How do you think fail states, specifically dying and reloading a save, affect the narrative of a video game? Because in a lot of games they feel like a pretty detrimental compromise to me, it always feels like I'm not actually supposed to use that mechanic. I haven't really found a way yet to interpret a lot of them in a way that doesn't just make the game worse.
like, i think there's a lot of ways a ''fail state'' can inform a game's narrative, right? like...
there's the way you're talking about here, right, where the fail state is something you're not 'supposed' to experience, it exists as a structuring element guiding you away from or towards certain actions, right? like... in subnautica, it's pretty rare to actually die. and it can be a frustrating and unfun experience when you do and you were carrying a bunch of stuff and you're like oh great gotta farm all that shit up. but the threat of dying is really really important to building the game's tension, putting some actual real-world weight (even if it's just in terms of threatening a purely digital object that represents a time commitment) into the idea of a reaper leviathan eating you. if there was no 'consequence' for getting Gotten by the Scary Getter, it would suck a lot of tension out of trying to avoid them, right?
this is a recurring thing in horror game design, right, if you make the chase sections too hard they stop being scary because knowing that all that happens is a scary cutscene + the impact of it being diminished by seeing it over and over again turns the Scary Getter into a nuisance that you groan at rather than something scary. so i think there can be a lot of value to parts of a game that you're not really ''supposed'' to experience but that need to exist to structure how you experience the parts you are...
& then of course i think there's a lot of games where you are meant to experience the failure states and they teach you important things about the world and characters. like recently i've been trying out this underrated indie gem called dark souls, you've never heard of it, and within an hour of playing i'd died like five times. and each time the death taught me something iomportawnt about the game: dying to the asylum demon taught me that you don't always have to fight enemies the first time you see them. dying in the middle of a skeleton clusterfuck taught me that you should try to fight enemies 1 on 1 as much as possible. dying when that cunt pushed a boulder onto me taught me to look the fuck out for traps. these fail states are essentially a form of tutorializing, and also help tell the story of dark souls, that you're an insignificant little fuck in a bleak and crushing world.
or, like, take disco elysium -- i think a lot of people who've never played it know you can get a game over screen because you sat in an uncomfortable chair. and yea if your last save was an hour ago i get why that's frustrating. but not only does the whole evrart sequence also serve the tutorializing function that my dark souls deaths did (demonstrating that you should unlearn the traditional CRPG correlation between 'danger' and combat) but it and other potential game overs like it tell you so much about harry du bois: that this is someone whose mind and body ahve been pushed so close to the edge that it's feasible for him to have a fatal heart attack trying to get his tie off the ceiling fan or have a complete mental breakdown because a child called him a faggot or just straight up shoot himself in the head trying to win an argument.
and ofc the fact that people who've never played the game have heard of the chair death speaks to another thing about failure states, which is that they can be fun and memorable. there's a reason why ykow some people demonstarte nostalgia for the king's quest death messages
& then of course there's the ways that 'bad endings' can inform you about the reality of the world of the 'real ending'. crpg ending slides that show you sme horrible fate for the companion that you didn't complete the quest for provide information and context for the quest itself and how it helps them grow and change. & then there's the most literal possible execution of this, zero escape, where due to all kinds of temporal bullshit the events of the 'bad endings' directly causally influence the events of the 'true ending'.
finally, of course, there's games where what would be a 'fail state' elsewhere is just part of a diegetic narrative. pyre is my absolute favorite example of this. if you lose a game of prison basketball then you just lose, and the other guys win, and when the stakes are escaping to the surface that means an npc leaves and you and your friends stay underground. on two occasions, this led me to deliberately throwing matches because i felt the NPCs on the other side deserved the win more than my guys. hades, as much as i hate it for a bunch of other reasons, did pull a really cool maneuver in making the constant death and grinding repitition in-universe features of zagreus' experience and the game's themes. katana zero also goes cool places with this, taking the route of "every failed attempt is the protagonist's precognitive abilities showing him a future where he dies" and exploring what that means for him emotionally and psychologically.
so, yknow! i think there is a huge amount of super worthwhile space for failure states, whether it's by teaching you about the game's world and characters, or helping create a specific experience by pushing you to avoid them, or by simply integrating them directly into the narrative and interrogating them... i think they're pretty neat and a storytelling tool that's unique to games :)
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
