_xeno_'s Journal: Modern Video Games and Rewarding Failure

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but a lot of modern (and by modern, I can really go back nearly two decades, which is kind of sad) video games have this annoying tendency to reward failure. When you fail at something, rather than letting you try again until you learn how to succeed, they instead make the game progressively easier. The idea is to prevent people from getting "stuck" and allow them to get to the end of the game. Of course, what it really does is prevent you from learning how to meet the challenges the game has and instead encourages you to simply keep on failing until the game gives up and just lets you win.

I really, really wish game developers would stop with that crap. I want to be given a challenge, the tools necessary to figure out, and then the chance to learn how to meet the challenge. I don't want games to just "let" me win because they've decided I'm too dumb to play them, which in turn is caused by them never giving me a chance to learn to play them properly.

Enough with dynamic difficulty. Enough with rewarding failure.