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The GMTK episode I threw away (Insider, May 2018)
🕑 Added 2018-05-26 17:00:01 +0000 UTC Hello everybody!So this month, I spent a fair amount of time on an episode that I just… threw away. Basically. I did the research, wrote the script, and was about to record it when I decided that it wasn’t right for the channel and so I tossed it.
The episode was about this concept of a “failure spectrum” (a term dreamed up by Gunpoint designer Tom Francis), which describes all the states between perfect success and complete failure. Some games (Celeste) have a teeny tiny spectrum whereas others (MGS V) have a huge one.
The idea was to explain the many virtues of having a wider, more generous spectrum. I would talk about how interesting stories crop up in the middle ground. How it supports and acknowledges failure, but doesn’t take you out of the experience. And how it can promote improvisational tactics.
I binned it for a few reasons.
- One: it just seemed a bit too short and obvious.
- Two: I was talking about the same games and genres that I always do (Far Cry 2 and MGS V).
- Three: I was quoting the same people I always do (Tom Francis and Clint Hocking).
- Four: It just seemed like it should be a small part of a wider discussion about failure.
So you’ll probably see some of this stuff crop up in a future episode. But instead, I decided to make a video about a topic I’m less familiar with and a genre I don’t talk about as much.
It was way more fun to research and make the episode and I’m very glad I bit the bullet, threw away some hard work, and started again.
If you’re interested, here’s the script I tossed away:
In some games, the line between life and death is razor thin.
But in many others, there’s a bit of leeway to make mistakes. Think about a shooter, where your health bar lets you take a few shots before death - while medkits can bring you back to full health.
Or a stealth game, where getting spotted doesn’t instantly end the game, but instead transitions things into a fight. Unless you successfully lose your attackers and go into hiding, in which case you can go back to sneaking around.
Tom Francis - creator of Gunpoint and Heat Signature - is the first person, I think, to give this idea a name. He calls the range of states between perfect success and total failure a failure spectrum.
“There’s a spectrum of possible outcomes,” he says, “and screw-ups can move you towards the failure end and recoveries can (sometimes) move you back up towards success”.
And so pretty much every game has some sort of failure spectrum, but some games - especially more modern and systemic titles - have a much larger and more generous failure spectrum, than others. Tom points to stealthy open worlder Metal Gear Solid V, which has a huge range of states between being a sneaky snake and a, uh, dead snake.
So, if a guard sees you, he won’t immediately start firing. He’ll just come in to investigate more closely. If you do get spotted, you enter into this slow-mo reflex mode, to give you a chance to headshot the guard in question. Screw that up, and the guard will need to manually call up his buddies for support, giving you a chance to stop him.
And even after all that, Snake can still escape. Or enter combat. Or even call in an helicopter and just take the whole “espionage” bit of the MGS slogan and dropkick it into the ocean. You’ll only die if you manage to screw all of that up.
So this is a huge failure spectrum, with all sorts of states between completing the mission without ever being seen, and bleeding out on the battlefield. And while mistakes will push you closer to the failure end, there’s still opportunities to turn things around and scramble back towards the other end of the spectrum.
So what are the benefits of a larger failure spectrum?
Well, one is that riding back and forth across the spectrum can provide some of the most emotional, interesting, and memorable stories. You know, like coming “this close” to dying, but turning it around and winning anyway. Or killing a panicked guard, seconds before they can raise the alarm. Maybe a switch to frantic action when the stealthy approach falls flat, or an exciting extraction when your plan starts to go hideously wrong.
These stories get lost when the failure spectrum is so narrow, that a couple screw ups can take you to a game over screen, and straight back to the start of the encounter. When the spectrum is wider, there are far more opportunities for turnabouts and reversals of fortune.
The other major benefit is that moving across the spectrum causes you to change your goals in an exciting, dynamic way.
In an action game, when you’re on the successful end of the spectrum you can focus on being aggressive and confrontational. But if you shift down towards the failure end you’ll need to change your focus towards getting into cover, finding health packs, or maybe even crafting a medkit.
Changing your priorities keeps you more engaged, gives you more to think about, and stops the game from becoming repetitive or single-minded.
Designer Clint Hocking made this sort of goal shifting a big part of his game, Far Cry 2. In a 2009 GDC talk, he explained that, originally, he wanted the game to be all about intentionality, which is achieved by having the game split between two phases.
There’s a planning stage, where you survey the scene, look for items of interest, watch guard patrol patterns, plan your escape route, choose your load-out, and even pick the time of day. And then an execution stage, where you actually carry out your plan.
But the creators decided that they didn’t want you to either have your plan totally work, or totally fail. Instead, they wanted you to suffer small setbacks - using tricky, messy, volatile systems like malaria, fire propagation, jammed guns, and car breakdowns - that would cause you to bounce out of the execution stage and back to the planning phase.
Clint describes this type of gameplay as improvisational. It’s this idea of constantly moving between planning and execution - within a single, continuous playthrough. And this is only really possible when there’s a generous failure spectrum. There needs to be ample breathing room between life and death for the player to bounce around. To get knocked down, but come back swinging.
And Far Cry 2 achieves this with a big health bar, loads of healing syringes, and the buddy system, where you can get one extra chance to keep playing after death.
Clint says “kicking the player out of the execution phase is easy, making sure they fall back into planning, not a loading screen, is something else”. Quite right.
Because seeing a game over screen can take you straight out of the experience. Back to Tom, he says total failure “interrupts your immersion and ends your investment in this current run. It pulls you out of the game, and you find yourself in a menu, then at a checkpoint or a save game. Mentally acclimatising to how much of your story has been lost forces you to disengage from it, and you have to build up all that immersion again from scratch”.
“If failure isn’t game over, it’s still nail-biting when to come close to it. And when you do slip over the threshold, it’s just another development in the story you’re creating and living through.”
The worst type of game over screen, though, has to be when you fail for pretty much anything other than your character dying. This is often when you fail to follow the exact steps that the designer has laid out for you - and the game’s only response is to throw up a game over screen and ask you to do it again.
If you ask me, that’s not really a failure of the player. That’s a failure of the game designer.
So it’s also worth thinking about a failure spectrum in this context as well. Look at Resident Evil 7. During the first boss fight against Jack in the garage, the designers want you to grab the car keys and get in the car - but the game doesn’t just end if you screw that up. Instead, it transitions into a different scenario, where Jack himself gets into the car and starts to drive towards you.
You’ll see it happen in LA Noire, also, where messing up a certain aspect of the investigation rarely leaves the case unsolvable. Cole just has to approach it from a different angle.
This does surface one of the downsides of a wide failure spectrum, though. If mistakes aren’t met with intense punishment, and if there are always alternative routes when you screw up, it almost feels like your errors are without meaningful consequence. Games become too easy and forgiving.
And that’s certainly true. But I think you could also argue that games with a wide spectrum simple redefine the concept of failure, from a binary win / lose state to something more analogue and nuanced. Look at MGS V, which tracks how often you get seen, or use reflex mode, or how you deal with enemies - and gives you an appropriate grade to match how well you did.
And in a game like Invisible Inc, there are loads of possible outcomes to a mission, from complete success with every objective and 100% stealth, to a botched extraction that just about keeps one team member alive. All are supported, but will have different repercussions down the line.
It’s just important to avoid spiralling feedback loops that will compound the impact of those poor runs, and potentially make the rest of the game impossible. I’ve got a whole episode on this topic, so check that out.
Another downside to having a wide failure spectrum is that some players will simply decide that they will only accept perfect play and manually reset the game state the second they make a mistake. And, sure, that’s a valid way to play I guess - but it squashes the failure spectrum down to a razor thin line and removes all the juicy middle ground, where the emotional stories and shifting goals are found.
For Clint Hocking, he reckons the answer is to have setbacks that are unpredictable and fixable.
Those systems in Far Cry 2, like malaria and weapons jamming, occur randomly - so it’s pointless to quick load to an earlier save when they occur. And because they are easily survivable - just pop some pills or get into cover while your weapon unjams - it’s only a minor setback.
Unpredictable doesn’t really work for a stealth game, but letting the player quickly get back to hiding certainly does. Making running away and hiding both viable and speedy could help avoid that nasty “got spotted, quick loaded” type of play. The gold standard, of course, would be to have a game where the mechanics for running away are just as much fun as those for sneaking around.
So ultimately, some games will always have a thin line between life and death. The player just has to do it right, or do it again. And they’ll likely enjoy dashing their face against a brick wall until they master it and break on through to the other side.
But in other types of games, it’s worth thinking about widening the failure spectrum, and being more leniant with the player before throwing up that Game Over screen. This provides space for emotional stories. It forces the player to change their goals and improvise new strategies. It gets rid of annoying game over screens for not following the script. And it redefines failure to something more nuanced and personal. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in future games.
Comments
So is this where the "Playing past your mistakes" episode was born from?
Doctor Professor
I definitely think there's stuff here worth exploring. If you're looking for more perspectives/angles, I wrote about something similar that I dubbed "the competence zone" in 2010 at <a href="https://pixelpoppers.com/2010/06/real-games-have-curves-welcome-to-the-competence-zone/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://pixelpoppers.com/2010/06/real-games-have-curves-welcome-to-the-competence-zone/</a> and I've seen other writers refer to how "strict" a game is - for example, see <a href="https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=36902" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=36902</a> - but the focus on using something like this to change goals/priorities is new and interesting to me.
Ryan Spargo
As someone who has desired/still desires to make a unique video essay channel one day, I'm thrilled to read and dissect a script of yours that didn't leave the cutting room floor. Good perspective from a pro on what works and what can be cut, I say.
Tom T
In regard to stealth games, I’m one of the players who often just resets if I get spotted instead of hiding. Partly this is because most stealth games don’t have fun/interesting mechanics for the “spotted” phase, but I think another huge reason I reset is because of immersion/the narrative. Most stealth games present the situation as you infiltrating an area without anyone learning of your presence. That works if the player is never spotted, but if I do get spotted I have a very hard time believing that the guards would forget about my existence after a minute or two, and that the guards would neglect to inform their boss that I’m here. It honestly just feels better to me to reload rather than deal with that dissonance. Maybe one way around this issue would be to have the villains know from the start that the player exists and is infiltrating the area, but they don’t know *where* the player is coming from. So the guards aren’t on a generic patrol for any intruders, they’re specifically looking for the player. Guards could exit their alert state not by forgetting there’s an intruder, but by assuming that the intruder has escaped the immediate area, so now they have to look somewhere else. You could set this up from a narrative perspective either by framing the sequence as an escape, rather than an infiltration, or by having the villain learn about your planned infiltration in the plot. Gameplay wise, developers really need to encourage taking advantage of guards seeing you. For example, there could be a mechanic where you can set traps and lead the guards to them.
Iestyn bleasdale-shepherd
Oh and also Celeste, surprisingly... despite instant death it has two elements that create a wonderfully satisfying failure spectrum. The first is the very closely spaced checkpoints - one per screen means repetition is easy to accept so they can demand much greater mastery of the player. The second is the carefully honed "motion envelope" they design into each stage; at any given moment along the correct path to the goal, you can be slightly too early/late/high/low... but as long as you remain within the envelope you can always correct back to the ideal position and make it to the goal. Cleverly, they usually make the envelope narrower at the start of the stage - the part you will repeat the most often.
Mikhail Aristov
The idea of a failure spectrum may be new to video games, but e.g. in tabletop RPGs (particularly the story-first ones from The Forge school, like Apocalypse World and its many hacks), this idea has long been established and explored. The thinking goes that instead of rolling dice to see if succeed at a skill check/attack or fail, you roll to see whether you succeed perfectly (then the narrative proceeds as the player intended), whether you succeed with complications (the "yes, but.." mentality: you accomplish your primary goal, but there is a complication imposed onto you by the system/game master which you have to deal with right away or along the line), or something goes horribly wrong and steers the story in a completely new direction (the "failing forward" mentality: if you fail a check, the situation changes irrevocably, and you now have to contend with a new, bigger problem in addition to your old troubles). All of this is actually hard-coded into the Apocalypse World mechanics and that game came out in 2010.
Mark M
Interesting, I've been thinking about similar things recently. Difficulty is definitely influenced by this concept. The wider the failure spectrum, the more death has to hurt in order to increase difficulty. FTL and Super Meat Boy are polar opposites in this regard, but both difficult. I also noticed this after playing Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us back to back. Similar games, but the focus on resource and health management, more punishing enemies, constrained environments, and a less capable character gives the latter a narrower failure spectrum. This also plays into the intended experience, themes and story of both games. Also funny that you mention the 'quick save quick load' thing. I do that in the Dishonored games. I love those games, and feel that I still get a wider experience purely from the size of environment, and as you say, enemies do not spot you straight away. Dishonored 2 also improves options for stealthy players. I always play Ghost, though, as I find the game less enjoyable otherwise. Too messy. Whereas a game like Far Cry I actually embrace the mess, Dishonored feels less fun to me in that guise. It just feels better and perhaps more challenging to try and ghost my way through.
I know some people like that. And I say that if they want to play like that, then let them be, they choose that play-style because it makes the game exactly as they enjoy it more.
Mathew Dyason
You definitely have a decent script here! I don't think it would be "too obvious" for the large portion of your audience that are aspiring game developers. While coming back to the same games and situations does feel a little predictable, you could use it as an introduction to the idea and then go deeper with your own examples (which you already do a bit already!) If you need to add a bit of length, I'd like to know how games could benefit from a narrow failure spectrum, if at all. You speak as if a wide state is inherently better, but I'd be curious to know if some games have successfully used a narrow failure state in an interesting way. I hope you're able to salvage the video because it's an interesting topic that I know you can do justice!
Blaine Talbut
"Some players will simply decide that they will only accept perfect play and manually reset the game state the second they make a mistake. And, sure, that’s a valid way to play I guess - but it squashes the failure spectrum down to a razor thin line and removes all the juicy middle ground, where the emotional stories and shifting goals are found." This makes me think of Fire Emblem, whose fans ostensibly love its permadeath mechanic, but in practice never play with it and just reset when they lose someone. I feel like a lot is lost there.
Iestyn bleasdale-shepherd
In case you revisit this, L4D would make a great case study. "I would talk about how interesting stories crop up in the middle ground" ... "screw-ups can move you towards the failure end and recoveries can (sometimes) move you back up towards success" ... L4D really does a great job of letting players claw their way back from near defeat, creating memorable shared stories in the process.
