(im all for people learning to deal with failure, but strongly against the systemic invention & enforcement of consequences done in the name of game design)
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If I were to take an optimistic perspective, I’d interpret that statement as saying “when you fail at games, you have the opportunity to figure out how to come back from that without worry that your life is over,” and which I would agree with. If it refers to the design itself, then I’m with you.
im not sure what your second sentence means! re: the first sentence, i think it’s important to look at death in games as not like death at all, but rather to look through the fictional skin placed upon the material punishment the player is made to experience
Sorry I’ll take more than one post this time hehe. For a statement of “games allow failure without consequence,” I see that as games as a whole allow you to lose without actually suffering any physical or real world loss.
This is a safe space for failure that can teach you what it feels like to fail and how to build resilience and handle it when it happens in your real life.
However, within a game itself, I think it is important to have a correlation between action and consequence, including when that action leads to failure. Else, the game represents nothing and you can’t pull anything back to your real world experience.
i am not here to defend or justify action—if indeed it is the case that action demands consequence, and i regard consequence as unacceptable or at best costly, then (in that case) it follows that my position must be to find such action similarly unacceptable or costly.
games teach you what it feels like to fail in games, and i think it’s extremely questionable how transferable that is to real life scenarios. mostly failure in games boils down to “that time you spent is gone,” and in real life there are many other consequences you have to deal with
a very valid response to failure in a game is to not invest more time in it, because it can only take away the time that you put into it in the first place. this is applicable to some types of failures in life but not even all of the types of failure within the “wasted effort” subcategory
so if a game tries to convince you that failure means “your life is over” but in reality it only means “you lost 10 minutes of progress/effort” then the game is capable of teaching you to deal with the punishment of 10 minutes’ wasted progress/effort
for this example i would say it is an intentional “cost,” to call it a waste implies to me that nothing is gained. im not sure i understand the second question. but the first instantly sounds like a waste to me because i am missing context for the positive outcome of having to re-read.
mostly i think learning to deal with failure in games taught me how to ignore made up consequences and get over it, which maybe is a good lesson (kill gameplay haha), but kinda self destructive for the form
hmm. so i'm interpreting this as -- we have a form that is defined to necessarily contain made up consequences, and my end result of engaging with the form at length is the rejection of made up consequences.
games did not invent made up consequences, but perhaps their widespread invention leads to some discovering this thing about made up consequences (rejecting them). i would still describe this as 'self-destruction' in a sense, but i can see a positive spin on it (that games, at large, enabled--
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