In Thursday’s class, we talked about why people like failing in videogames and one of the first reasons discussed was “heightened sense of agency” and the notion that every failure was a step towards eventually winning.
A key part of that is the sense of progress. The feeling of getting a bit closer every time or ever maybe a literal bar of progress telling you how far you’ve gone. Something to look at as an anchor point of what you’ve accomplished. Each death or mess-up is worth it for a bit of an increase.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishments has five separate parts: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Prometheus, Danaids, and Zeno. Each feature an indicator of progress. Sisyphus with a FAILURE counter, Tantalus with a WATER counter and a FRUIT counter, Prometheus with a LIVER meter and DAY counter, Danaids with a BATH FULL meter, and Zeno with a START point and a MIDDLE point.
What do these numbers mean though? For Tantalus and Danaids the numbers stay at 0. There is no way to raise either number in Tantalus and for Danaids, the meter will never get above 20% let alone reach 100%.
These theoretical indicators of progress exist only to taunt the player as the numbers don’t change or revert back 0. No matter how often or ferociously you click, there’s not a hint of progress.
On the other hand, there’s Sisyphus. With this game, each failure is carefully documented in the FAILURE counter. Yet, as your amount of tries increases, the same sense of inevitable failure pervades, because even though the number gets higher, no tangible progress is made.
Zeno taunts us with a facade of progress.
Progress at first seems to be made! Look! The numbers are getting greater (by a good deal). Yet, many clicks later… the measurements disappear, reverting to an abstract idea of “half-way”.
And then last but not least is Prometheus. Another blog post made me think about the nature of inaction with Prometheus. Constant clicking serves to maintain the LIVER meter at 100% and the DAY counter at 0. To keep both of those numbers there, you need to have your finger constantly there. Doing nothing, with all the others, doesn’t show any marked progress. With Prometheus, letting it run in the background for a couple hours gives me this.
In various ways, these markers of progress only serve to emphasize the failure, but I think it’s interesting to think about the different ways these function in conversation with each other.
