Accepting Failure
January 22nd, 2010 Posted in Comment
“What happened? Did you find her?”
“I’m sorry… she’s dead.”
Telling a father his child is dead is hard. Even harder still when, only five minutes beforehand, it was you that killed her. Not intentionally, of course. In fact, in bartering and then battling with the demon that possessed her, you did everything you could to save her. Everything you thought you had to do in order to save her.
And yet when that final blow struck, when the demon’s body dissolved into nothingness, you and your companions were left alone in the cold, stone chamber. Wondering where that little girl had gone.
So ends The Stone Prisoner, a downloadable quest for BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins. And while to many gamers, failing such a quest is not such a big deal but for some, it makes it impossible to continue your adventure without a heavy heart. While that is due in part to the quality of the game’s atmosphere and narrative, a key factor is gamers’ refusal to accept failure.
Failure in games such as Dragon Age is far sublter than death but no less final. Should your party die, you simply reload your previous save and try again. Should the child die, the game takes that as the allocated outcome and assumes you wish to continue. True, you can reload and try again for the outcome you desire, but there is the pang of shame, recognising that you’re being a little too pernickety about a single, irrelevant sidequest, holding you back.
More often than not, gamers are too busy enjoying the adventure to save before every key moment, every choice - in which case, living with the consequences of your failure is the lesser evil when faced with the idea of replaying twenty to thirty minutes of repeated ground. Of course, it’s a relief that we aren’t forced to do so anyway - as is the case with many FPS titles and their unavoidable ‘escort X to Y’ missions - but the option would be nice.
With games becoming increasingly driven by narrative and boasting a greater level or persistence, this sort of event and the associated danger of failure is becoming more common. If we choose to blow up Megaton, there’s no way of reversing its destruction. If we lose our Far Cry 2 buddy, they will never be able to help us on future missions.
However, being able to progress beyond our failures makes them much harder to live with. While frustrating, deep down we don’t mind having to restart a level because a key object was inadvertantly destroyed or the car you were pursuing got away. One loading screen later and you have another shot at victory.
But on some level we do object to being unable to finish the quests we began on Tanis before the Sith blows it up, we regret being unable to save Wrex and wish, oh we wish that we could have survived the assault on Mike’s Bar.
Because the bottom line is, gamers don’t like things being out of their control. We recognise that such persistant worlds are good for the future of development, we’re intrigued to see the consequences of our actions as we move from Mass Effect to its sequel. There are countless gamers who recognise they should never forsake game design simply to be able to save or sacrifice a young girl at will. We just have a little trouble accepting it.
