I was reading How to Talk About Difficulty over at A Knight at the Opera, which is a really interesting look at the different ways difficulty in a game can be defined–the sweet spots for different games (and game types) between decision and execution, or the flavours possible between possibility of failure and consequence of failure. And then the third bit is about how failure is framed in a game. What is does failure even mean in a game, for different games? Is it not completing a challenge, or not telling the most satisfying story (or the story you wanted to tell), is it playing the game “wrong”? And then there was this paragraph:
Of course, the notion of any content being “optional” is a clever sleight of hand. Everything in a game is “optional.” You can always choose to stop playing whenever you want. This is entirely a matter of framing. When a game chooses to hand you the “you win!” screen and roll the credits before you’ve completed 100% of its content, it’s basically just providing you with an off-ramp to exit from the game without feeling like you’re giving up. It’s giving you permission to stop playing while still having the satisfaction of “winning.”
Now, the post then began talking about speedrunning and “redefining the goal of a game,” but I went and re-read that paragraph. Because, guess what game it reminded me of.
Of course it’s Fallout: New Vegas.
See, in one of the DLCs, Lonesome Road, you are told again and again, “you can go home.” Ulysses, the other side of your coin, tells you this constantly, that “could turn around, walk away at any time,” that your desire to push through to the end is the same thing that is undoing the NCR, that was the weakness of the old world.
“Think it wasn’t your choice? Of course it was your choice. You could have stayed in the Mojave. But you chose to come, couldn’t let be – not in you to let go.“
It’s written all over the shattered pieces of the old world that you’re walking through.
It’s even in the messaging before you start the DLC–in FNV you get a nice little heads up as to how levelled you should be before starting a DLC, but the wording keeps the theme here.
Anyway, do you turn back, or do you complete (not fail) the game? For all I am mostly about puzzles and stories, I love me a 100% (or as close as I can to feeling that way), so I walk it. Every time. And I am shocked, every time, when there are consequences to my decision to not turn back.
It’s delicious to finish something. You feel accomplishment. But it sucks to finish things that suck. Like okay, bad segue here, it had me thinking about the idea of you, the player/reader/experiencer, deciding when something is done. For a while I would just doggedly finish a book even while hating it. I don’t know how I got into the habit, because as a kid I very much would nope out of a book if it wasn’t doing it for me (sorry, teacher who was certain I’d like Little House On The Prairie). But at some point, I dunno, I got the idea that seems to sometimes just be in the aether that it’s a failure to not finish something you started. Then I read Verne’s Mysterious Island, wrote a mean review on Goodreads (back when I Goodreads’d), and decided I’d do my best not to waste my time on things I hated.
Which, of course I’ve failed that. Part of making goals or intentions is knowing that you’ll fail (ooh, see how it’s looping around a bit, the theme here?!). But I do try my best to interrogate if I’m actually having a nice time reading/watching/doing things and if finishing something is going to bring me benefit–do I hate the story but want to know the ending, do I loathe this part of a craft but want the finished object, does this movie suck but someone I love enjoys it and I want to share that with them.
Deciding if something is worth continuing can be difficult, and going for it anyway (even if you’re going to fail, whatever “fail” means here) can be a win. It’s all how you frame it, right?
Anyway, How To Talk About Difficulty is a great (long) post and I also encourage you to chew over the questions at the end. As someone who plays mostly story and puzzle games (and who plays other games as if they were story and puzzle games), it was nice to get some words to describe why certain games don’t work for me, and what works when it does.