Why Game Over was a great idea

Gamers fail a lot. Losing is almost always a possibility in the games we play. Some players will suffer screen after screen of game over to inch their progress meter and single percent closer to completion or the top of the leader boards or simple bragging rights over their friends. So why do we do this to ourselves? What gets is it that gets us so attached to our games that we keep going?

                Let's go back to the when the arcade scene was prevalent. This gives some perspective as to why gamers are okay with failing so often. Just look at the basic arcade set up: customers come in and pay to play a single round on a game. You can't have one person on the machine for the entire day and you can't make the time allowed too obviously limited or they'll call it a rip off. So give them the chance to play the entire game, but if they mess up they lose a turn at the machine as well as their money. This provided the incentive to play, as one: you didn't want the machine to win there's something wrong about losing to an inanimate object and 2: if you got better at the game you got to play more, it looks like a win-win situation. Take into account that arcades are public places and winning or losing happened live in front of other people, and you have the perfect formula to attract players.

                What about when gaming moved away from acrades? What happened to difficulty and the game over? Well there's a phrase associated with the earlier days of video games, back around the heyday of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and later the Super NES (SNES). This term was "Nintendo hard". Early games of that time were often very difficult. This difficulty padded play times of shorter games and generally kept players trying. Games like Contra, Ghouls and Ghosts, Castlevania, and Mega Man are all good examples of this. If you were going to play one these games chances are you'd be facing a lot of game over screens. In fact Contra was known for a cheat code left in the game that gave bonus lives. The reason this code was in the game in the first place was so testers would be able to play all the way through. Yet despite the constant failure players still considered these some of the best games of the era. They all had solid game play and have pretty well stood the test of time. Their characters were iconic and the stories allowed for a lot of player influence by having a simple backbone story that players could flesh out themselves.

                                Games are played and lost on a regular basis, how many game over screens have you viewed? It's hard to tell at what point they became something to just accept and not think about, but really they're a great idea and most of the reason people play games.

-Baxter Cranch