You Should Try Failing More Often, Detective Phelps

I feel compelled to fix my "mistakes" in games. If I haven't learned anything from games but one thing, it would be video games teach you that winning is everything. But I want to change that, the Mass Effect games are the ones that are making me stick with the tough choices that I make. I agree I want more!
 
Good article Patrick.

This is why I wish the game was more ambiguous with the interrogations and "star ratings". I would be totally cool with screwing up the interviews except for the fact that the game tells me that its wrong. If I leave an interview with a 1/4 rating then I tell myself "I fucked up, I need to do that again" but if it didn't have that then its more along the lines of "Gut feeling says I didn't get everything out of him that I could have" but I would live with the fact and move on.

Totally agree with Patrick on this one. When I play games where there are different paths to take I always forbid myself to reload and choose even if it is possible. Only exception is if bad dialog choices fool me to think they mean I do one thing but ends up being something else. The Dwayne example is true. I think I killed him too and I felt like a total dirtbag later. 
 
@orshick: I haven't started playing LA Noire yet but I think it sounds like a good idea if you weren't rated. At least not instantly. Perhaps at the end or just a comment from someone later on that you may have got the wrong guy. 
 
I will force myself not to retry on the first playthru and perhaps only go back after I finished the game to replay the cases. I am however the kind of person that always examines every nook and cranny before proceeding.

great article, i agree more games should allow for failure. I have always kind of liked  the idea of objectives in a game evolving dynamically if you fail a bit like LA noire but your failures have more of an effect that just a rating but on the game world around you.

The decision to kill Playboy X in GTA IV, for me, took about 0.5 seconds.  He was an irritating character, and when you killed him, you took ownership of his sweet studio apartment. 
 
If you killed Dwayne, PBX just gave you some money - not exactly useful in a game where you're constantly finding guns, and stealing cars anyway. 
 
- Scott

Well written, Patrick.  

The point, I feel, isn't that you can rather easily fail a case in L.A. Noire. To me, the point is that your failure yields the same results as your success, the only difference being a largely underwhelming cutscene with your section head complaining, which is always immediately ignored upon the start of the next case. 
 
Since the results are static, it only seems reasonable to try to play the game as correctly as possible. Not doing so breaks the story. It's a significant flaw in the game.

I keep quiting and resuming when I fuck up the interrogations at the end of cases. I feel cheated with lie/doubt sort of things as lie tells you the evidence you need to prove it but the conversation doesn't seem to be going in that direction so I assume doubt.

Patrick, You've just become my favourite member of the GB crew.  
  
Playing through L.A noire, I feel exactly the same way. I just feel Team Bondi should have taken this one step further, Or at least given us the option to go one step further. You're told whether you go a question right or wrong, You're told whether or not you should keep looking for evidence, You're told if you've done all you can at a particular location. I understand that in order for this to be a viable game it needs this, I just want an option to essentially change the game and remove that.

Last night I actually one starred a case. I couldn't believe it. I've been playing cases once and I've never reloaded when things went bad. Still, almost every case I've gotten 4 stars in with the exception of a couple of 3s and a couple of 5s.
 
I'd collected every piece of evidence, but I screwed up an interview and as a result someone died who either shouldn't have or at least should have given me info I needed to continue before their death. Still, I finished the case and moved on to the next, and I think that's great. I'll go back and do it correctly later, but I'm more interested in progressing through the story one case at a time than I am trying to perfect things as I go.

I redid the first Traffic cases just to see what was different with 5 Stars, but from then on just went with it. No matter how much I played though, I still cringed everytime I heard this. 
 
  

You've given me a lot to think about. Thank you for writing this.

Another great article by Klepek!  
 
I don't reload, but I did it in Mass Effect 2. Just because the suicide mission in that game brakes the point of losing characters in an RPG by taking away the surprise factor and putting in a stupid system about each character's supposed skill set.  
 
It was a good idea, but poorly executed.   
 
In L.A. Noire it has never struck me to reload a case. I take what story that comes, but I will 5 star them all later.

@gladspooky said:

I'd rather play a video game.

Enjoy your call of duty

This makes me think of people that play sports game and start a season with a team.  They will play every game to win and if they lose, they just replay the game over thus ending up with a perfect season.  That's unrealistic as that doesn't happen often.  If you lose, then you lose.  You don't always have to have the perfect record.  Just keep playing.  There's always the next season.

Interesting piece to see on Giant Bomb--I like it! 
 
When I play a game like this that gives you multiple paths and such, it's more about the experience than succeeding. If I fuck up or do something that causes bad things to happen that I would have preferred to gone differently, oh well. That's my story, and, in my mind, is the canonical version--at least the first time I play through a game. Once I've beaten it, I'll go back and do things differently or try for a higher rating to see how things play out. Take Mass Effect, for example. The first time I play through is always the "true" version of those events, while any subsequent playthroughs are more like "What Ifs" than anything else. The only time I ever restart a sequence is when I know exactly what I want to do but the game presents things in a confusing way, causing my character to do something differently than what I wanted; I don't restart if the results I receive are not what I was expecting. 
 
I received a one star rating in L.A. Noire and it really bothered me, but I kept playing and beat the game. Now that I've finished the story, I will go back and see how things would have played out if I didn't screw up.

This article reminded me of playing through mass effect 1 and 2. I always play through as a good guy then I go back and try to play as a jerk, and its hard cause I always feel bad. Shame that most of the time its more humorous and "cool" to be a bad guy.

I love reading opinions like this. I know there is the podcast but when its put into words its much better personally. I wish there were more opinion based articles posted by the other GB guys.

Failure in games has always been an interesting topic, especially in the last decade, when console checkpointing has made games seem easier overall.  While I get the GTAIV comparison (I killed Playboy X, since he was a douche), the example I always think of are the Wing Commander games.   

While I can't remember if they all did this, the first Wing Commander was quite notable in that you could fail a mission (fail to save a mission objective, etc.), which would actually make the fleet retreat to a different system than the one you would go to if you beat the mission.  In fact, you could fail the first three systems and still get the "good" ending by beating the rest  (The mission tree: http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/2715518/img/2715518.jpg).  The feeling that your performance actually affected the large-scale story was very powerful, and although you could just restart every time you failed, you would have been missing out on different missions that way.  Adding failure as a viable option eliminates the boring "succeed or reload" sequence that dominates games.
 
On the other side of the coin, I remember how people were complaining about the 2008 Prince of Persia game, specifically because it seemed too easy.  A lot of that feeling stemmed from the fact that any time you were about to fall to your death, your AI partner would swoop in and shoot you back to the last stable place to stand.  Functionally, this was no different than a checkpoint system, and in fact it was better because it didn't make you reload every time, but the fact that you literally couldn't die put a number of people off, as it seemed like the developers had taken away all of the penalty for failing.  I mainly mention this because it seems that many people do need to feel like they can fail at a game to make it worth playing. 
 
Just my thoughts, this is a fascinating issue as far as game dynamics and player psychology.

This makes me think of people that play sports game and start a season with a team.  They will play every game to win and if they lose, they just replay the game over thus ending up with a perfect season.  That's unrealistic as that doesn't happen often.  If you lose, then you lose.  You don't always have to have the perfect record.  Just keep playing.  There's always the next season.

I tend to agree with others regarding the instant feedback you receive when you incorrectly interrogate someone.  It seems incongruous with the (mostly) vague suggestions you get at the end of the case.  I feel like that is the appropriate time to give the feedback because it has the ability to cause you to stop and re-think things -- to reflect on the case as a whole and not one individual question you blew.
 
But it's a minor thing, really.  I hope that R* and Team Bondi can up the ante a little bit the next time around if they create a similar game.

@sixghost said:

@gladspooky said:

I'd rather play a video game.

Enjoy your call of duty

''ENJOY YOUR CALL OF DUTY ''      '' look at me guys i played la noire and i feel like a better person then all those cod fanboys because i enjoyed this game hihih''  There is a reason that call of duty keeps selling millions. This game is just fucking boring.

@ Patrick Klepek that was a fine read, sir. Very well done. You made me think about my actions as I acutally started over pretty much every case so far (I am only on the last case of traffic) and I decided I´ll just roll with it from now on.

I feel the same way about all that stuff patrick. Heavy Rain was great for that stuff as well - if you got a main character killed, they really stayed dead and you had to live with your mistakes. Powerful stuff.

Great article.   
 
I think partly why we are not allowed to "fail" in most  games is the time/resources it takes to create well done multiple outcomes, and make sure none of the outcomes will contradict the main story of the game.  When done right, I think it is definitely worth the investment, as it helps players feel invested in the world, unfortunately there's no metric to measure this, so I'd imagine it's an uphill climb for a developer with no clout to convince the money people that these elements are worth the financial risk.
 
More than anything, I think it's the general audience and what they want that's really holding things back.  I believe this stems from Western Culture's inclination to favour "winning" and the paradigm games have built up over the decades of their existence where you're either successful, or it's game over.   But when you boil down games to their essence, they're experiences, and currently most games are one of a few limited flavours.  I'm confident that with time we will see more and more non-indie games provide us with a more fuller spectrum of experience.  I mean it took studio funded movies a very long time to get to a point where it was alright for some movies to not end on a super happy note. 

I felt so guilty when I killed the guard in AC2 in the first tomb who was telling his buddy that he couldn't wait to go home and tell his wife about the extra hours he picked up at work.

My favorite thing about 'Heavy Rain' is exactly what's being spoken to here.
 
I'd love it if there were more "permanence" in games and things you just can't take back. Too bad, for such a thing to happen, it would require developers to install an inability for players to reload previous saves. Something I think most players would rebel against. Limiting player choice and fortifying critical thinking is something the mass consumer audience tends to reject.

And there's nothing satisfying about failing in L.A. Noire, because the game doesn't even acknowledge it in any meaningful way. Total and utter failure in one case has absolutely no bearing on any subsequent case. It's never even mentioned again. Nothing has any effect on anything to come. Heavy Rain is a game that does that kind of thing right, and I say that as someone that really doesn't like Heavy Rain at all.

This article doesn't try to argue that L.A. Noire gets everything right--in fact, I'd say it's a deeply flawed game on a number of levels, morality included--but that the moments it does get right are worth reflecting upon.

Maybe it is my experience with Heavy Rain, but although the tug to win is still there, I seem to accept the 'ride' of LA Noire better having experienced David Cage's game a year ago.
 
I think people will slowly accept 'failure' and taking 'the ride' in games as long as there is not game ending fail states, but we need more games to train us.  At this point, we are so over trained to play to win and be perfect that we do not handle failing well in games.  
 
However, I think I could quickly learn to find satisfaction in such games without regrets if the payoff or taking the ride is high enough. 
  

Just as a side note, it seems like if I played through the cases again it would be simple to see all outcomes.   It seems like it would be very easy to choose different paths of intentionally find less clues or answer less questions correctly; or find all the clues and answer more questions correctly.  In that, respect Heavy Rain is a MUCH HARDER game since you really need to be very dexterously skillful to arrive at certain outcomes in the game.  Anyone who cares to replay teh LA Noire cases two or three times would see everything, where as the outcomes possible with Heavy Rain and the amount of game play necessary to achieve that is far more substantial.

You killed Dwayne? Fuck you Patrick! FUCK! YOU!

I did in Playboy X - he was a douchebag :D I am cursed at the moment of quitting and restarting in L.A. Noire - so I have stopping playing for the time being and will go back to it when I am less OCD about getting everything right. Deep breath and let it all go :D

In GTA IV, I was legitimately saddened by my decision, and I knew I was making the wrong decision when I decided to kill Dwayne. 
In LA Noire, I found myself getting pissed off most of the time when I got a question wrong because the game's logic did not match my own all the time. But the game is definitely better if you live with your decisions rather than take yourself out of the experience and reload until you get five stars.

I killed Dwayne too, the only regret is you miss an achievement.

Great read. It reminds me of something I penned a while back on the topic of video games and failure, and how I hope that in the future we'll see more games that don't, as you say, automatically respond to player failure with a Game Over screen. I haven't finished with L.A. Noire yet, but from what I've seen, I think that even though it doesn't quite hit my aspirations for the medium's treatment of failure, it's certainly a step in the right direction. 
 
Please keep these editorials coming, Patrick. You're a fantastic writer with a lot to say about a medium you obviously care about. I much prefer reading this kind of stuff to the standard news pieces and regurgitated press releases on other sites.

This is what I really loved about the original Wing Commander, how it would let you fail a mission, or several missions but still continue, and even if you failed enough to get into the defeat fork of the story, you still had more missions to do as your fleet was retreating. Despite never actually finishing the game in the 'good' way, I felt very satisfied with how the game treated me even after several failures, and really didn't feel the need to get the "right" ending.

A friend of mine couldn't grasp this idea at all. I watched him repeatedly reload one of the earlier cases at the slightest hint that he'd messed up. Repeatedly. This time last year I witnessed him do something similar with Heavy Rain, which was even worse. I can't imagine how much playing these games that way would suck the enjoyment our of them.

Hearing Brad talk about needing to go back and reload an earlier ME2 save so he could get through it without squad/crew members dying is similarly frustrating. Sometimes "failure" in these games that allow you to make the "wrong" decisions without seeing a game over is just as valid or satisfying as doing things the right way. I felt absolutely terrible in my most recent ME2 playthrough when I failed to prevent Thane's son from becoming a killer and witnessed Thane's resultant depression. And you know what? In that case I wouldn't have it any other way. Sometimes it's good to let a game make you feel like a dog, it can be a really interesting outcome and another way that games can provide an experience quote unique to the medium.

I'd rather play a video game.

GTA IV is a bad example to use when talking about compassion.  How about the option to not kill either of those people?  That wasn't there.  How about the option to kill both?  Nope.  The player was railroaded into killing someone, heartlessly, with no chance to say "fuck this" and walk away.  Now normally that would be fine in a game, as often these things drive the narrative, but neither death advanced the story of the game at all.  It was murder for the sake of murder, and the developers wanting to tout the supposed choice the game offered.  
 
Edit:  I absolutely do want more games to offer more failure states though, and no chance to try again for a better outcome.  L.A. Noire so far hasn't gone far enough down this path for my liking.  Having some cases become completely unsolvable if the player messed up would have been wonderful, realistic, and an incentive to replay the game again. 

Yo, this game is deep.

I also think that more games should attempt to implement no fail gameplay but I feel that LA Noire's was a very poorly executed one.  To me it was one of the main reasons I didn't like it so much. Sure you can "fail" an interrogation but most of the game's cases have a fail safe bottoms which involves always giving you the smoking gun. Oh, you went 1/4 on your questions with the main suspect? Well you won't fail but you will also get a random phone call saying that he has past committed crimes that will lead to him cracking when you ask him. This happens way to much.
 
I also thought that the way Rockstar handled the Playboy X/Dwayne mission was equally poor in that it was not not a mission you could "fail" in a real way. I was hyped to make a powerful decision between the two and went to kill Dwayne. Doing that results in him just walking around in his kitchen muttering that "I thought we were friends" or something over and over again until you shoot him in the face. Then you get next to nothing as a reward or story progression. I then went back and instead killed Playboy X. Try to kill him, you get a full mission with cutscenes , a chase and a shootout. And a ton of rewards. 
 
Long story short, IF games are going to go the route to be no fail games, make it a true no fail game where there is an actual progression from your choices. Not simply a minor diversion that will just be cleaned up for you later.

Great article Patrick!

To those doubting the "proof" system on lies, please re-evaluate what exactly the "proof" means.  If you can find one counter example to your logic, then the "proof" is no longer valid.  Only times where there is no other possible explanation for the piece of evidence does the "proof" become concrete and solid.   
IMO, I love the system.  I analyze (too much sometimes) what exactly my decision will have on the character.   
Also, the rating system works.  Basically, if your get 5 stars, you did it while preventing anything bad happening usually.  Lower the stars, and more bad things occurred.  Get over the fact that your decisions may not have been a 5 star rating.  Pro tip:  We all won't make good decisions in everything we do ever.  Fact of life.

Sweet.

I agree in principle, but in practice I think it needs to be executed a whole lot better than LA Noire manages.

The kind of sour feeling I enjoy is Johnson's moment in Halo 3, or the end of GTA IV. It's that sour moment that I can live with that either provides motivation for a future event, or provides a sort of closure, a revelation of some sort. Some of the cases in here left me much more dissatisfied than that, and I despised entire parts of my game experience as a result. Again I'm not looking for 5-star perfection, but the one time I got the wrong guy, I never wanted to play that game again. I could never accept fucking up THAT bad, and I certainly couldn't accept not trying to fix it, or at least say sorry to the guy. And oh, all the times I screwed something up because I was trying to ask a certain question in a particular manner that was never offered in the truth, lie, doubt choices. At times, I didn't feel responsible for what happened, but I was blamed for it because I was only given 3 choices among the many variables reality offered. I had trouble getting immersed in the world cause I kept feeling restrained by all the mechanics in the game. I'd live with my decisions more if they truly felt like my decisions.

@patrickklepek: 
 I agree 100%  I've primarily heard the below in response to your thoughts and observations:
@gladspooky said:

I'd rather play a video game.

 If anything, the events and various reactions to these events in LA Noire has given me the understanding that rather than being an ecclectic sort, Video Gamers (even 'enthusiasts') are a surprisingly shallow bunch.  Not shallow like valley girl.  Shallow like ordering a cheesburger when quality wild boar is available.  As in not interested in seeing something that changes your conventions.  Conversely, I do think there is a distinct problem with LA Noire's 'performance evaluation' presentation.  The game presents you with two distinct performance evaluations after every case.  There is the star rating and what your captain says.  As far as I understand, each evaluation is done on a different set of measures, and while the star rating is pretty clear your captain's evaluation is less-so.  Thinking of the mario score question in last night's bombcast- I think the star rating provides a 'gamer' motivation to replay for the highest score.  And I don't think this is a good thing.  Problem is, your captains evaluation is not a great indicator of performance.  Sometimes making the right choice in a case garners his affection, sometimes his anger.  Sometimes it's the innocent man he wants you to put away.  So I guess I see why the game has a star rating after every case.  Now I felt compelled on principle to finish the story before replaying any part of the game- and held strong to that.  And I really enjoyed the game.  Unfortunately, I think this game provokes the comment above (Ie: this game is not a game) rather than self-awareness and understanding that perhaps the measures of success or failure we judge our 'game performance' by are not the only measures and/or potentially 'game performance' isn't as a vital part of video games as we gamers consider it to be.  I think we gamers' need to replay things we get wrong is largely a problem of taste.  A little broadening of tastes never hurt anyone.  Try the wild boar.  You'll like it.

Great article and, to a great extent, you're right.  Although I was frustrated by some of the "Phoenix Wright" logic the game threw at me during interrogations, but in the end, I liked the way the game progressed.  Some of the cases I botched up completely were the ones I felt progressed the most entertainingly. 
 
But I must say... how could you kill Dwayne!?!  Seriously, you must be one cold-hearted bastard if you picked to spare Playboy over poor Dwayne in GTAIV.