Success in Game/Life: Notes on Reality Is Broken, Part IV

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In the previous post we have introduced four traits of game that could guide or enhance game design on a philosophical level. We will take a look at the rest three traits that the author mentions in Reality Is Broken¹. These traits are mostly concerned with defining success in a game, and raise that sense of achievement to novel construals of reality. We are gonna explore how game could be designed to offer a path to success in both virtuality and reality: an attitude for success, a purpose of grandeur and a levelling-up worldview.

As usual, it should be reminded that the theories presented are drawn loosely from a psychological perspective. These statements, no matter how well constructed in their own field, cannot explain game or gamification as an entirety. The traits mentioned should be approached as a checklist during your project instead of a cookbook.

Crafting an attitude for success.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour. — T. Capote

What creates success? While the answer to this question is complicated in reality, it’s much more simplified in game: keep playing. The rules, feedbacks and objectives in a game are all built to aid a player towards success and its enjoyment. Similar to building a maze, one must ensure a game has at least one successful path no matter how difficult the whole map gets.

To keep playing, a player needs to have an attitude for success: a positive reception of failures, and an enduring expectation for success. We will take a look at how they could be cultivated by game design.

A positive reception of failures.

A game should bring a positive feedback for failure instead of a negative one. The player must not give up after a failure. Instead, he needs to believe that as long as enough effort is devoted, success can be achieved.

The first step to produce positive failure is to glorify it. We can emphasise the outcome of a failure by exaggeration, irony, comedy and so on. Failure is treated as a special kind of “reward” rather than a hideous “scar” that one tries to ignore. Glorification brings encouragement rather than discouragement or humiliation. The player can now attain more motivation with this belief: “I failed this time, but have learned what works and what doesn’t. To reach my goal I just need to keep trying!”.

In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the mechanism of positive failure is manifested straightforwardly. As the title suggests, the player can resurrect his character if he has enough “charges”. Moreover, a disease named “dragonrot” spreads further as more resurrections are used. The disease can deactivate quest lines offered by NPCs if it gets severe enough.

The positive side of “dragonrot” mechanism is buried deep in its implications. It only incurs penalty on the player if he uses too many resurrections. However, before “dragonrot” actually takes effect, a player’s failure (death) is glorified by this mechanism. The burden of “dragonrot” becomes a great motivation every time he resurrects, because he is literally allowed to try again by using a potential failure. A player is trading failures for success actively by using the resurrection. This is definitely a positive handling of failures. An attitude of “I must succeed this time” is imbued rather than “I should not try again/harder”.

A second step to cultivate positive failure is to give it a sense of control. As beings of reason, we won’t try any further if we deem the cause of failure as belonging to anything but ourselves. Thus, a game must rely on causality rather than stochasticity when it comes to designing failure and success.

The statement above doesn’t ban the use of chances in a game. Rather, it bans the framing of probability as a factor that a player can’t control. We must try to guide a player to think he has full control, either by reason or belief. Even for casino games like poker, every player is still motivated by the belief that his “luck” determines success in the next bet.

By adding appropriate mechanisms to handle failures, we could guide a player to obtain this sense of control.

For causality-based failures, the method is simple: provide real-time, direct feedback for them. A player might step on a landmine, for instance, and immediately sees himself blown up and the screen of death.

For probability-based failures, a reasonable way to manifest control is to frame the failure on not following certain beliefs. These beliefs could be rendered as specific objects or events in a game. For instance, in lottery, many people purchase numbers based on their birthdays. This belief gives a fake sense of “control”, or causality, to a purely probabilistic outcome. Adding this to a game of chance won’t break the rules, but will certainly influence a number of players to play more rounds.

An enduring expectation for success.

From a viewpoint of game dynamics, a game offers the process of achieving the final objective instead of direct rewards. The fun in a game lies in learning how to play it well, but not playing it well. A game, therefore, will always be a consumable product: as we go from novices to masters, a game gradually loses its attractiveness.

Thinking further along this line, game becomes fun by offering an enduring expectation for success and purposefully witholding the reach of that success. Although there are many ways to promise this mechanism, a common source of inspiration lies in the long-term jobs found in reality: these jobs are proven to offer enduring learning curve for achieving their objectives. The job of a game designer, in this perspective, is to gamify these jobs well enough so that they are fun to perform. I recommend reading the first post on this subject for more details if you are interested.

Offering a purpose of grandeur.

Grandeur refers to any intention, any act and any result that has greater significance than an individual’s. Yet the interesting thing is, these intentions, acts and results often come from just an individual. According to buddhism, in these moments, a transcendence in significance occurs, along with extreme happiness.² Even if we don’t believe in any religion, the construction of numerous modern monuments speaks the same fact: grandeur is one of the most wanted things for a human being.

Game offers grandeur in buckets. We might not have the chance to experience grandeur in reality: that often requires lifelong efforts and crucial chances to achieve. In game, however, we could get the ingredients for grandeur easily. Specifically, game can offer the following building parts:

• Sense of Duty: A vast background story in game connects an individual with grandeur. This story imbues us with a sense of duty: there is something bigger than ourselves in this world, and it’s worth fighting for. We could assume this duty by our actions, and we could actually experience it by the outcomes of our actions.
• Vast Action Space: Game offers a much larger action space than reality. We might be living in a tiny bedroom with barely enough assets in reality. In game, however, we could be among the stars, watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. The vast space for action in game offers limitless future possibilities, and ensures that grandeur can really be achieved and perceived.
• Great Project: The project a player is trying to accomplish is often not short of greatness. It requires a sheer amount of time, space and human efforts to finish. For these projects, the grandeur is factual, no different from building a rocket together. Many games offer such projects for the player community, encouraging them to experience real grandeur not found in reality.

We could approach the invocation of grandeur by brainstorming the three features mentioned above. More importantly, they all hint this fact: grandeur doesn’t have to come from a resource-consuming monster project.

As long as we can get a good story, a freedom to act and a large group of people working together, we could always have grandeur. This is an important revelation because we now know a game doesn’t really need AAA level investments to produce grandeur. It is achievable even for indie game designers. In fact, I think finding a low-cost, innovative way to do this reflects a much deeper understanding of game.

Having a levelling-up worldview.

This is the last trait I’m gonna discuss, mentioned in Reality Is Broken. A levelling-up worldview refers to the fact that reality could be interpreted as a game in many settings. We can solve many personal distress by assuming this worldview.

Reclaiming control in life.

Depression is often caused by a sense of losing control. We are pressured when a sheer contrast of ideal and reality happens. We feel weak, anxious and sad at these moments because we believe we are unable to control the situation. We then evade actions, and this creates further pressures to cause more anxiety.

Game lets us reclaim sense of control with its clear rewards and feedback. It also cultivates a positive attitude for failure to fight against anxiety.

By treating reality like a game, we could gradually escape anxiety or depression. We could set up game elements for our daily activities, such as rewards for socialising, to “play the game”. We will work towards positive construals by regaining our sense of control.

Attaining vicarious reinforcement.

Vicarious reinforcement utilises the power of idols to encourage one’s own reinforcement. It follows two principles:

• If others have success/rewards by performing some action, we tend to do the same thing.
• If others have failure/penalty from some action, we tend to avoid those behaviours.

In a game integrating vicarious reinforcement, the idol is often setup to be a virtual avatar or character that could reflect our own status. For instance, in Nike+ a virtual character accompanies the player in his exercises. It receives penalty or rewards, and interacts with the player for his progress.

We could set up vicarious reinforcement for almost any reality tasks. The virtual idols will motivate us to accomplish them. Similarly, having an idol also helps us avoid unwanted behaviours.

Accommodating different belief structures.

In the lecture series of Maps of Meaning by Prof. Jordan B. Peterson, the element of play is mentioned as a deeply rooted preparation for socialisation. One of the main features of game, as Peterson suggests, is that it cultivates a cooperative environment out of competitive rules. The game must be competitive since a final objective needs to be set, but all players need to cooperate on following the rules, and be voluntary in playing the game. Peterson further states that the line drawn between reality and game is vague to say the best, manifested in the example that a Vietnam player could make more money in a massive online multi-player game than in reality.

I will probably talk about Prof. Peterson’s lectures and their relationship with game in more details in another post. For now, I would like to focus on the implication of his statements. From these observations, we could hypothesise that different belief structures can at least coexist under a game system. This means that instead of dominating or subjugating, we could afford an environment with different belief systems. For an individual, this idea implies a much painless way to operate in a society.

Adopting a levelling-up worldview allows us to accept different belief systems from other people without sacrificing our own. Moreover, it can help us reach goals that need others’ cooperation. Essentially, gamifying reality reduces the complex situation to simpler game systems that could accommodate more belief/value structures, a common ground for people to work on. We will review this statement in another post.

Recap

We have discussed what success requires in a game: a positive attitude, a purpose of grandeur and a levelling-up worldview. Together they help players enjoy the process of success, not commonly found in reality. With this post, we conclude our investigation of the ideas in Reality Is Broken. Again, I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in furthering their understanding of games.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned.