Jesper Juul’s discussion was really interesting, and provided a lot of insight into the background of the philosophical dissection of failure. However, I have one central issue with his arguments and ideas.

Basically he never discusses the conflict of seeking a ‘negative’ ending when given the choice between multiple outcomes. In recent years many games employ multiple endings to help reinforce the idea of meaningful action within a narrative. While the discussion of these kinds of endings could constitute a thesis, one important, and likely unforeseen, aspect of their implementation is the idea of ‘best endings’. This trend started back in the day of old JRPGS, and usually involved the completion of additional content in order to receive a more satisfying or explanatory resolution to the game’s narrative. This makes sense for the time, you do what the game wants you to, often overcoming additional and sometimes more extreme challenges, and the game rewards you. Basic game design. However, with games like Telltale’s Walking Dead et al., games culture nowadays is running in to an interesting conundrum. Basically, valid but emotionally negative endings are avoided, to the point of basically cheating.

Since we have access to Telltale game choice statistics, it’s not hard to see how this trend manifests itself. In any of the Telltale games traditionally ‘Good’ actions are almost universally chosen over more ‘Negative’ options, even though both paths (usually/should) create equally valid narrative threads. This is pretty concerning for a few reasons. But first and foremost it means that the design choice to craft scenarios based around themes or internal logic can be put in jeopardy simply based on the fact that people will tend towards externally motivated actions as their deciding factor. However, what pertains to Juul’s discussion is that people still greatly tend to avoid tragedy and failure, even if that isn’t what the game is portraying, when it is seen as a choice rather than a result of the inability to overcome an obstacle. A topic I’d have been eager to see him tackle.