What Makes Losing Fun

[Sharpe]

As I read the various threads enjoying the recent competitive games like BF 1942 and WarCraft III, one thing jumps out at me: these games must have figured out how to make losing fun. On average, in the big scale, players in head to head games are going to end up losing 50% of their games (assuming no AI opponents). Only the "elite" are going to have consistently high winning percentages. For the bulk of the playerbase, there is a pretty good chance that the player will lose any particular game, and if they play several games per session, most players will walk away with one or two losses (or more). And yet, head to head gaming is increasingly popular. So what did these companies figure out that makes losing fun? I have a couple of theories:

1)The Bad News Bears Factor. At the end of the classic 70s movie, the Bears lose to the hated Yankees in a hard fought, respect-earning battle. The Yankees come over and say that they now respect the Bears and are generally gracious in victory. The Bears' response? They give the Yankees a Bronx Cheer and shout "just wait til next year!". I think this idea of coming back to wreak some vengeance in the next game is key to making losing tolerable: as long as the game keeps a level playing field in each game, offers quick rematch options, and lets players "try again next game", then losing is not so bad. In fact, losing many times to a hated opponent can often make the eventual victory so much sweeter (assuming of course that you can beat them, if given enough chances). If a game does NOT afford a rematch, then losing can seem very depressing.

2)Low time investment. Similar to the discussions on save/reload: if a game sucks up a big chunk of time and then rewards you with death or defeat, most players get frustrated. If there's a chance you can lose (or die) then its best if the game keeps the time investment down. For example, WarCraft III is IMO an inferior overall strategy game to Kohan and yet it is far more popular. One of the factors is that the average game of Kohan lasts roughly twice as long as WCIII: if you get on a losing streak it can ruin a whole evening and since you play fewer gamers per session, the odds of walking away with at least victory per session are reduced. I think this last point is key: many players keep playing through losses until they score a big win and then log off, satisfied for the session. One good win can overcome many losses in terms of overall enjoyment. Thats why short games with the ability to have multiple tries at victory per session tend to be more popular than longer, more involved head to head games.

3)A level playing field. One thing that crippled head to head play in MMORGPs (IMO) is the concept of character development: if you lose a battle and the victors take your stuff and become stronger while you lose stuff and become weaker, then your chances at a rematch, at vengeance, and at evening the score is less. Many players who suffer multiple losses grow frustrated and quit. If victory makes the strong stronger, then the losers have less incentive to try again. If on the other hand every game is a clean slate, then you can always say to yourself "OK I know this map now, I'm gonna kick butt" or "OK, here's my new and improved strategy/tactic/build order - watch out". If however you are stuck playing a class/faction/race that just sucks, then your desire to try again and tolerate losses is reduced. If you don't have a "fair" chance then why try? (that is the way many players think IMO).

Along the lines of the above, I think there's an obvious 4th criteria which no one has really done well yet (though BNet is trying):

4)Matching competition. If you fire up a game and know from the teams that you are going to lose guaranteed, most players will not even want to try. This is a serious problem in the small world of online Kohan - since there are only a few dozen regulars, you can often look at the teams and say "oh well..." before the game starts. This leads to all kinds of weird team-mate maneuvering, which can often make set up an annoying political process. On the other hand, most random matching systems thus far seem pretty damn random :0. To my mind, a good matching system would be one that gives each team a more less equal chance of victory, all else being equal. Not sure if that can be done with the current anonymity of the net, but its worth a shot IMO.

So what do folks think? Are those the main factors? Other important factors? What makes people keep coming back to a game that they have a high chance of losing?

Dan

[Gordon Cameron]

Losing isn't fun, but if losing is more likely, then winning becomes sweeter when you finally manage it. I suspect it feels better to win Wimbledon than to win Half-Life, partly because it is so much easier to lose Wimbledon. The winner's joy is purchased at the cost of 127 losers' frustrations.

[Bub, Andrew]

I suspect it feels better to win Wimbledon than to win Half-Life, partly because it is so much easier to lose Wimbledon. The winner's joy is purchased at the cost of 127 losers' frustrations.

I suspect it's the crowd reaction, fame, money, etc., too. I mean, I didn't get anything but an amusing choice of ending cutscene when I won at the Half-Life.... What did Tiger Woods say recently? It was about two golf tourneys. One is prestigous, but he was more interested in the other one. When asked why he said he could think of "one million reasons."

[Gordon Cameron]

I suspect it's the crowd reaction, fame, money, etc., too.

True, the reward is a nice touch too. But I doubt that's why Pete Sampras, already a multi-multi-multi millionaire, felt so good about winning the U.S. Open last month.

As for crowd reaction, well I agree it would be pretty cool if 20,000 spectators started chanting my name when I killed Nihilanth. :)

[Bub, Andrew]

Taking this whole thing seriously, I don't expect to win at multiplayer games. Or any game really. I play to win but my ultimate goal really, what makes me happy, is a good performance. I don't mind losing if I played well, in other words.

Like this epic tank battle I played against Robert Mayer in Combat Mission. I nailed him with a brilliant ambush at the start. Took out half his tanks in two awesome turns... then I failed to take into account his reinforcements and got cocky. I went after him to mop up and he creamed me. Loads of fun! He really should email me for a rematch. Yep, he really should....

[Desslock]

I think you're overlooking the obvious -- losing may not be "fun", but it's tolerated or acceptable because the gameplay is enjoyable. It's not necessarily the end result, it's the getting there -- missed and made opportunities, seeing tactics unfold, plans come to fruition -- even if you lose constantly in a shooter, you'll still get the opportunity to shoot a couple of guys in the head and have a few laughs.

[chet]

Because in art, there are no winners or losers.


Sorry.

Chet

[ciparis]

Don't forget that you also get better as you go. These games are successful partly because of the diversity of strategies you can employ. You'll see something new in a good percentage of well-played games with various people, and this learning and improving adds to the replay appeal.

[Alan Au]

1. Losing is fun because it makes winning more enjoyable.

2. Losing can be fun if it provides entertainment.

One example I like to use is insta-failure stealth missions. In NOLF, being spotted during a stealth mission drops you straight to the "you've failed" screen. In contrast, Thief lets you continue playing (usually), but things become much more difficult. In Thief, failure is fun because the player has an opportunity to recover and correct the mistake.

In any challenging game, the player is probably going to "lose" a few times. Why not make the experience interesting?

- Alan

[Anonymous]

One way to make losing fun would be a flexible game structure--either through mission trees that branch or missions that are "dynamically" created (as they say) as a game unfolds. Playing badly wouldn't mean losing (unless you got wiped out); it would just mean you'd have a different experience--perhaps running a guerilla war. Success wouldn't be measured by the mission, but over the course of the whole game, which could end many different ways.

I don't know whether anyone's done this yet, but that was the design of Sierra's (then Codemasters', then nobody's) Navy Seals game, which was in development c. '98-99.

Peter

[fastFRENTIC3dINFLUENCE]

like wing commander's branching missions?

[Anonymous]

Yup, but on a larger scale and with more flexibility. I'd really like to see a game create itself in response to what you do or don't. Winning or losing wouldn't be , but the game wouldn't fixate on success. The point would be simply -playing-. The point would be just fun, in whatever form you find it.

Peter

[Anonymous]

sorry, left out some words: "wouldn't be irrelevant"

po

[Kevin Perry]

You do have to be careful about the perception of winning and losing if you do have a tracked game.

The Wing Commander series had this, but I never saw the 'losing' track, because I'd always replay the mission until I got the 'winning' track. And I doubt I was alone.

In a pure gamey game, like 1942, I don't care if I win or lose, because there's nothing at stake. But in a game with story elements, I'll replay until I get to be the winner, because what's at stake is the little story with me as the winner.

Panzer General did this pretty well. IIRC, there was the Winning track, but also the Really Winning track. Probably a losing track too, but I couldn't tell you :)

[Anonymous]

You're right. You have to avoid defining how the player is playing.

One way would be to drop the mission structure--which creates stop signs where the player's bound to reflect on whether he's performing optimally--and have the game simply flow seamlessly along. Like a sim.

Warzone did this a bit--that is, it kept the mission structure, but it kept you on the same map, with new destinations and priorities. (Good game. I'm surprised they never followed it up.)

Peter

[Met_K]

Because in art, there are no winners or losers.


Sorry.

Unless you happen to star in a movie with Carrot Top. Take a guess at which one that is.

[wumpus]

I dunno. I'm gonna go play Warcraft III. I'm "SpunkyMuffin" on US East if anyone wants to add me to their friends list.

My other account is "Wumpus"; I created this new account so I could go random exclusively. I've burned out on race specialization. I currently find it much more enjoyable to go into a game and try new strategies with the four different races.

Anyway. I'm level 10, with a ~75% win ratio. I will play with anybody, so look me up.

[Enidigm]

Actually i think the key in any game where losing and winning are meaningful are in games in which there seems to be a real sense of skill in victory. Ask how many people enjoy losing to a hacker in any game in any genre. Widely disparate games from Il-2 Sturmovik to Counterstrike to Warcraft all give players the sense that if they think about it more, practise some more, play more games, they will get better and start to win. Pinning down an absolute definition of what skill seems implausable, but most players know intuitively when gameplay quirks, imbalances or designs cross the line either way. A jaded Age of Kings player might lament that the game is all 'repitition and build orders', that "perfect play"is nothing but execution, whilst otoh if the game were better balanced be more accepting of clicking speed as an important but not sole ingredient in the skill pie.

Matching competition can be a very divisive problem facing competitive games, especially those with smaller online communities. Blizzard powergamers tend to be more social on the whole, but Age of..X powergamers developed into exclusive, snobbish cliques because of the open ended hosting systems. Not ever knowing if RandomInternetGamer1234 was uber or clueless they eventually just stopped taking applications into the expert players club and would host games only amongst themselves and the other top players. It meant that, because of the complexity of the game and its smaller online contingent, you had to be invited into the top circles once you became skilled to a point or else be damned to intermediate pick-up game hell. This was the main reason i quit playing Ensemble games online. All that above was just to show how the dominating force behind entire gaming communities' development are often the matchmaking systems supporting them; losing when you have a stupid teammate is not fun.

I totally disagree with the whole concept of low time investment; games like Diablo 2 take hours to build a character which may end up being a dead end. This is just typical potshot at the Big Popular Bastard as being dumbed down vs. brilliant but unloved niche game. The reason Kohan didn't catch on was because of its 1996, Red Alert 1 era graphics. Actually the deeper the game the more time players will end up spending trying to master it; and i don't think the discreet times per match or game are particularly influential unless unusually different. 20 min vs. 40 min? Doesn't really matter imo. Its only 5 min. vs. 2 hours that time per game really starts to add up. Not trying to divert the point of the thread of course :).

[Alan Au]

Dynamic campaigns would be great except for two things.

The first is level of complexity. I mean, if you have a win-path and lose-path for every mission, worst-case is an exponential increase in complexity. More realistically you get something more like the Wing Commander mission tree, where winning a mission in the lose path can bump you back up into the win path.

Of course, you could just go with open-ended mission design with assets varying based on previous mission performance. This leads to the second problem, that of the positive feedback loop. Sure, you failed to defend the convoy in the last mission, so now you have fewer supplies, so it's harder to win the current mission, etc.

There are couple of intermediate solutions, like offering more strike missions to a player who does well and more protect missions to a player having trouble. Unfortunately, those sorts of missions still tend to feel very generic because they're usually disconnected from the overall campaign or storyline.

Maybe I'm just being picky. :D

- Alan

[Kevin Perry]

Alan, you're right, of course.

A truly dynamic campaign in a mission-based game is a Holy Grail of sorts. It would be very difficult to pull off.

Probably the only way to get it to work is in a game with a Strategic-level overlay, dropping into tactical gameplay when necessary. But this is no longer a mission-based game, now is it?

Still, with scripting blocks and instancing, a little fuzzy logic. . . you'd have to have very alert designers and coders to get it to work right. And even then, you'd have, at best, a situation in which the best-case scenario is a game that plays just like a mission-based game to begin with. Its magic, if any, would only appear on multiple plays.

[Alan Au]

And even then, you'd have, at best, a situation in which the best-case scenario is a game that plays just like a mission-based game to begin with. Its magic, if any, would only appear on multiple plays.
Yeah, that's the kicker. Even if you do it right, there's a good chance nobody will notice.

- Alan

[Jason McCullough]

Panzer General did this pretty well. IIRC, there was the Winning track, but also the Really Winning track. Probably a losing track too, but I couldn't tell you :)

The losing track is actually much more fun than the winning track! With a copy of the campaign tree, you can plan out a path that'll take you through virtually every scenario in the game; the most interesting ones are stuff like Anzio and Sevastopol.

http://dlh.net/chtdb/chtview.php?lang=ger&sys=pc&disp=e3576&act=print

[Dave Long]

Once again, the great Warlords Battlecry 2 has done the dynamic single player campaign right and it looks like no one noticed.

--Dave

[DennyA]

I will play with anybody, so look me up.

That sounds so... Desperate. :-)

[milo]

And even then, you'd have, at best, a situation in which the best-case scenario is a game that plays just like a mission-based game to begin with. Its magic, if any, would only appear on multiple plays.
Yeah, that's the kicker. Even if you do it right, there's a good chance nobody will notice.
Not necessarily. Just give the player the option to pick what mission he will play next, and ensure that the mission generator coughs up a reasonable cross-section of mission variety each strategic "turn." As the player gains rank, let him jump around from unit to unit. He may feel like flying a fighter escort one mission, a strike the next, and commanding a destroyer squadron, or driving a tank (or mech) the third. Just having the choice will make it clear to the player that the game is not just a pre-scripted set of events, but an experience in which he takes an active role.

Of course, this will make it harder to have the backstory tightly interwoven with the actual gameplay. But if the gameplay is enjoyable enough, that might not be a problem.

--milo
http://www.starshatter.com

[Murph]

I'm one of the guys that, as Desslock said, enjoys the journey far, far more than the end result. Personally, I'd rather lose a hard-fought match than win an easy victory.

I enjoy playing, win or lose -- especially multiplayer games, but usually I play those over a LAN with my buddies, so that's maybe a slightly different experience than what most of you are talking about.

[wumpus]

What if you were playing against Hitler?

[Bub, Andrew]

Just a random thing...

I was playing BF 1942 today, Stalingrad map and there was this guy who called himself Adolf Hitler. Sigh. Anyway, Mr. Hitler was a newbie and he didn't understand how the Balanced Teams servers work. He kept respawning on a different team from which he died. This led him to, in caps no less, stridently cry:

AdolfHitler: HOW COME NOBODY WANTS ME ON THEIR TEAM??!?

Oh, would history have unfolded in that manner...

[deanco]

GTA3 is the only game I didn't mind losing at, because something else wild and wacky would happen and you'd be off, running from the cops or whatever. So that took the sting out of losing.

I don't mind losing, as long as I do *something* good. And my definition of 'something' is pretty broad. But when I get totally owned, I hate it.

DeanCo--