2025-08-04
Many games, when confronted with the disconnect between the gamplay vs. narrative failure states, prefer take the ludo-narrative bullet, so to speak, and just provide checkpoints, save-games or other such meta-narrative tools.
I think a lot of the time this is has to do with how games relate to violence. Many games, maybe due to design innertia or as shorthand, end up equating failure in gameplay with death or serious injury. This often shatters our connetion to the character we control, because after reloading a save, we players have information the character narratively doesn’t have. When we preentively duck for a projectile, avoid an unseen trap, choose a more correct dialogue option–when we as players make our chracter act on information accquired on the previous life–we break the immersion.
I’d say there’s a lot of interesting unexplored ground in tackling failure states head on and baking them into gameplay. Maybe in a stealth game being caught can be weasled out of through skillful dialogue or, failing thtat, force the player to re-enter the level area in some other way like social stealth games sometimes do. Maybe, if we can’t solve for it, we don’t add clearly deadly holes for our characters to fall into.
Not that all games should strive for perfectly immersive narrative (or any narrative at all), of course. Often it’s just not possible, or is simply not what the game is about. But, sometimes, those big deadly holes I think are products of that design innertia.
– rb