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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Many video games teach implicitly that failure is an undesirable outcome. It is a result of player ineptitude, an ignorance of game mechanics or controls. To combat failure, players learn skills by leveling up, passively earning new resources to assist their gameplay.
In sharp contrast, rogue-likes and Souls-likes expect their players to fail. These games rely upon death-as-rebirth: when a player dies, they are sent back to a checkpoint. This allows players to access their resources after a failed combat attempt to switch out various gear, upgrade abilities or loadouts, and practice combat before trying again. However, these genres of games have social and rhetorical baggage attached to them: there is a typical refrain that a player should simply “get good” at the game, and that failure does indeed reflect ineptitude or ignorance, rather than an opportunity for exploration, innovation, and progress.
In line with the conference’s 2022 theme, I explore this iterative practice as a “reinvention”: players are invited to adjust their relationship with failure and death to see opportunity and potential, rather than punishment and misunderstanding. I focus my analysis on Supergiant’s 2020 game Hades, as well as Bandai Namco’s 2019 Code Vein, to showcase how these genres, when viewed via a feminist lens of rebirth, can become emblematic of growth rather than stagnation. I conclude with remarks on how this lens can be useful in the first-year composition classroom with regards to drafting and revising.
Dying and Reviving: Exploring Failure as Growth in Rogue-likes and Souls-likes
Many video games teach implicitly that failure is an undesirable outcome. It is a result of player ineptitude, an ignorance of game mechanics or controls. To combat failure, players learn skills by leveling up, passively earning new resources to assist their gameplay.
In sharp contrast, rogue-likes and Souls-likes expect their players to fail. These games rely upon death-as-rebirth: when a player dies, they are sent back to a checkpoint. This allows players to access their resources after a failed combat attempt to switch out various gear, upgrade abilities or loadouts, and practice combat before trying again. However, these genres of games have social and rhetorical baggage attached to them: there is a typical refrain that a player should simply “get good” at the game, and that failure does indeed reflect ineptitude or ignorance, rather than an opportunity for exploration, innovation, and progress.
In line with the conference’s 2022 theme, I explore this iterative practice as a “reinvention”: players are invited to adjust their relationship with failure and death to see opportunity and potential, rather than punishment and misunderstanding. I focus my analysis on Supergiant’s 2020 game Hades, as well as Bandai Namco’s 2019 Code Vein, to showcase how these genres, when viewed via a feminist lens of rebirth, can become emblematic of growth rather than stagnation. I conclude with remarks on how this lens can be useful in the first-year composition classroom with regards to drafting and revising.
Bio
Rachelle A.C. Joplin (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston. Her work centers on the use of memory and embodied researcher positionality around new media, most notably video games. She has been published in Presumed Incompetent II, as well as Peitho.