Loss

 And losability.

Once upon a time it was said that videos games cannot, fundamentally, stand as pieces of artwork to be considered comparable to other forms because by their very nature, as interactive media, one can succeed or fail at them; whereas you cannot, objectively, fail to experience a piece of art. (I feel like modern art snobbery might have a thing or two to say about that, but's theirs is not the angle I wish to adopt today.) Even at the time when I first heard this, I think the concept sounded like bunk to my little ears, and the years have further solidified my belief that the experience of engaging with a video game is not dependent on the completion of that game. In many ways, video games propel themselves to another level of artistic expression when they go so far as to provide functionality and purpose behind a 'lose state' to further enrich the storytelling. Gamers should, by and large, very much welcome the iron hand of the fail state and all the unique opportunities that it brings. But things aren't that simple, are they?

The first game I personally remember playing which really engaged with it's loss state and turned a real mechanic out of the eventuality of dying is the classic, Dark Souls itself. Now you know how the game works by this point, surely; you gain experience points in the form of 'Souls' for every enemy that you defeat, experience can be spent at save points to level up or improve gear, but if you die between spending those souls then you'll drop every spare XP point on you along with a desiccated body. Those points can be reclaimed, should you find your corpse and interact with it, but should you die again before the recovery then that new body with overwrite the old one and you'll lose those left over souls at the same time. This adds a punishment for failure and death and recontextualizes the player's relationship with XP rewards so that they have to examine what it is they value too much to risk and what they comparatively consider not worth this time of day.

But Dark Souls is not itself an outlier in this style of game design in the slightest, in fact there's an entire genre of game built to cater towards the concept of 'losing' in games. I'm talking about rougelikes, wherein the premise of the game is typically some sort of procedurally generated platformer world with randomly selected tools and equipment dropped in there to pick up and combine. A world which then shifts and changes everytime the player character dies and is sent back to the beginning. Think Rogue Legacy, Enter the Gungeon and Dead Cells. These games shoot you right back to the starting line with each failure, but also build in special persistent unlocks so you never feel the full weight of losing all progress because in some way any of ground has been crossed. In many ways the resilience to stick out the losses is as important as developing the muscle memory of each enemy and the general knowledge of all good item combinations.  The art of these games has as much to teach in that department as Dark Souls does.

And then there are the titles that take their own approach to dying. Such as Death Stranding, wherein the death of the hero doesn't stop any ongoing events because the hero, as a Repatriate, cannot fully die by any known means. (Aside from in one very specific story instance which isn't worth bringing up right now because it would take half a page to explain it.) As the gameplay cycle of Death Stranding revolves around delivering supplies across routes through the land, it makes sense for the punishment of 'temp dying' to be the creation of giant explosion craters which scar up the landscape at the spot where you fell; making future supply runs just that tad more complicated than they would have otherwise been if you'd remembered to pack your faeces grenades properly. Yet again, death is punishment but it isn't the end of play; because that avenue is totally open to the developers creative and intuitive enough to take advantage of it.

Yet all of these systems that I just describe still do, in some way, disincentive the act of failure; which makes sense, does it not? The overall goal of most games is to actually succeed in some fashion, usually to overcome some great difficulty or big evil villain- and as such, we as gamers are typically imbued with this resulting resolution so fully as to be totally adverse to even entertaining the prospect of failure when there is literally any other alternative on the table open for us, even in situations where failure and it's punishing consequences are designed to be a process of the game. But when would such a circumstance be? How about in one of those Role Playing Games that focus on the power of the random dice roll?

XCOM, Baldur's Gate 3 and all games of it's ilk rely on chance rolls for a good deal of it's systems. Whether you're carefully planned and executed strike actually passes the hit-percentage and lands, whether that attempt to roll for a persuade skill-check passes the chance and succeeds, whether you pass that death saving roll and avoid the permanent demise of a cherish team mate- all of those situations come back to the virtual roll of digital dice. And in such games it is fully possible to, should you so decree, save scum. As in, reload a save when you encounter a rolled result you don't like and try it again. In a way, cheating yourself of the consequences of a bad turn of luck when the game itself is pretty much designed to present you with such turns of fate and ask you how to deal with them. Messing up an XCOM ambush you've spent 10 minutes planning is heartbreaking, but it's kind of what the game is about. If you hit every shot all of the time, then you're not really playing a chance-based tactical game at all, are you?

And when we expand the confines of that example to RPG games, the situation becomes even more distasteful. These branching RPG games are built to exacting standards so that every eventuality beyond the death of the protagonist can branch out into it's own reality, whether that be a choice made or a skill check failed. Screwing up a 'persuade' roll doesn't just automatically result in a 'game over', because the roll of the dice is not the test of skill, the consequence of that roll is. By save scumming your way around, making sure you win every roll, you're paving your way past all the effort that narrative designers, level designers and everyone else who gets roped into that process, put into making games like that structurally sound. At that point, why are you even playing a roleplaying game to begin with?

But even as I say and acknowledge all of this readily, I'll be the first to admit that I do, in fact, save scum. When I'm totally screwing up a key mission in XCOM, knowing well that a full team wipe is pretty much a death sentence to an entire campaign in higher difficulties, I'll save scum to the beginning of the level. I probably would save scum even more so if I didn't personally limit myself to one save at the beginning of each XCOM mission. In Baldur's Gate I try to live out the failures of my rolls, but sometimes you'll hit your 5th miss in a row and just lose your ability to be objective- from that point onwards what else can you do but slip on into the autosaves list and play a quick game of 'time god'? It's a bit like cheating fate, and it certainly doesn't feel good after the fact, but I'm just going to be replaying this section in pretty much the same manner anyway; so I'm just saving myself time- right?

Coming to the point of accepting losing is perhaps one of the general lessons of playing games from a philosophical standpoint. Many historical games that have been developed throughout antiquity are themselves based on microcosms of real-world pursuits, battles and war most often, wherein players would compete and win or lose without suffering the irreversible consequence of death. It is a safe space, or a magic box, wherein one can experience outside of their comforts or capabilities, without feeling the scars after the fact. Accepting that philosophy in our stance towards modern day gaming would go a long way to emotionally enriching the gameplay experience- or at least making it up to all those poor level designers out there who spent several weeks planning out every way someone can fail to walk up a set of stairs to an audience of no-one. (Won't somebody think about the fail-state designers?)