The only way to lose is not to play

(To paraphrase WOPR's dismissal of the underlying principle of MAD.)



Is it possible to lose a video game?

Say you are playing one of the original Mass Effect games. Your player-avatar can get caught in a crossfire at any time and die. And the game promptly restarts from the last save point. Contrast this to completing the game -- the major story points are wrapped up, the majority of the playable content has been played, and there is a nice little cutscene informing you the galaxy is saved (for the moment).

Point is the game doesn't stop until it reaches that planned ending. Failing at any moment just means going back and doing part of it over (there are certain purist players who refuse to use save games but, even then, that is an end of the game experience, not a completion). You can of course walk away at any time, but nothing changes in the game world because of this. The Reapers don't up and swarm Earth because Commander Shepard said, "The hell with it."

Now there are canonical "bad" endings you can work for. The most illustrative example I can think of at the moment is the Dawnguard expansion for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. You can join the Dawnguard and stop the vampire plot. Or you can make one simple choice and condemn the land to (literal) darkness. Thing is...you might be playing as a vampire yourself, in which case this is the good ending. It all depends on which lawn you are standing in.

Bioshock also had two endings. In the "good" ending, you die after saving some kids. In the "bad" ending, you take over the world in a reign of evil. Similarly ambiguous. KOTOR, also, you can defeat the Dark Lord or become the Dark Lord.

But these are all choices earned through completing the game. Where is the game where you can play badly enough that the Reapers win?



I'll throw out in passing there are also what are informally called "non-standard game overs." These are usually triggered when you do something unusually stupid. In Half-Life 2, if you drove the buggy over the side of a cliff you got a text screen complaining about destroying Resistance assets. And then you restarted.

There are also quicktime failures. Tomb Raider 2013 caused a bit of a stir with the graphic nature of the things (and the fact that the QTEs were so badly designed that even veteran players were triggering the death endings) To be fair, watching Lara ragdoll into a rock-strewn ravine was always part of the experience of that series. But again, these don't end the game; they just return you to the last save point.

The closest expression of what I'm talking about occurs in Batman: Arkham City in the Catwoman extra content. At one point you are playing Catwoman and are given a choice to take the door to the right and escape with your loot, leaving Batman under a pile of rocks. If you do this, Catwoman walks out of frame, the screen fades to black and the end titles play (over them, a desperate radio message explaining that with Bruce dead the Joker won). But it's a fake-out; the game rewinds -- reverses the animation, rewind noise and all -- and offers you a second chance to do it right.

Now, I cheerfully admit that a game can't render a whole new ending for every wrong door. But I'd like to see a, "you failed" ending that had as much attention as the actual game ending. Given, too, that many otherwise good games drop you out of the last boss fight to a simple still screen and a, "play again?" button.



Perhaps a better version of, "failed to play the game well" is the ending to Mass Effect 2. Thing is, what this game gives you is blink-and-you'll-miss it. To really get the full impact of your failures in Mass Effect 2 you have to play Mass Effect 3. Again, more in my upcoming review.

So this is how it works. After you've completed several key missions (about a third to one quarter of the play time for the game), you can chose to go on what seems likely to be a suicide mission. You'll actually get an in-game warning, though, if you haven't done what are called the Loyalty Missions. Basically, you have to seek out each of your team members and initiate a quest via dialog options. Then complete the quest (and it actually doesn't matter how you chose to complete it; as long as you don't walk away from the game you will "strengthen" that team member.)

So you can finish the main campaign in under eight hours. Or invest another eight hours in bonding with your crew and helping them settle any personal issues that might keep them from being totally focused during the final mission.

There is also a little bit of finesse during the actual Suicide Mission; who you assign to what task actually matters. Well; they will always succeed, and you will always succeed, regardless of whether you send the most fumble-fingered idiot in your squad to hack the computer and open the door. But...if you do so, within a scene or two someone else will die. You will lose, permanently, one of the characters you've spent hours with, conversations with, etc.

And at the end of the whole thing, the Collectors are stopped...but you can range from getting the entire team back alive to losing everyone...up to and including Commander Shepard, your own avatar (makes playing Mass Effect 3 a bit difficult, one would think).



Or perhaps this is just a problem for the subset of games that are generally described as first-person or third-person shooters, RPGs (Role Playing Games) and the like. The term sandbox game gets thrown around a lot and in the pure form there is no win or lose because there are no imposed goals, no over-arching story. In most modern hybrid RPGs there are numerous side quests and since these don't have the investment (on either Player or Developer side) it is quite possible to "lose" or otherwise achieve the bad outcome with no easy take-back.

And of course you can quite easily lose a campaign of any strategic, tactical game from Sim City to Civilization.

But a game where there is a story, a full story with an emotional arc and developed characters and where your expertise at all the elements of play, from making choices on a dialog wheel to how well you shoot, that offers the possibility that you will actually lose? That would be something different.