Failure has always relative consequences, especially in videogames.

The oldest and most common consequence of failure in games comes from the common sense. After a failure there is a punishment: in classic videogames, when the player makes a mistake, he's punished by depleting a life from his stock and, in most of the cases, it requires him to start over part of his play. The ultimate failure happens when the player loses all of his lifes and the punishment is losing player progress, his hard-earned score and, during the arcade age, his right to play.

Right after the homecoming of videogames, this punishment became more and more mild: since the player can't be denied of another run, failure now just depletes a generous health bar and player progress is saved very often so losing a life just means losing few minutes of gameplay.

Failure generates an exhortation more than a punishment. That's a slight tinge of meaning with huge consequences: while the immediate punishment of the player also suggests him to get better, starting from scratch every time can be frustrating for beginners and repetitive for veterans. So games decided to hit the player self-esteem instead of his time: despite dying in modern games is not a great deal, nobody wants to die multiple time in a row. The player is just noticed with red bloody borders and frequent checkpoints reload which requires him to perform the same actions over and over again that he's brute forcing the game thru the ending.

Nowadays failing in videogames even gained a positive meaning out of necessity: with inflation of the death and respawn and the impossibility to predict the average length of a gameplay session and the players skills due to the increased size of the market, failing in modern videogames is just another way to explore its content. Yeah: failure is even rewarded.

Messing up a heist in Grand Theft Auto (2001) is the easiest way to raise the game difficulty: the more chaotic the player is, hitting pedestrian during an escape due to bad driving or shooting (or intentionally), the more aggressive the cops will be, making the game both more challenging and rewarding in term of fun and in-game currency and weapons.

In some games, GTA included, the story requires the player to fail in order to proceed. Moral choices in modern games even let the player decide what failing means and literally select the consequences. In roguelike procedural videogames a small random part of its contents library is playable in each run, so the only way to see what the whole game has to offer is failing to death multiple times.

A softer approach to failure allow the player to accept his limits, that ironically can overtake just playing and explore more games and having more fun, fueling some sort of virtuous circle instead of cutting out newbie players.

Educational videogames figured it out ages ago: despite their boring pace, questionable quality and random design, games are always gentle on player failure, guiding him to the end of the exercise despite his streak of errors. But answering correctly to the questions without hearing that irritating error jingle a single time can be a good incentive to get better on multiplications.

Speaking of that... plot!

Are you ready to learn how to do multiplications, kids? Follow the professor Chippy to the third chapter of the (fictional) educational videogame series Funemathica and meet Jasmine the chicken at his aunt farm!

First you've to input your name: select the letters from the keyboard on the screen, then press DELETE to clear the last letter or DONE! when done. Then you can choose to follow the Chippy lesson on multiplication or test your skills with the easy exercises or the multiplication table exercises! Have fun!

(Want to share something? You can find me on Twitter!)

Install / Add to home View game sources ...or play it online below!