The masochism of a player

I’ve always found the way Mario dies in the original Super Mario Bros to be quite poetic. The way time stops, music is suddenly cut off and enemies and obstacles unexpectedly freeze in place. Mario turns to face you with a betrayed expression and raises his hands in hopelessness, as if to ask ‘what happened? I thought you had it in control’.

It’s the only moment in the game that so obtrusively breaks the fourth wall. The special death jingle plays out, as Mario raises in the air in a slapstick fashion, before falling off screen, a specific highlight of the player’s own failings.

There has been a natural trend in the industry to make games easier, under the pretext of ‘accessibility’; minimizing challenge to reduce frustration. By trivialising obstacles in the player’s path, it allows them to progress further in the game and view more of the content. This all reinforces one key idea: the player wants to win.

The obvious critical response to the removal of challenge is ‘what’s the point in defeating something if there’s nothing to overcome?’. By limiting failure, we remove the natural satisfaction gained from learning from your mistakes, increasing your skills and overcoming what you once could not. Through failure, we are told to take a step back and rethink our strategies. What this means is that success after failure leads to a much purer and intense sense of satisfaction. This gives us a more refined idea: the player wants to ultimately win but also wants to regularly experience failure.

The player will only experience frustrations if the play is not deterministic enough to afford the outcome of the result to the player’s accreditation. If the player loses, but it is not their fault, then it is only unwarranted punishment and will unavoidably lead to frustration.

This means that challenge should come from the truest source of reasoning, it should test the player not from time invested, and not from luck but from skill, and perhaps most importantly those that the game has taught them.