A few years ago I visited an exhibition called “No Pain, No Game”. One of its interactive pieces best embodied the basic principle - there was a simple two-player Pong game, which punished losing a round by administering actual physical pain to the player.
The idea was that an important part of any game is the presence of negative reinforcement - obstacles that need to be overcome, the possibility of failure. So obviously it immediately got me thinking if there could be a game that has no such thing, and pretty soon I realized there indeed is one - Cookie Clicker, and its many variants.
There is no pressure, no possibility of failure, no wrong moves. You just make more and more cookies. Everything and anything you do is immediately followed by positive reinforcement, including not doing anything. Arguably Cookie Clicker is barely a game, more of an activity akin to a Skinner Box, but its
Addictiveness is undeniable and in the end it’s hard to classify it as anything but a game, if strange one.
So then my mind went the other way. Can there be a game (or a “game”) that would be completely devoid of positive reinforcement? A game that would do nothing but punish the player for their actions? I’ve found that concept to be a lot harder to figure out (impossible even?), which perhaps shows that the creators of the exhibition were wrong in a way - it’s the positive reinforcement that makes a game. Even obstacles serve this end, not by punishing the players for failure, but by rewarding them for overcoming them.
So how about a game where your decisions have no effect on the game world? Since some amount of interactivity is needed to be able to call it a game, let’s have them have a random effect. You can make decisions, but the outcome is equally likely to be positive or negative. Well, now we see our dedicated gamer start the game over and over again and eventually find a way to “beat” this sophisticated coin-flipping simulator by dumb luck.
The biggest obstacle a game with no positive reinforcement is facing is the great capacity humans have for coming up with their own goals. Say the game has a win condition, but it is unreachable and failure is sure to come sooner or later. No problem! The player will try to last as long as they can. Or fail as soon as they can. Hell, you can’t win Tetris. It’s futile, but every line you make still rewards you.
The problem is that you can’t just declare some aspect of the game (e.g. points, time survived, enemies killed) to be the measure of success and make sure the player can’t make progress in this objective; the player will just come up with their own narrative and eventually figure out a way to “beat” your game. This is evidenced by all kinds of sandbox games which lack objectives altogether, inviting players to come up with objectives of their own.
One thing that makes me thing this kind of evil game could in theory be created is that the creator is able to cheat. Let me give you an example. In the campaign of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty there are two places where you can choose how the story will proceed. In the first one you have a bunch of colonists who are in the process of turning into Zerg and a Protoss fleet comes with the intention of blowing them all up before the process (thought irreversible) is complete. A scientist on your side pleads with you to hold off the Protoss, as she’s on the verge of coming up with a cure.
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If you chose her path, you manage to hold off the Protoss and she completes her cure, saving the colonists (at the expense of Protoss troops, who are surprisingly sporting about the whole encounter).
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If you choose to help the Protoss, you get to fight the colonists who are beginning to turn and the closing cinematic shows that the scientist has already been irreversibly corrupted and has been trying to stall you.
The game cheats because whatever choice you pick, it turns out to be the correct solution. There is no way to trust the scientist only to find out you’ve just enabled a major infestation to take place, or to bomb the colonists to oblivion only to find you’ve not only killed tons of innocent people, but destroyed valuable cure in the process.
This sort of cheating is common especially in the RPG genre, but very rarely is it aimed against the player. You could use this to make sure the player makes the wrong choice no matter what, by changing the unknown variables to whatever leads to the worst case scenario depending on the player’s choice. One example almost made it into Fallout 1. One quest in Skyrim sees the player deciding whether to trust an accused woman or the people hunting her. The game never tells you which side was correct.
OK, I got a little side-tracked, so let me finish with one game I think gets closest to my concept: Takeshi’s Castle. While the contestants definitely got rewarded for passing obstacles (by not being eliminated), the fact that only 8 players ever managed to win the whole game, plus the fact that there were a hundred players and several obstacles couldn’t be overcome by anything but dumb luck make the identity of each contestant pretty much irrelevant.
In short, while there’s still some positive reinforcement happening, it’s drowned out by so much punishment for things out of the player’s control. I’d say it comes pretty close.
Anyway, any thoughts? Examples of games that went in this direction? Ideas how to make this concept more viable?