 So the overall theme of this is simply that losing is fun, losing is interesting, and losing is possibly an integral part of gaming. So let's talk about a history of losing. In the old days, for most of video game history at least, there was no such thing as winning. You couldn't win DigDug. You could get a high score. You could beat your opponent in a high score contest. You could beat some arbitrary goal like a high score. That's all there is. These games did not end in a sense that you did not win them. You played until you could not play anymore either because you sucked or because programmers never even conceived that anyone would spend that much time. So the idea of winning is a very new thing relative to video games. Winning is not something we had before. Losing was the default. So a while ago some games came out and those games, there were games before these, but these are iconic about the year that suddenly a game wasn't just a series of challenges that eventually end in your failure. Games are now a series of challenges that rewarded you if you completed them. Games could be won. Not only could they be won, but they had endings. I don't know if any of you are young enough to remember those heady days where your friend, you know, there were no smartphones, there was barely even internet. My friend Joe called me on the phone. He called my parents on the phone at about 11 at night, which when you're in elementary school, that is not cool, to tell me that he had just beaten Final Fantasy 1 and that if I ran over to his house, I could see the ending. He wouldn't hit A until I got there. My parents didn't understand or care about this, but I would see these endings. These endings validated every single trouble and pain and hardship. Every time I threw the controller at the ground, these endings justify that or they maybe literally want to throw the game away. The worst part is that game is hard as balls. So what we're looking at here, if we look at this in terms of a narrative, the narrative of Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, is that Mario saves the princess. The story is not Mario died on the first Goomba. The story is not Mario died on the eighth Goomba, or the first Hammer Brother, or the second Hammer Brother, or the third Hammer Brother. Every death in Mario is the same. There is one narrative and that narrative is you won the game. That narrative is you're rewarded for beating the challenges you have faced up to this point. So losing is nothing more than a consequence, something to give you a challenge. Now, we can thus, while we can talk about games, aesthetics, we can talk about art and story and all these things. The only way to judge the game part, the playing part, is by the nature of those challenges and the nature of the reward. Many people would argue that games have to be difficult. If a game is too easy, then it's not really even a game. So Super Meat Boy is an excellent example of this. This is a game that is difficult to the point of tears, and yet a lot of people in this room seem to really like this game. Why do we like this game, but we don't like Silver Surfer? Silver Surfer is way harder than Super Meat Boy. Silver Surfer, however, is not fun. Why is this difficult and horrifying and this is difficult and you exult in that difficulty? One interesting thing is the way the rewards are presented to you. The rewards in a game, maybe a reward is worth 10 fun points, but if you suffered negative 50 fun points on the way to those 10 fun points, you get a total fun of 60. The deeper you go into the depths of madness, when you finally come out on top, that is the most rewarding experience in the world. But if you go too deep, you give up. Or you get the Ghostbusters ending and then it wasn't even worth it. So Super Meat Boy does something very interesting. It increases the reward you get the longer you have attempted and failed to complete a level. In Super Meat Boy, for those of you who haven't played it, as you play, every time your little Meat Boy goes through and dies in some gruesome way, it records that. And it keeps recording that. If I try a thousand times, there are a thousand recordings. So eventually, when I beat Super Meat Boy, when I beat that level, I see all those little Meat Boys coalescing into the one motherfucker who made it. So as a result, the game is scaling its reward based on my effort. And what does this do? You've all been in this boat. You stay up. It's 12 at night. You want to go to bed. You need to go to bed. But you've got like 4,000 Meat Boys just waiting for you. Are you going to throw that away? Are you going to give that up? What about punishment? Has anyone here played? This is a game that is, it seems kind of niche. It's called Five Nights at Freddy's. Has anyone here played Five Nights at Freddy's? Wow. Okay, this is a kind of small indie weird game, and I don't want to spoil a lot about it. If you'd all played it, I was going to get a lot more into the mechanics of this game. So the deal with this game, short game, you're a dude. You're making minimum wage in the United States. That laugh was a little too real though. And you can't move. You sit in a room. You can look a little bit to the left. You can look a little bit to the right. You can flick the lights on in the hallways outside your room. And you can close either or both of the doors. All these things use power. And if the power runs out, the lights go off and the doors cannot be closed. If they're closed, they open. You're a security guard from midnight to 6 a.m. for Five Nights at Freddy Fazbear's Entertainment. And at Freddy Fazbear's Entertainment, the animatronics move around at night because otherwise their servers look at all janked up. And if they see a human, they think it's an exoskeleton that isn't in its suit. So they kindly put you in a suit. Now if you're a human being, that horribly kills you. So if these things see you, they kill you. And the game is a horror game. It's one of the first, and I would argue best, horror games that has ever been made as a video game. Because many people, when they think of horror games like Resident Evil, those are more survival horror. Those are a narrative of you achieving, of you conquering, of you winning. Losing is just you dying along the way. In this game, not only is it a horror in the sense that it's existential, it's horror in the sense that it punishes you when you lose in a very visceral way. It jump scares you. Now, jump scares aren't horror, right? People always say, oh, that game wasn't scary. It's just dead things jumping out of, you know, you walk past a weird window and something jumps at you. And there's a locker room and something jumped at you. So when things are jumping at you, that's like cheap horror. This game tells you straight up, this is a jump scare game. We're going to jump scare you. And then it puts you in it. And you look to the left, look to the right, and then you pull up this monitor and you can see the security cameras. And you see that the animatronics are all on the stage. And then you look around, you look back at the animatronics, one of them's gone. The fuck did that rabbit go? Where's that rabbit? Where's that rabbit? And eventually you're sitting there and you start to get really paranoid. I'm not a fazable person. And when I was playing this game, my girlfriend was standing next to me, kind of half-watching. I thought, I'm a big man. I can get through this. Though the power went out, I knew that asshole was in the room with me. And I knew there was going to be a jump scare. I knew this game was going to punish me. So I'm just waiting for the punishment. I kind of leaned back from the monitor, like, alright. I don't want to jump. I don't want to be afraid. And nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. And I lean in a little bit and I move the mouse to be like, did the game? Crap, then it got me. The game scared the ever-living shit out of me, even though I knew it was a jump scare. And it makes my adrenaline pound. And the game teaches you paranoia. But winning the game, the only thing you get for winning is your minimum wage paycheck for the week. So games can be great if losing makes winning feel good. And games can be great if losing itself gives you an experience that you don't normally, as an adult who isn't afraid in haunted houses, get. So let's expand this idea of losing a little bit. Chrono Trigger, I assume many of you have played. It's one of the most iconic and beloved games, arguably in video game history. It's very telling that no one has successfully made a sequel to this game, spiritual or otherwise. Chrono Trigger is doing something a little bit different. This is exploring a narrative of victory, a narrative of winning. It's the same basic game. If I lose against some random encounter along the way, the game just ends. It's just Mario dying. Losing is just there because it has to present the challenge, otherwise it's not a game. It's a movie. But if I do certain things, the end is different. Maybe Cynestar comes along with me on my journey. I get different endings. I'm exploring this narrative of victory. But it doesn't do anything with the narrative of failure. Failing in Chrono Trigger doesn't do anything other than prevent me from seeing an ending. It forces me to continue to go back to that save point with a few very interesting exceptions. It explores this a little bit. For those of you who have played this game, I thought that this is too soon or spoilers. There's one moment where one of the characters, her mother, is crippled in the game. And you have an opportunity just once to prevent that in the past. And if you do that, you see her walking around and happy and leading a very different life in the future. If you fail at that, she's still sitting in her wheelchair, sad and basically alone. It doesn't affect the game very much. It's this tiny little thing. But this is the first step in a game that primarily is focused on a winning narrative. Where they give you a losing narrative that isn't a dead end. A losing narrative that changes something. So then there are games like Shadowgate. Shadowgate is a game where you encounter a ray. If you don't fucking hate anything, just write death. Go down a hole, death. Bellowing like a fool, you leap off the bridge and into the blaze. Death. You finally set your hair on fire. You can't even scream because you no longer have a throat, let alone a larynx. I suspect Nintendo of America didn't read all the text in this run. So this game, Shadowgate, is famous for its death. But not just because there's a bunch of deaths. Because the deaths are all interesting and weird. And the game is encouraging you to explore these deaths. I mean, look at this. This right here, this death, this only occurs if you use torch on self and you burn yourself badly. But it doesn't kill you. If you keep using the torch on yourself, eventually this happens and you die. So the game decided, what if this guy tries to set himself on fire? Let's warn him away a few times and then let's set him on fire. So what we're doing here is we're now exploring the narrative of failure. Now we're getting into an interesting place. Now this game, it still has a narrative to the end. Playing the game to the end gives you an experience. It gives you a victory. It gives you that ending like other games do. But every time Mario falls in the pit, it's a different thing. It's interesting. We can explore it. And a lot of games have done this, even if you didn't realize it. Out of this world, relatively famous game on the Super Nintendo, at least that's how most people played it. It was known by other names. I believe another world outside of the United States. There was a sitcom in the United States called Another World at the time. So they had to rename it. And then there was also a sitcom called Out of This World. So out of this world had elaborate and horrific animated deaths. And many times when people played it, you'd watch them seek out those deaths. You'd see something dangerous. And at least once, you're going to go poke it and see what it does. And you can see this resonates because the game like Dragon's Lair, this is a video. Every death scene in 720p. And it's got like a hundred thousand views. So there's a hundred thousand people who wanted to watch in glorious half HD, every elaborate death in this game. I don't want to say anything about those people, but I think a lot of them might be in this room. Here's another game you might have played. These are games. Don't let anyone tell you they're not. And how did you play these games? This is a Choose Your Own Adventure, if you've ever encountered these. This one, this particular Choose Your Own Adventure is special. Because you can't win this one. There's a winning ending where you find paradise. There's literally no way to get to it unless you cheat. No page references the page that takes you to the good ending. And the book is about finding paradise. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but I'm going to hope it was. So in this game, many of you, how did you play these as a kid? You get to a choice and it's like, do you climb the rickety bridge past the snakes? The snakes? Or do you go home and eat chocolate? And you know that chocolate's the right way to go. But you put your finger in that page and you flip over. Because these games also had pretty elaborately descriptive, horrific death texts. And for whatever reason, we like exploring those. So here's another game you may not know. Don't cheat your pants. You might not even be able to read that subtitle. A survival horror game. This is a text adventure that you can all play online. And it is literally just that. It is a text adventure. Can you not poop your pants? Now, you can pretty easily win this game. When you win this game, it gives you an achievement. And then there's a bunch of blanked out achievements. And then you start exploring what happens if I do different things in this game. For example, if I just type kill self, I kill myself. And then because I'm dead, I shit my pants. And then I lose. So if I take my pants off first, I win. The game isn't Don't Die. So what about the Stanley Farrill? This game arguably doesn't have winning or losing. We're not exploring a narrative of failure. We're not exploring a narrative of success. We're just exploring. No ending is the right ending. Many of them say they are. No ending is the bad ending. Even if you play the longest possible path through the game, you find the secret at the end for Mario. The narrative of this game, the game is just a game of exploring narrative. There's no challenge. You can die in this game, but it doesn't really mean anything. Dying is just a choice. So we still call this a game. What about Ghost Dad Detective? You might have played this. So Murdered Soul Suspect, I'm an enforcer at PAX East. And I was doing like the live streaming stuff for the Albatross Theater. And Squeenix was talking about this game. And they did a great panel about this game. And then they opened the room up to questions. And one dude, I don't know who he was. I tried to find him, but he disappeared my hero. And he walks up. And the first question was, so can you lose this game? Like, can you not figure out who murdered you? Or is this basically just a movie? And they really, really tried to not say, yeah, this game is just a movie. But they basically admitted that the game is just a movie. So now we're getting into something really interesting. Gone Home. Gone Home is a beautiful, brilliant game. However, independently of Gone Home, Valve Steam added community tags. You can tag a game with whatever you want. I would tag games as good or bad. Some people would tag games as not a game. In fact, this game's tags at that time were not a game, bad, walking simulator, and Tumblr. Now, I'm going to say, I'm going to be very direct here. People who say that this is not a game are assholes. But why did so many games get tagged not a game? Well, because we keep using that word game. Now, those of you who wrote my other lecture yesterday, a little bit of this is ground we're going to cover again, we're going to crook it slightly so. Game designers, game people use one of these three definitions. An interactive amusement, series of interesting and or meaningful decisions, a competitive test of scale. People who say something's not a game are always thinking about games as number three. They think of games as challenges. And games that are not a challenge are not games to them. They call themselves gamers. They get mad when other people who play other kinds of games call themselves gamers. They're assholes. But you can at least see that's why. In fact, I wish they hadn't gotten rid of that not a game tag because the not a game tag was a way to find some of the best games on Steam. So, an interactive amusement. It's very telling that the organization that globally generally administers video games is not the video game association. It's the entertainment software association. We're not talking about games that are ortho games or audio games or strategy games or competitive games. We're talking about entertainment software. Everything on a computer, all these things, it's not a movie because while I can pause a movie, if you're going to argue that that's interaction, you're an insufferable pedant. But it's not a movie, but yet it might be mostly a movie. Ghost Dad Detective is mostly a movie. But I'm interacting with it. It's still a game. I'm not going to say it's not a game. So, just always bear in mind that video games are not just games. They're entertainment software. It's not that our entertainment software might not look like what you think of as a game, but they're still a game because game is a super generic word. So, there's another term, ortho game, which describes that game type number three. This is a word I stole a page from Richard Garfield because he took a prefix, ortho, and added it to game to make his competitive test of skill definition. Ideo is a prefix that means like personal or unique. So, in this case, an ideogame is a game that presents a series of interesting player decisions that produces a personal outcome. The idea that these are games where I as the player am making choices. And those choices lead to a conclusion, and that path was personal to me. Other people might follow the same path, but I follow that path I had an experience. If I played again, I might have a different experience. If someone else plays it, they might have a different experience. So, one of those assholes says that something's not a game, throw it right back in their face and say, what do you mean by game? Are you talking about ortho games or ideogames? And that'll usually shut them up.