Fantastic piece @mikelemmer! You've hit on a sorely underrepresented concept in video games: the truth that we are all fallible, in one way or another. You can see a similar aversion to accepting inadequacy in film, albeit to a lesser extent. The obsession with a 'happy ending' is a persistent trope in fiction, and its survival isn't due to poor writing or a reluctance to experiment. The vast majority of fiction exists as a form of escapism, allowing us to forget the parts of real life that aren't so red and rosy. When a story - or even a single plot thread - ends in failure, it can often feel like the whole thing was futile. That's why bad endings to books, movies, and games often leave consumers bitter and jaded. Despite all the idioms regarding the journey being more important than the destination, it's hard to ignore the sour taste that defeat leaves in your mouth.

To bring this back to your observation, most gamers don't want to feel like their time has been wasted with an impossible mission. With so much entertainment accessible at all times these days, people tend not to stick with things that don't deliver that sweet shot of dopamine in the first few minutes - just look at how many people pike out on TV shows after being unimpressed with the pilot.

I, personally, am all for your idea. I would love if more games toyed with the notion that the 'hero' isn't all powerful, and that they won't be able to do everything on their own. Unfortunately, I can't see a whole lot of developers taking the risk. Maybe Kojima (if he comes back), and probably some smaller independent developers, but the general public seems more interested in power fantasies than deeper reflections on the nature of the social construct.

Once again, great write-up! Kudos :)

This void of delegation might be a factor in the rise of team multiplayer games. In MOBAS and games like Counter Strike, you largely can't even get by simple tasks alone, you have to rely on each other to win. You have to rely on real people to do well. And in this context, that is actually a novel mechanic. Which is a little bit sad.

Very interesting! The Fire Emblem games had some unit personality stuff right? I seem to recall some turn-based game where units in a relationship would work better together. But even then it doesn't feel quite like delegation, just another stat to take advantage of as commander.

I think of is the "suicide mission" in Mass Effect 2 is a pretty good example of delegation that feels somewhat out of your hands, but even then when you break it down it comes down to how well you prepared for it. The same would be the case with that hypothetical MGSV mission. It's still you making a decision and it either being right or wrong. It doesn't quite feel out of your hands, you know?

That'd be really fascinating to see in a game, though it's easy to imagine how it could be frustrating. Relying on simulations in strategy games tends to always work out less well for me than going in to lead the fight myself. Plot-wise, taking things out of the player's hands can be even worse. Dragon Age II comes to mind. Characters in that felt much more like actual charaters occupying a space in the world, guided by their own beliefs and ambitions.

But then that's one of the things about Dragon Age II I fuckin loved. A game where you're not THE hero but are A hero fighting alongside others would be really cool. Not some Dark Souls-esque parallel world thing though. I mean plot-wise, you're just another character alongside others trying to save the world. Or a game where you're basically one of the side characters in any other game and have to support the big hero who's out of your direct control and influence. Instead have that main character try to convince you of shit the way you always tend to in RPGs.

@macka1080: You can have a 'fallible hero' with a 'happy ending', it just requires abandoning the power fantasy of being able to handle everything as one person. Stealth games like Metal Gear and Thief are probably better suited to this, as a sense of vulnerability is built into the gameplay itself. Determining which jobs you can't handle, the best people for each role, and whether to take lots of people for support or just a few people to reduce the chances of being caught are all legitimate tactical questions most games don't cover.

And the whole "one failure means the whole arc was futile" is a consequence of constantly increasing the stakes so that every previous victory can be erased by a single failure. I would personally love a plot arc that resembled an actual war, with a mixture of successes and failures constantly shifting the front lines, where failure isn't the end of the world and just recovering from a previous failure is counted as a success.

I also suspect our modern obsession with power fantasies is making us insist upon perfection in our idols, which is not healthy. When I read about the Allied Forces' generals in World War 2, what struck me is they were brilliant-yet-flawed people, and a big part of Eisenhower's success at leading the Allied armies was learning to work around (and use) their quirks.

I..don't see this point being a point.

Like yes, it would be possible to write a story with a different build up but, um. This is fiction. The hero saves the girl, saves the day, is the key to the prophesy. In Videogames, you play the hero. Its not real life, not really and not often.

Its absolutely possible for games where you don't play the one and only, the chosen champion of the world or etc to be made? But just because a lot of games don't do it doesn't make them..what, wrong? Inherently stifling the genre? or any of that. Like take the majority of TV shows on tv. You've got a central group of characters who solve problems others can't. In a game form you might play one of them, or some of them but again, same concept. Famous roles through-out history get told like this, The victory of WW2 is told through names, not collectives, and so on.

But see, video games is a very young medium. The fact its dominated by one story style doesn't mean its the only one to ever exist. Go look at all the other genres and you will see, the more realistic "One man can't do it all" story exists in many many different forms. Plenty of movies, tv dramas and books are about the futility of the whole "I am super man!" plenty of fiction has been written on the folly of thinking you have all the solutions and on and on.

To expand on that. Video games are going through a lot of transitions right now, just like every medium did in their day. Music, Books, Movies, Comics. If you wanna push it further.. What we can read, what we can believe, what we can say, what we can think. The whole hashtag stuff from 2014, for example, is just video-games version of the backlash to any other form of media becoming mainstream.

And that conflict, like this one, if we look back of the dozens, hundreds..(basically every single cultural development if you wanna expand this idea far enough) will end in the same way. Every one wins. Everyone gets what they want..and the world doesn't end because of it, the world ends up better for it. There is room in the movies genre for citizen kane and 'insert random porn title" there is room in books genre for War and Peace and Twilight. There is room for guys who like explosions, and women who like emotionally uplifting dramas in movies. There are room for the same tropes in books. And..what do you know, videogames will be the same. You'll have room for high art, and heavy pandering, for male and female focused pieces, for this and that kind of story, or message or..

Hell we are already seeing it happen. Go think about what both sides of the 2014 argument over video games was about. "They are taking away our games!" "There are no games representing me" and where are we now? Why..everyone won. (except the people for whom victory is the total destruction of the other side but, that type always gets regulated to crack-pot/sideline status) We have more games in this year that are artistic, non-standard and so on then ever before, their acceptance level in the community only goes up and so on..and yet go look at steam. Anime boobs everywhere, and games with blatant uncensor/add sex patches sticked in their forums.

Would you look at that though, the world didn't end..everyone wins, it just takes time.

So the tl;dr:Don't worry about it, we will get there. Video games are the youngest medium around right now. Every other medium expanded..this will too.

Two other things related to this just occured to me, related to various complaints about Mass Effect 3.

First, it's not just about toning down the power fantasy. It's also about not wasting the hero's time with minor errands. Let him assign them to a competent lackey while the hero gets back to focusing on the big threats.

Second, I remember how many people complained about Shepard & crew going on shore leave for a few days in the Citadel DLC. That's the downside of the power fantasy: if you're the only ones that can handle problems, you would wear yourselves out until you can't handle anything. R&R is also vital from a characterization viewpoint: if you really like a character, you want to see what they do when they aren't focused on saving the world. They can't do that if they're the only ones who can solve problems.

It reminds me of a scene near the end of the 90s Starman comic: Starman's arch-nemesis has just died, leaving him with their son (long story). His superhero friends then spend several pages convincing him to retire from being a superhero and focus on raising his son. At first, they point out Star City will be safe in his absence: several of them are now patrolling its streets, taking over the job he had previously been doing solo. Then his old buddy pulls him off to the side and tells him a story about a man that spent years obsessively caring for a classic hotrod... only to discover one day his garage had rotted from neglect and collapsed, crushing the car. "If you focus solely on the city and neglect yourself, you'll collapse and crush the city with you. You need to take a break and care for yourself and your son; the city will be fine without you." The series ended with Starman moving away to start a new life for him & his son, and DC Comics has not forced him to don the tights once again or decimated the city in his absence. It is a great, tender ending, with a hero retiring from the good fight confident others have stepped up to take his place.

@theht: It might be interesting to play a game where you're the Prophesized Hero's Assistant, rather than the Prophesized Hero himself. You're the one tasked with keeping his men happy, deciding which of their grievances to bring up to him, taking care of logistics, and advising him about various courses of action, and generally setting everything up so he can do his task without a hitch. I would avoid the whole Clueless Boss routine in favor of a hero who respects you even though your opinions may clash. After all, many wartime generals swear their greatest asset was a competent assistant.

@mikelemmer: Yeah, I'm with you, I just don't think the vast majority of the entertainment industry (consumers and creators alike) share the same opinion. Just look at Hollywood's obsession with only using 'glamorous' and 'gorgeous' actors in the lead roles. Plastic perfection is certainly a serious societal problem, one that makes it difficult to sell the fallible hero as a worthwhile protagonist. And in too many stories, 'fallible' amounts to things like addiction and narcissism, rather than simply being a byproduct of humanity.

You're on the mark with the mention of real-life leaders like Churchill: they were great for succeeding in spite of their failures more than avoiding defeat entirely.

Nice blog! Thinking about this, the closest that the medium has come is probably with the Telltale adventure games, where you're occasionally given the opportunity to, if not directly delegate, then pick from a selection of secondary characters when approaching a problem. I have to admit though, it's understandably frustrating when you're trying to focus on the universe-altering big picture and some NPC is mindlessly distracting you with a mail delivery quest. I'm sure it's justifiable within the context of gameplay, but it seems to undermine the gravity of the situation somewhat.

An important point here though, is that you focus almost entirely on the AI form of delegation, as oppose to human/online delegation, which many games are built around. Look at something like Eve, in which there's a very real economy and business platform, with players forming whole corporations comprised of hundreds of different roles. Or a much more direct example would be something like the raids in Destiny, in which each boss requires a sequence of actions, often completed simultaneously, to be dished out to a group of players who must then coordinate to complete the objective. There are probably better examples, any MMO with individual roles I suppose, but Destiny is the one I'm going to stick with because I'm knee-deep into it right now; being given a task and knowing that your team will succeed or fail depending on your performance, is exhilarating. It's the difference between being a small cog and being the entire machine - when you're a small cog the sense of achievement is so much greater, and this is something that single-player games routinely fail to utilize.

The flip side of this is, if you could delegate a task and there was no guarantee of success, would you still do it? Or would that be more frustrating than simply doing it yourself?

@sweep: True, although EVE has a similar problem of people avoiding delegation whenever possible; there's entire corps of alts in it because players are too wary of other people backstabbing them to trust others. They can get away with it because most activities in EVE require minimal action; if you know how to do particular jobs, it's easy to do 5-6 of them at once. That isn't possible in a game like Puzzle Pirates, which is an MMO where players have to solve puzzle games like Tetris to do anything. Since it's near-impossible for a single person to do well at two puzzle games at once, you have to rely on other players to sail a ship. Delegation is also important in online FPSes and MOBAs for similar reasons. But yes, successfully pulling off a plan as a group is exhilarating.

I'm assuming your question of dealing with potential failure on delegated tasks is for a single-player game where you can choose between doing a task yourself or having an NPC do it for you. In that case, I would say yes, it would be more frustrating than simply doing it yourself unless the NPC could achieve something you couldn't. I'll break it down:

On its own, delegation failure would be frustrating because that failure is permanent. If the player tries to do it himself and fails, he can simply Continue from the Last Checkpoint until he succeeds, thus making any failure temporary. You could remove that advantage by making it a Hardcore mode where if the player attempts it himself and dies, his save is erased; that would certainly foster a reliance on delegating risky tasks to NPCs. However, let's assume you don't want to go that far on the base difficulty.

My preferred solution is to balance that potential for failure with a chance at a critical success: give the NPC a chance to gain a reward the player couldn't himself. A persuasive NPC could crit and recruit an enemy NPC the player couldn't, a thief NPC could crit and steal a large stash of gold, and so forth. That gives the player an incentive to let NPCs handle certain jobs, and judging whether it's worth risking failure to have a shot at a better reward is another tactical decision.

Another solution is to pull an X-COM and have the enemy attack 3 different targets at once. You can only fight at one location personally, so you have to send NPCs to fight the other two. Or make a heist that requires 3 different jobs and only lets the player control one. This is similar solution to MOBAs/FPSs' "can only focus on one character".

I actually enjoy playing games where you have indirect control. Watching something play out after you've made a decision can be fun and it is one of the reasons why I enjoy fantasy football. An air of unpredictability make tasks exhilarating but make designing the game without making it overly frustrating a challenging task. When done properly it makes for exciting moments. Take Madden for example: your receivers don't always make the all important game winning catch on a well thought out play because of their catch rating, but this makes the times that they do more exciting. It's a matter of buying into the mechanic like Madden players do when they choose a team with bad receivers.

Incorporating delegation into games more often would definitely lead to some interesting results. I'm all for it and love seeing most designs that challenge your typical expectations.

One of my favourite things in video games is when you get the sense that the video game world does not need you to be in it or to do things to operate. To me that is a major ingredient in creating a believable world. I generally dislike games where you end up being the boss/king/lord/chief/etc. of everything (hello there, Elder Scrolls games). I would love to play a Mass Effect game where you're not the crux of the whole story. That everything, in fact, does notdepend on your actions.

The (fate of) the universe should not revolve around the player nearly as much as it currently does. This isn't even a problem with video games alone. I remember reading comic books with wild intergalactic adventures but then everything still has to revolve around the humans or earth. Somehow the special snowflakes of the universe. Terrible.

@hassun: Intergalactic adventures revolving around Earth makes sense to me; it provides a good excuse for numerous things to bug humans. In order to combat that, you'd either need humans already colonizing other planets, or a setup like MIB where alien refugees are coming to Earth.

@mikelemmer: When there are giant space empires or galactic republics or whatever, the last thing I want is for Earth to be the centre of the universe/crux of the story filled with special snowflake humans who know better than all those filthy aliens who all look the same.

I get that there are technical reasons why some of these decisions are made but I still don't like it.

Man, can you imagine if MGSV had the Nemesis system and this was the the way their ranking system worked. Dying would bring its own reward if you manage to extract him after dying a couple of times.

Interesting read. Good job!

Part of the reason I enjoyed This War of Mine as much as I did was the way it dealt with task management. You controlled a group of people of which you could assign different roles depending on their health and well being. Characters had particular talents that made them better at certain things but they would still get tired and occasionally sick, forcing you to delegate the tasks to other members of the group. It created a sense of teamwork and companionship, despite there being little interaction between the characters.

It's a legitimate point that needs addressing, yeah. It's also one not strictly belonging to games - watching The West Wing, you might think that it really only took a dozen people to solve the nation's problems, and the Marvel comics universe is crippled with this issue, to the point of everything being sucked into their weird supermilitary-industrial complex. Mass Effect is still totally the worst at it, tbf.

With games specifically, though, that power narrative underlying the whole thing gets twisted by that kind of thinking. Leveling up and becoming greatest hero in the land means you would normally be able to expand - go from Batman to the Bat Family to Batman Inc., essentially. Which kind of happens in, say Mount & Blade, but that's the rare exception. And in a way that doesn't actually solve the underlying issue - you still being the only one who can solve the world's problems - but it does at least have a more logical progression. Personally I think the 'power fantasy' label is a bit misleading, with a lot of it coming down to a simple desire for agency. The player is able to do a thing that has an effect on the world. Doesn't have to be big. Just has to happen. Sending out minions can have the same net effect on the player, so long as they still feel like they were the one who caused it to happen. Designers are less likely to see the problem simply because "What's the point of making #content if the player can't #engage with it?" There are some games where you're simply not going to access all the content in a single playthrough, either because of choices or time limits or whatever, but that's not quite the same thing, I think. Having a quest where the 'best/true ending' is to just stay out of it would be kind of funny, though.

In general I agree with everything you have written, but I do have a favorite veteran Diamond Dog. I will never dismiss Rumble Worm even though he may get outclassed by S++ ranked "recruits." If he dies, I will shed a tear. Anyway, it is why I have taken to doing some side ops and even main missions as characters other than Venom Snake in MGSV. Some of those missions just seem like they don't require his attention. So even though I, the player, am still conducting those missions, the head of Diamond Dogs is not.

One final thing that is slightly relate. I am sick and tired of being "the chosen one." So damn tired of that trope.

Whenever the The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky First Chapter games get released, the nature of the game's protagonists' roles in society (as part of a heroes for hire guild known as the Bracers Organization) gets laid bare: the fact that other bracers can pick up on at-large side-quests and do them (resulting in time limits for these missions) sends neurotics into spirals of apoplexy, demanding that versimilitude be erased.

To put it bluntly: that's what this is up against, avarice.

@chillicothe: Is it avarice or obsessive completionist? Avarice implies they want to make as much money as fast as possible. Completionist implies they want to get a 100%, even if it's unfeasible. This wraps back to the initial issue with Undertale that inspired this article: players were willing to do horrible things to "get 100%" or "squeeze out as much content as possible", and the game laid bare just how unhealthy that is.

Getting 100% was alright in earlier days, when the main way to get 100% in a game was finding secrets off the beaten path that often led to 1-ups, power-ups, and hidden levels. Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, and Donkey Kong Country 2 & 3 were all really good about this. However, when the Xbox 360 introduced achievements, getting 100% turned into doing more & more for less & less. I know people that are more worried about getting every achievement as quickly as possible than actually enjoying the game, and watching them immediately look up everything in a strategy guide rather than experimenting with a game is horrifying.

Same difference at that extreme, but I do know it's against what you're fighting for (and is worth fighting for).