So I was reading this and thinking about how some of the brightest minds of my generation were destroyed by the "pull the lever, get the pellet" sort of dull, non-initiative-driven interaction that public schools, video games, and even most employment train people for. They breed the type of interaction where it's good to win because winning is good.
However, it isn't always good.
Learning to lose has some merits. Put the box inside of a box and simply make a game that you win by losing. I don't mean that you spend four or twelve or twenty hours losing. No, that would suck. But when the game rails you into a bad spot (morally, play wise, etc.), you can lose on purpose and there's a new, 'better' route for the game to follow.
Is it just providing a different lever for players to pull? Yes. Does it say something different? Yes. In the end though, I admit that with the internet and strategy guides (both things I loathe about modern gaming: "Here's instructions for which buttons to push in our game to get a thing we made. The super-gaming guide is simply Tron 2 on a jump drive, but after every action scene you push a button on your controller and you get an achievement.") Anyway, since I'm already courting a Skinner Box analogy, I suggest The Watchmen Method; nothing you do matters anyway, so you might as well do what you want.
That is, individual victories, losses, and choices don't end the game; it just keeps trundling along, win or lose, generally worse if you lose, but you tend to eventually end up in a place where the challenges you face are ones you can beat or don't have to beat (cooperation, interaction, exploration, etc.). Whatever 'ending' there is to the game is a composite of a few large decisions with a lot of minor decisions affecting one another.
"Yes," you might say, "that's certainly personal and whatever and despite the fact that automatically generated end scenes would seem jarring when they're mathematically strung end to end and the fact that this game involves maybe people trying to do stuff and not succeeding, which isn't--generally speaking--something someone playing a game wants to experience, I'm going to focus on the trouble with how I can still pull the right set of levers to save an ersatz Aeris or whatever."
That might have been a good thing to ask about. Randomizing encounters is a good way to approach it. Sure, if a character gets less than twelve, but more than no hits in on the Elder Dragon Grestreyx, then dies to his fire-breath, then they will probably end up as a burn patient in a hospital that leads to a story that reveals his family's dark secret, but there's a smaller chance he'll emerge badly burned but recover quickly and be celebrated and loved by the community, beginning a path of heroism.
Will players be angry they can't job the system? Will they call it arbitrary and act like none of their decisions have any effect, even if you give them a nice option of skipping outcomes they've already experienced? Will they quit and play something else, despite the fact that no matter their options, they are still playing a video game and at the end of the day haven't made any consequential decisions at all? Yes. Yes, they will.
After all, once you learn to pull the lever, you get free pellets! If rising obesity rates in developed nations are any indication, folks love pellets!
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