Deep in the wilds of Fairfax Virginia, 3,000 intrepid gamers got together to make MAGFest 2011 the largest occasion of the yearly Music and Gaming convention to date.  Games were played, rockin’ music was listened to, and panels were attended.  One panel in particular stuck with me, as the topic was something I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time:

“Losing Should be Fun.”

The hosts of the panel (the esteemed Gaming Intellectuals from GeekNights) posited that the act of losing a game should be as fun —  if not more fun — than winning the game itself.  They used the allegory of a D&D campaign, wherein the “war stories” of the players are almost never about the triumph of a party over a particular evil, but about how your mage completely botched an attack roll and accidentally blew up half your party.  They are, to use a poker analogy, the “bad beat stories,” the stories of losses where you come away looking like the hero, or of something so completely ludicrous occuring that you can’t even fathom how it happened in the first place.  The fun doesn’t come necessarily from the loss itself, but from the retelling of the story.

Another great example they gave took a different tack on the “losing shoud be fun” conundrum, wherein if the losing isn’t fun, then just remove the whole concept of losing from the game in the first place.  In Super Meat Boy, the concept of “death” is almost an afterhought – merely a stepping stone in figuring out what it takes to get through a level in one piece.  When you die, there’s no reload, no game over, no decrease of remaining lives – you’re just back at the start of the level.  Death and reloading are so instantaneous that it takes away the frustration that comes with losing in the first place – you’re right there ready to try it again as soon as you die.

I started thinking about these concepts, and how they applied to some games that I’ve played in the past.  I wholeheartedly agree with the two points the panelists set forth, and I think the best two best examples I can come up with are those of X-Com, and Prince of Persia.

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It is October 1994. I am on my way back from the mall with a brand-new copy of Final Fantasy III for the SNES tucked safely in a bag next to me. I would love to be reading the manual on the way home like I usually do, but I am the one driving this time with my recently-acquired learner’s permit. When the arduous fifteen-minute drive ends, I rush into the house and head straight downstairs to the basement, where the SNES patiently waits for me. Tearing open the box, I settle in on the couch and begin to read the instruction booklet. Yes, I am one of those people. Once I’ve learned about how to set Espers and seen that I will be able to equip Relics with a multitude of effects, I am more ready than ever.

Running back upstairs to the kitchen, I grab a can of Coke and a box of Harvest Crisp crackers. Supplies in hand, I head back downstairs and pull my comfy, if somewhat threadbare, beanbag chair over in front of the 26″ CRT Panasonic TV and slide the cartridge into the SNES with a satisfying click.  Flipping the system on, I settle back into my beanbag and let the first strains of the opening theme wash over me. I have, of course, run the SNES sound through the stereo to take advantage of the bigger speakers.

I am hooked pretty much instantly. The moment those mechs come walking through the snow towards the lights in the distance, I know that this is where I’m going to be spending most of my time for the next few weeks.

Somewhere just outside the basement door, my father is splitting wood for the stove. Winter is coming soon.  The rhythmic thuds of his axe striking the logs punctuate the theme of Narshe.

I should be out helping him, but I’ve got a world to save.

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Gamasutra released an interview today with Jonathan Pelling, creative director at 2k Marin, about the upcoming reboot of the X-Com franchise.  Now, as someone who looks upon the original game as something akin to a masterpiece, I am perhaps a little biased towards the conversion into an FPS.  That said, when I read things like this:

I think once the fans start to realize that this is a game that adheres to the core XCOM tenets — it may not be aesthetically the same, and of course it’s not a turn based tactical game anymore, it’s a first person shooter — but it still maintains that essential vibe, that fear and tension of going up against an unknowable enemy and being in charge, and running an organization, and making all the big choices.

…it can’t help but reinforce my feelings that these guys really have no clue what X-Com is actually about. To say that they are stripping away everything about the game – the setting, the overall story, and most especially the mechanics – and then claiming that they are going to “maintain the essential vibe” sounds like nothing more than weak marketing mumbo-jumbo.  Sure, if you view the “essential vibe” of X-Com as being about fighting an enemy and making choices, then, yeah… your new game will probably have that.  You know what other games have that?  LOTS.  If I distill Modern Warfare down to its “essential vibe” of fighting bad guys with guns, then please allow me to offer you my new Modern Warfare design: I’ve changed the setting to WWII, and made the whole thing turn based, from a “grand strategy” perspective.  I call it Panzer General, but that’s just a working title.

At any rate, this interview has done little to encourage me that 2k Marin are going to hit a home run here, but as the game isn’t out, I will have to reserve final judgment.  It may, in the end, turn out to be an excellent game; but that doesn’t mean it’s X-Com.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on a throwback gaming binge. After finishing up The Ur-Quan Masters, I found the entire X-Com series on sale on Steam for a mere $2, which was impossible to pass up.  The original X-Com has always been near the top of my list of favorite games of all time, and being able to get the whole series in an easily-playable format was a golden opportunity.  In fact, I was so happy about it, I decided to make a gift of it to a friend who had never played any of them, explaining that it was vitally important that he play the original right away.

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If someday I am standing at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter looks down at the sum total of my life and asks, “You played Civilization 2 once for an entire weekend? Like, 32 out of 48 hours? Seriously?” I will answer him, head held high, “Yes, yes I did.  And it was totally awesome.”

It is true that in my younger days, I put in many a marathon session of gaming.  Entire nights or weekends could blow by as I sat immersed in whatever game was occupying my attention at the time.  An entire Christmas vacation could be lost to Final Fantasy VI, or nights that should have been spent writing history papers were spent tracking down Sectoids in X-Com. Even up to my years in college, I still might put off more pressing concerns to stay up until the wee hours of the morning waiting to see what was coming next in Silent Hill or the like.

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I have left a trail of dead behind me from the forests of Ivalice to the farmlands of North America.

In my defense, I only killed a few of them on purpose.

Characters die in games all the time, but when I am the one responsible for getting them killed, it tends to resonate with me a little more deeply.  I’m not talking about when someone gets dropped in battle and I have to throw a Mythic Bird Feather on them; I’m talking about when a character is dead and gone and not coming back. RPGs and story-driven FPSes can strike down a beloved character to try and tug at the player’s heartstrings, but these deaths are ultimately just stepping-stones in the storytelling process; no matter what choices I may make in the game, Aeris is still going to end up with a sword through her sternum.    

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