Learning not Losing

Making losing an enjoyable learning experience

Other than the Green Eggs and Ham interactive storybook for Windows 95 I had as a young child, every game I’ve ever owned had losing as a possible option. Even in Spyfox in Dry Cereal you could get get caught replacing the sheet music at the boat party or lose your trinkets to Mr. Pig in a game of Go Fish. To get better at something, one frequently has to fail at it, whether it’s drawing, cooking, sports, or a game. Failing find the blind spots in one’s planning, knowledge, and execution. One of the most enjoyable parts about any skill-based activity is the skill acquisition, which is a change in the ability to do a task. That means being able to do something you couldn’t do before, i.e. have failed to do in the past. Some games manipulate the player’s sense of skill acquisition by secretly lowering the difficulty or other tricks, but that’s not what I’m talking about — I’m talking about actually improving skill. More specifically, I’m talking about improving skill by losing at the macro level, especially in multiplayer games with a match format. In a previous article, I described briefly how some people may avoid strategy games because of the fear of losing. I mentioned the fear of losing in association with strategy games because it’s the genre that comes to mind when I think about losing without learning (Why aren't strategy games popular anymore?). The best example of losing in an unenjoyable way, on that side of the coin, is MOBAs.

Patterns of losing

Narrow victory, close defeat

Each pattern of losing has a different psychological impact on the losing player or players. Many times it seems like game developers design like they’re they’re trying to make a video slot machine, targeting a maximum number of games resulting in the narrow victory, close defeat loss. Many matchmaking mechanics focus on making games as close as possible. This makes players who are improving feel stuck in place. Players in even the top 10% or 1% of the community by skill still have a near-50% win rate, and even players in the bottom 10% by skill may have a near-50% win rate as well. Sometimes gameplay mechanics are fiddled with to make games feel close even when they’re not. Combine matchmaking mechanics and mechanics to make games feel close and sometimes very undesirable things happen, like a team that that loses a player mid-match knowing they’re screwed but still being forced to play out a 45-minute game. Worse, it stunts player growth. Getting blown out by a team with more skill or coordination is a great learning experience. So is getting destroyed after flaming your own teammate until he quits. Narrow victory, close defeat is awesome when it happens naturally but not as a product of deception.

No-fault loss

On the topic of deception and chicanery from game developers, Blizzard loves to prevent blame (and learning) by obscuring all of the useful stats in the game, leading to being the worst perpetrators of the no-fault loss. If you don’t know how you’ve fallen short, it’s hard to improve. In the no-fault loss, you’re told that everyone on your team did a great job but the fact that you lost is objective proof that that’s not true.

Three guesses/20 questions/a step behind

Three guesses, 20 questions, and a step behind are three variations of the same loss pattern. Three guesses is the most unfair-feeling of these types of losing. It’s not necessarily unfair, as long as the initiator has to pay a sufficient opportunity cost for initiating the scenario. However, even with a three guesses of three sequential 50-50s losing instantly to random chance 1/8th of the time is not fun and isn’t something a player can improve his skill at.

Conversely, 20 questions is fun and it is a game of skill. Given adequate time, a skilled player will figure out his opponent’s strategy and counter it. Not asking the right questions or not recognizing the strategy with sufficient clues are skill issues.

In a step behind, your opponent has the counter strategy to your counter strategy to his original strategy prepared as you launch your counter strategy. This is also a skill issue, easily solvable by having your counter strategy be decisive, counter the counter, or come out in-tempo with the strategy it is countering. Essentially, this is timed 20 questions instead of turn-based.

Good comeback factor/bad comeback factor

Good comeback factor is just making sure the decisions in the second half of the game count for just enough more than the first half of the game. This prevents the long loss.

Bad comeback factor is either like the golden snitch in Harry Potter where the end game is the only part of the game that matters or the blue shell in Mario Kart where losing into the end game is actually beneficial. Not fun, not helpful for learning, and a waste of half a game.

Long loss

The opposite of comeback factor, long loss means that a single misstep in the first bit of a game leads to an unavoidable loss after a long period of time. Sometimes these are obvious mistakes (bad build order in an RTS) which are good for learning or sometimes these are really untraceable mistakes which are really bad for learning.

Conclusion

Okay, that’s a lot of blaming the developer, but at the end of the day the ability to learn from and enjoy lost games is determined by the player. Complain about unfairness as much as you want but it averages out over sufficient games. If the game doesn’t teach well, you can learn from an expert or experiment in single player, the training mode, matches against AI, or quick match. This is how fanatics get to levels of incredible skill in the most broken fighting games like Jojo’s or X-Men vs. Street Fighter (or any EA UFC). There are people who get above 50% win rates consistently in rock-paper-scissors tournaments. To be one of these possibly insane people, you need a fierce competitive spirit, a love of the game, and enough mental resilience to take a loss and come back. Additionally, you may have to try really hard to learn. But, before you go through all that hardship and spend all that time, make sure it’s worth it. And from one friend to another, don’t reinstall League of Legends.