long-running D&D campaign that spanned three editions of D&D die at the end of their journey sometimes losing is watching Goldicott absolutely bite it at those stupid games that nobody cares about but losing is just it's there it's in games but it's not a monolithic concept and you can't really talk about like a monolithic concept you can't have a very specific game design definition of losing and fight about it for an hour that's pointless not every game needs to even have losing I still say you can't lose D&D unless you're not having fun and I think a lot of tables really need to internalize that we have definitely watched people play D&D games or campaigns that they are not having fun in and sure their characters are leveling up they're winning mechanically but are they winning in life losing affects winning and before nerds get sweaty that is a very correct use of that word perfectly counting but you cannot achieve cannot experience winning without having the possibility of losing you can still have fun without losing but you cannot win mechanically without also having losing you're like two sides of the same coin I feel like the Game Master giving the evil villainist monologue of oh I'm the evil wizard but without me could there be good and of course you stab him before he finishes the stupid stage never let's drop finish talking but losing is absolutely necessary if you want your game to include winning as a concept but it doesn't mean you have to include winning as a concept it is entirely optional experiences, entertainment software can guide you on a journey and I think that is one of the most unexplored areas of games today games you can't lose games you can't win games you experience I played a VR game that was just meditate with fractals for an hour I guess I could lose that if I fall over maybe even save this slide or save this image and send it to that friend who's the problem at your table it is that your Game Master is not being mean to you if they hurt your character the social contract of most role-playing games is you're asking the Game Master to hurt your character if your character is not hurt how are they going to grow how are you going to tell a fun story again back to the idea of play sometimes you can use failure in the safe space of games in order to fail enjoyably one would say and also realizing that letting your character fail can be a positive thing so because it's not you you're not the one who's disgraced and outcasted by the king you're not the one who has you know failed your right check I would like to experience big and out for the store doing something cool but I don't really want to experience getting stabbed in the kidney by the other Elfers mad at me so games should be fun so we would argue if you're playing any game of any kind and you are not having fun it's not saying that is a bad game nor is it saying that you are wrong in some way that game is just not for you whatever's going on in that game it's not for you and you are probably best walking away from it don't play games that aren't fun fun could be many different things like type 2 fun we'd like to 100 miles in New York State a few weeks ago you know what 80 miles of that fun type 1 20 miles was a little bit rough dwarf fortress fun type 2 but in the end we still enjoyed the experience but if you bike 60 miles and your butt hurts and it sucks you can always just take a cab home you don't have to keep going if a game isn't fun hit the bricks that applies to all games in all contexts especially if you get pulled into what your friends say is a 2 hour game of Twilight Imperium they're lying to you it's a 6 hour game of Twilight Imperium it's still going you don't even have to make up an excuse you should just be able to tell your friends I'm not having fun this isn't fun I would like to leave if you can't quit it's not a game anymore I would get an affordance of games is that you can quit them because the rabbit can quit me chasing him around in the house if he's bored the rabbit can't quit being chased by a fox but being chased by a fox is not a game anymore and then on these definitions there are the people out there we encounter them especially online less so in person it's almost like they're afraid to say these things in front of real humans who might react to them but the people who try to argue that whatever game you're playing is not a game however sweaty they get just think back to that Richard Garfield quote they are objectively wrong and you can throw that in their faces but more importantly don't worry about what they think just play games with other people so I realized we actually had about five minutes left usually we're drawn out of time to lose things so we could possibly even I could come out there we could take one or two questions before we write this up which is an extreme rarity for anyone who's seen us give talks before oh and I can also come go to the expo hall and talk about a game where you can explore and you can fail and there is a bit of that you know interesting failure going on is colossal cave adventures so stop by the business booth then we'll have great okay yeah see where Marcus over there are our producers so so if anyone has a question we can take probably two questions you raise your hand first I'm gonna roll over there so my question how do you go back to what they only had a few years back about brave rage playing in this sense that you said a game should be fun or lose a game should be fun and what do you want to say is when you're raged you think this is still fun and you should just walk away that is a feature that's a must so I think there's something everyone has a personal fine line I don't think I've ever rage quit a game personally and if you're playing a game and you're frustrated some people just have the personal ability to crystallize that into I want to get that like right now in DPS and Overwatch I am bronze care I am like garbotee if there was a wood tier below bronze that's what I am ah it is freighter natural how bad I am Star Wars Squadrons we gave up playing with humans because the game literally cannot find people that enough we have to play as easy AI's but I think if personally if you find yourself quit stopping playing because you're mad and you're still mad later you're not having type 2 fun if the next day you're laughing about how you teleported the entire team into a cliff because you're really bad at symmetrical might have done that recently and you laugh about it by all means proceed but in competitive games and this is I think a very good point to to sort of explore this more if you're playing a serious competitive game in the competitive ladder especially a team game then great quitting harms the other players you've almost signed a social contract to play so if you find yourself quitting games that actually punish players for quitting like Overwatch many competitive games do this now I would say just not playing those games until you get to the point to where you can roll with failure and not just quit but I do also argue that games that cause those feelings they're not necessarily bad but they could be designed better also forfeiture is a type of losing that kind of allows for that be like okay this isn't going well there's some extenuating circumstance whether it's emotional or situational where you're like I would like to cease playing this game and lose on purpose you know take the L and just move on some games do have forfeiture yeah I remember Natural Selection you could hit F4 to jump back to the ready room and if a majority of players did that the game would end and the team that was ahead would win but you get into a weird trolling situation where people who hit the slightest difficulty like they get killed once suddenly you're like screw this F4 F4 everybody F4 game over game over so I do think that the games industry and game designers don't need to do a better job of guiding players toward having fun and minimizing the impact of players aren't having fun because I know we talked about in the other panel but for the benefit of the crowd who weren't there there's the concept of griefing where people play against what they're trying to do in the game most griefing happens because someone is not having fun but rather than quitting maybe the game won't let them quit maybe the game is a competitive game where they have punished for quit so instead of quitting they will do as much as possible to annoy everyone in the game and spread their anger to the rest of the crowd because the game is basically telling them that is the only thing they have left to have fun with so games do need to be designed better to handle this and I think that's still an area of exploration that we haven't quite settled on how to address it case in point competitive games in general look at Fortnite Fortnite made the game less competitive on purpose to make the game more fun there was a release a few years ago where they would reward you for getting kills and what happened was if you got more kills you were more likely to win the game so the kids who were trying to build a form three 40-year-old dudes would roll in and roll them and roll everyone on the server and 20% of players were having fun and 80% of players hated it so the Fortnite designers actually did something brilliant they removed them they went back and said you know what we're not going to reward that style of play because our goal is fun the competition is secondary to the fun and I think we really are going to see a big divide between esports and competitive gaming and how that handles these situations from literally all other games and I think that distinction is necessary and I mean like when you're talking about games like something like Fortnite where there is a discrete winning and losing condition like it's more like a sport right like if you play a game of hockey then it's like okay this team won this team lost I think there are there's a whole spectrum in there where it's like softer wins and softer loss and so like the less competitive you make it you can have like a friendly game where you pick up basketball where there's like okay you're just goofing around with your friends so there is a winning and losing but it's less strictly defined and it's less you get less upset and stay tuned for our upcoming lecture probably at PAX East where it's competitive versus casual and we're still doing research but we're looking at can competitive and fun casual play exist in the same game in the same ecosystem can they play that? and that is a very difficult question to answer and all evidence points to no so far but we're still doing some research we're out of time thank you for coming thank you very much enjoy the rest of class