If you would all be so kind to quickly follow me down this rabbit hole real quick:
Picture yourself trying to kill a few minutes in a waiting room,
so you pull out your phone or laptop and open up Solitaire.
Now, in that moment, do you start to feel like Captain Kirk?
[cat meows]
Well, you should.
Because just like the infamous Kobayashi Maru scenario from Star Trek,
there's a chance, right now, that you've been dealt a hand that is entirely unwinnable.
So, let's take a second and examine something that we often take for granted when we sit down to play a game:
the idea that it can be won.
[INTRO]
Recently, our illustrious EC streamer, Will,
has been playing a lot of Slay the Spire at Ascension 20 over on our Twitch channel,
which you totally should go check out via the link below after the episode because it's fun as heck.
And he's been musing a fair bit over the way that the game makes itself harder
and whether or not all of those increases in difficulty makes some runs of the game unwinnable.
Is it possible that, from before you begin your first fight, you're doomed to failure?
And if so, does that make the game any less worth playing?
Now, before we dive in, let's go over some terminology,
just to be sure that we're all using the same words to describe the same phenomena.
When I say a game is "unwinnable", I mean that there is no set of player-generated moves
and randomness that will allow the player to achieve victory.
No matter what you do, no matter how many times you reload and try, you won't be able to win.
It's pretty easy to establish;
you can end up in an unwinnable state in the middle of a game of Solitaire or Spire,
and we can also work backwards from there to show that it's possible, no matter what set of moves you make,
that you'll end up in a similar or even identical position, and be doomed.
In the case of Solitaire, the randomness is locked in
once you shuffle and deal the tableau of cards onto the table.
And from the very beginning of any hand of Klondike, the most popular form of Solitaire in the US and Canada,
there's a 21% chance that the game isn't winnable.
No matter what series of moves you make,
you can't fulfill the victory conditions by placing all the cards in rank order in their suited piles.
And Slay the Spire is actually kind of the same.
Though it's harder to see in Spire, every possible move is determined before you start.
This is also, of course, a problem unique to randomly generated games,
because if we could test each and every seed or position during the design process,
it would be possible to eliminate this fear entirely.
But, that's never really gonna happen
because the very strength of randomly generated content
is that it lets designers gain an extraordinary amount of possibilities
without doing a ton of manually checked work.
So with all that said, is this the problem that even needs to be solved?
Is the possibility of us not being able to win really ruining our enjoyment of games
that rely on randomness to generate a scenario for us to play though?
Well... I don't think so.
Though, to be fair, I don't know if that's the right question that I just asked myself,
because games with no-win situations, like Solitaire, are enjoyed by a ton of people
some of whom might not even know that unwinnable deals even exist.
So, rather than debate the validity of doomed scenarios in games,
I think it would be much more interesting to take a look at the different ways
we as players can approach this kind of loss.
And we're going to do that by boldly going back to a place we visited before the intro,
because one possible philosophy that is applicable here is given to us by Captain Kirk,
and another one by Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Kirk rejects the notion that there is such thing as a no-win scenario.
Therefore, when running the star fleet test simulation, the Kobayashi Maru,
where he's forced into choosing to go on a rescue mission designed for him to have no winnable outcome,
he simply hacks the test and changes the situation for the better
in order to fit and to "prove" his outlook is correct.
But, looking past whether or not you think that might be cheating, does this outlook really teach us anything?
If our approach to losing is changing the conditions of the game or the test,
do we really learn anything from our struggle?
Sure, we accomplished something that looks like a win,
but then we're no longer playing the same game that we were when we started.
Plus, you know, if Kirk had been in that scenario IRL,
his crew and all the folks he was trying to rescue would've been super dead.
A different outlook is one outlined by Jean-Luc PIcard in the Next Generation episode Peak Performance.
Lieutenant Commander Data, an android, begins to doubt his abilities
following a loss in a strategy game to a much more experienced player.
When Captain Picard tells Data,
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life",
what he's saying here is that we need to be able to accept that some challenges are beyond our reach
and that losing to them doesn't define us.
What matters is that we've tested ourself against the challenge,
and as long as we've learned something from that loss, it isn't a wasted experience.
Okay, but fun Star Trek examples aside, in both games and life,
we're going to encounter situations where we just can't win.
In games, you have the option to step away, to restart and try again from a fresh save if you need to.
If you stick with a no-win scenario, however, you might learn something about yourself
that you can use in your life.
You can begin to understand what happens when you're confronted with something that's out of your control,
because in life, sometimes you're going to lose,
no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try.
And while sometimes it's not fair, you can't let that define you.
So that ability to predict how we'll feel, how we'll react to those situations,
should be the real lesson that we're after when we take on challenges that we know can't be won.
Thanks for indulging us in this little roundabout discussion to get to a sort of life lesson! That was fun!
But what do you think about no-win scenarios?
Is their existence in games a hindrance,
an opportunity for personal reflection,
or something else entirely?
Let us know in the comments section below.
Oh, and one last thing:
if you're interested in talking more about Spire, winnable games, or learning from failure,
then may I suggest you go over and ENGAGE with us over on Twitch?
Trek puns for days!
We'll play Slay the Spire Monday through Thursday mornings from 8 to around noon Pacific Standard Time.
Lately, he's been working on his Ascension 20 heart streaks,
playing mods, and using the game as a gateway to talk about game design.
So if that sounds up your alley, beam on over and say hi via the link in the description below!
And be sure to tell Will [Spire puns]
See you next week.
[OUTRO]