The chapter introduces three paths for player to achieve success, skill, chance and labor. On the path of skill, failure serves as a way of learning, which improves player’s skill and prepare him to conquer the challenge and succeed. For chance, there is an equal possibility to win when seeing the big picture, but every role of the game distributes the possibility to win unevenly, which means failure and success are based on luck. From my personal perspective, chance offers a great excuse for players when they lose the game, especially for PVP game. It would be humiliating to be beaten merely for lack of skill and boring if be beaten only for inadequate devoted labor, so chance comes as a way to engage players with the game again when they fail. For the path of labor, there is no concept of failure, which means players are impossible to lose. To achieve success, players need to keep putting time and labor on the game and accumulate more. Sometimes there is no success for labor-based games.
Besides the three paths, I want to propose the fourth path, information. Information is somewhat like skill, as they are both gained through the process of learning. However, the difference is that skill is to find a way or strategy to overcome challenges, while information could only help player overcome challenges more easily. For example, the skill of fighting with a monster could be escaping its attacks through rolling, while the information of this process could be whether there is a trap to hurt the monster. One example of the games which purely bases on information is puzzle-solving game. Though it requires observation skill to discover the information, the information could come from somewhere else, like the game guide or the player’s previous experience of playing this game.
From my perspective, when designing the failure for players, fairness is a must for PVP games and could be neglected for PVE games. For PVP games, players need fair rules so that they can prove their skills are better than others, since a key source of entertainment in PVP game is socializing. However, this does not mean that the PVP game should be completely fair. When the rule is completely fair, players wouldn’t have the excuse for their failure, which could cause them give up the game quickly, so chance and labor are also needed. For PVE game, fairness doesn’t quite matter as fighting someone stronger than you could be the challenge of PVE game. As long as there is a fixed rule, fairness is unnecessary for PVE games.
Then I want to illustrate my ideas more clearly by raising the PVE game Hollow Knight as an example. Hollow Knight is a 2D Metroidvania game featuring unique art style, smooth actions, great music and fantastic map design. It’s a combination of the paths of skill, chance, labor and information. Player needs to fight with monsters with little allowance for making mistakes, which requires skill. When fighting with some kinds of monsters, their attack involves certain randomness, which requires chance and offers player an excuse for failure. Player could discover several items in the scene to improve their abilities. Regarding information, there are several hidden places for the player to explore. Sadly, the game doesn’t provide much guidance, which somewhat stops players from succeeding through information although it could encourage map discovery. However, players could still collect information from game guide and explore the hidden places to strengthen themselves. Since it’s a PVE game which the player fights with the NPCs who are stronger than the main character, the fairness of the game is neglected while remaining certain rules.
For video games nowadays, multiple paths to success are designed to enable different players to discover what is fun to them, thus improving the players’ game experience. As video game developers, we should combine different paths to achieve success in our game to make our games enjoyable for larger group of people.