Punishment in games is exactly what it sounds like to any gamer – negative reinforcement in order to show the player what they did is wrong, or in order to add challenge to the game. With this said, there can certainly be other reasons for punishment, but this is a general definition. Now, I had always thought that punishment in games was a sort of crutch that game developers relied on in order to show the player the ropes and challenge them, but I always thought that there had to be a better way to do those things than punishing the player – it’s just easier to rely on punishment, since a working alternative would take so much creativity. After all, negative reinforcement in the real world generally is frowned upon in comparison to positive reinforcement, because positive reinforcement typically works better for human beings in general. However, a comment that one of my friends (a gamer, not a game developer, mind you) made about his latest favourite game inspired me to write this blog post this week, because he said words I never thought I’d hear: “I love the punishment in this game.”
The game my friend was referring to was Dark Souls – but how could the punishment in the game be so memorable and so positive in the eyes of a player? Even when punishment works in a game, I always thought that if the player consciously realized that the game was very punishing, then it would be less enjoyable. This game proved me wrong.
The player collecting their souls in Dark Souls
Now what is it about the punishment in Dark Souls that makes it enjoyable? Just to get this out there, I haven’t played the game – yet – though now I want to. However, I’ve seen my friend play it, and so I know a bit about how the game works. Essentially, the heavy punishment in the game is that all of the experience, or “souls”, the player collects from the last save point they visited can be lost as soon as they die. This means that the player can go through a level, collecting plenty of experience along the way, but die at the hands of the boss and lose all experience they accumulated along the way. So I asked, why is this not frustrating? How could this be a positive thing. My friend answered this for me: the lost souls can be retrieved if the player can reach them after dying without dying again along the way. In this way, the player feels that despite being punished, they have the ability to earn back what they’ve lost. On top of this, the player will likely feel that if he or she dies along the way and loses the collected souls for good, then it was a well-deserved punishment. Because of this, I realized the game Dark Souls in particular uses punishment so well that lack of punishment actually becomes a great reward. This made me then question – what is it that makes punishment work or fail in other games?
I thought of games I have personally played, and remembered different ways I recall being punished in a few of them. Unfortunately, most memories of punishment are negative ones, but I discovered some commonalities between the negative punishments. The first common negative punishment I can think of is the notorious game over screen. Sure, sometimes this is appears to be the best option in order to keep some challenge in the game (after all, a player shouldn’t be able to keep progressing after they die), but one particular type of game over screen is a little too negative for my taste. I am referring to the concept that if the player dies, they lose all progress from their last save. The harshness of this punishment varies depending on where and when the player can save. For instance, if the player can only save at certain save points, and these save points are very spread out, this punishment can be very frustrating. Another similar punishment that I am not a huge fan of is the way that the Pokemon series punishes players. If the player’s entire party faints in a battle, the player “blacks out”, teleports to the last Pokemon Center they were at, and loses a good chunk of their money. I see this as being far better than the lose-all-progress game over screen, but still can be frustrating to the player. But what do these two punishments have in common? The player may be tempted to just turn off the game after being punished in these ways. I have been victim to that mindset as well – if I hit a game over screen and lose a whole ton of progress I’ve made, I often get so upset that I turn off the game and don’t want to play it again for a while. Even in Pokemon, though the player doesn’t lose all progress, there is less incentive to keep going after fainting than there is to turn off the game and try again – though at least, I’d be more likely to try again after being punished by Pokemon than if I was punished by a game over screen. It seems that the makers of Pokemon realized that their punishment was too harsh in the earlier games, since the player would lose half of their money if they blacked out, but this amount was adjusted in later games to be far less if the player had accumulated plenty of cash over the course of the game.
Blacking out in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl
Another punishment that stood clearly in my mind was completely different from the previous two mentioned, but had a great impact on my memory though I haven’t played the game for a while. In The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the creators stuck in a really obscure punishment based on morality. I am referring to the fact that if players are sneaky enough to manage to steal from the shop in the game, they are punished for the rest of the game through shaming. I tried this out of curiosity the first time I played the game. I managed to steal an expensive item from the shop, and when I returned, the shop owner killed me. I thought that was it in terms of punishment. I saved the game and kept going. However, everyone in the game from that point on kept calling me “THIEF” instead of the name I picked at the beginning of the game. At first, I ignored it, even laughed a little, but I realized it actually upset me when I saw cutscenes that were supposed to be serious and touching, and the other characters still kept calling me “THIEF”. I actually felt far more ashamed of stealing that one item than I ever thought I would be, because that took away from my experience for the rest of the game. On one hand, this punishment was extremely effective because I felt very ashamed, just as the makers of the game had intended. But on the other hand, I despised this punishment because that one mistake haunted me for the rest of the game. A little bit of curiosity ended up making me really resentful. Thus, I’ll always remember this punishment very negatively in my mind.
So, what really makes punishments bad, and what makes them good? There are many answers to this question, but I’ve personally discovered a few based on my own experience, and the experience of my friend who played Dark Souls. Any punishment in a game that makes it so that the player wants to turn off the game, or has no incentive to keep playing, is clearly bad. Also, any punishment that haunts the player for the entirety of the game without fair warning is also bad, because if the player really dislikes the punishment, they may feel that all of their progress up to that point was wasted if they don’t want to continue with the lingering punishment hanging over their heads. However, punishments that the player has a fair opportunity to recover from can be positive, such as in the case of Dark Souls, or even in a game like Minecraft where the dying player loses their items, but can recover them if they make it back to the spot that they died. Because of this, I learned that punishment isn’t only not always a bad thing, but it can be a very good thing in enriching a game experience for players.
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