Jon Remedios, Tyler Coleman, Tanya Short, Nina Kim, Kevin Snow
Loss and death are important, some would say essential, parts of the human experience. It’s something that we all must, in time, come to accept in our lives. Why is it so hard to accept in our games?
Permanent loss in games can be an incredibly powerful tool. It has been an important element of many successful titles over the years and is a defining feature of the widely popular roguelike genre. When approached sensitively, a moment of significant loss can deeply affect players and lead to great stories they carry with them for the rest of their lives. However, there is one small problem: loss, even in games, is really painful.
In modern games, meta-progression systems (quite successfully) help players minimize the pain of loss through the use of extrinsic rewards. This is undeniably an effective solution for reducing player frustration and increasing retention, but what does this design pattern sacrifice as a result?
Our goal with this report is to make a case for guiding players through the pain of loss rather than away from it, and demonstrate ways this could be accomplished without relying on extrinsic rewards. With the following toolset, we hope to encourage brave designers to think beyond retention and try to make their games more deeply resonant and personal for their players.
Before continuing, here are some key terms (as we’ve defined them) that will be used regularly in this report:
Loss: The permanent and irreversible removal of something valuable to the player. The following are common examples of loss:
The above examples are presented, roughly, in increasing order of severity. This is, of course, player dependent. To some players, the loss of certain NPCs might be just as painful as losing the game. It’s also worth noting that types of loss do not have to be cumulative. You could, for example, experience the loss of a run but retain your items or progress toward a long-term goal.
Permadeath: The complete and irrevocable loss of a game without any carryover of items, characters, progress, etc. after which a player must start entirely anew. For the purposes of this paper, this must be an intentional design choice and does not include accidental loss (e.g. bugs, crashes).
Player Pain: The traditionally negative feelings experienced after a loss (e.g. frustration, anger, sadness). Throughout this paper “pain” and “player pain” are used interchangeably.
Now that we have some shared language, let’s briefly explore some reasons why you may want to allow for painful losses in your game.
To Appeal to a Certain Player
The most obvious reason for supporting loss and pain in your game is simple — the players you’re designing for enjoy it. The recurring debate on the difficulty of Soulslike games suggests that the threat of loss and pain matters a lot for some players. This isn’t surprising, historically many successful games incorporated elements of permanent loss. Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., RimWorld, and Minecraft are just a handful of examples where players can lose everything they’ve worked towards. Roguelikes prominently feature permadeath as an integral element of their design, which has been a major contributor to their long lasting appeal.
Emotional Impact
In some of the best cases, permanent loss can create deeply resonant moments for players. When we asked game developers about losses in games that greatly affected them (in their experiences as players), the death of Aerith/Aeris in Final Fantasy VII was overwhelmingly one of the most common responses. However, emotional impact isn’t limited to scripted loss. Many designers cited Rogue, NetHack, and their progeny when describing their first experiences of grieving a lost character.
Provide a Personalized Experience
In certain systems, loss can act as a means of differentiating one person’s run or playthrough from another’s. Deciding whether to save Carley or Doug in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, releasing your first caught Pokémon in a Nuzlocke run, or accidentally burning down your house in Minecraft can all help create experiences that feel uniquely personal to the player. Through play, we can control when or how our stories end, writing and rewriting them as we see fit.
Facilitate Safe Exploration
Allowing players to experience things that cannot be safely explored in everyday life is, arguably, one of the greatest strengths of our medium. This commonly takes the form of escapist fantasies of power or control, but it doesn’t have to. There are a breadth of nuanced fantasies we could offer players instead. Similar to how some games allow players to explore their gender identities, games can offer ways to safely experience the loss of our cherished possessions, capabilities, loved ones, and even our own lives. We can even go further and give players the opportunity to witness the impact of their lives after they are gone. For example, a simulation RPG could show a player how surviving NPCs react to their death or how their gameplay actions are affecting future generations.
Resisting the Attention Economy
Games like Slay the Spire, Drop Duchy, or Balatro soften the sting of loss through the use of meta-progression and extrinsic rewards. These systems take painful moments and make them part of a compulsion loop. It’s an effective retention tool, but in a world that is increasingly dominated by the habitual consumption of “content” (e.g. social media), rejecting these design patterns could very well be a refreshing kindness we can offer to our players.
Regardless of the potential benefits of painful losses, we must acknowledge that there are a number of complicating factors that make them a tough sell. Here are just a few of the reasons why designers may understandably want to avoid painful losses in their games:
Individual Preferences
Some players may not want loss as a flavour in their game, for any number of reasons. That’s perfectly fine. Every kind of game can coexist peaceably.
Species-wide Psychological Obstacles
Humans possess many evolutionarily-helpful cognitive mechanisms to avoid too much enjoyment of, or enthusiasm about loss. Some are so deeply rooted that they appear to function without humans even recognizing them when they occur. Psychological phenomena such as loss aversion, the endowment effect, and psychological inertia all contribute to most players having an irrationally strong distaste for loss, whether it’s real, imagined, or even theoretical.
Industry Trends
Meta-progression is becoming ubiquitous in games that would have, historically, been built around painful losses. In this context, loss without a reward might be viewed as deeply punishing, unfair, or a waste of time. In a crowded marketplace, friction can easily transform into poor retention and can seriously impact how well a game performs commercially. In the present economic circumstances, it’s understandable that swimming against the current may be too great a risk for some designers.
Despite their inherent risks, we are of the opinion that painful losses can greatly enrich an experience and should be embraced rather than shied away from with half-measures. In other mediums, such as film and literature, a loss that elicits strong emotions from someone is often a testament to how effectively it makes them care. The pain is kind of the point.
However, in games, player pain is often viewed negatively, but what if we too viewed it as a sign of emotional investment? Through this lens, reducing the pain of loss could make players care less about a game’s core experience. At the very least, avoiding or distracting from these uncomfortable feelings narrows the emotional spectrum of a game and undercuts impactful moments. From this perspective, pain isn’t something to avoid, it’s something to process — like grief.
While grief is often associated with the intense experience and feelings that follow the death of a loved one, it can also accompany non-death losses (Harris, 2019). Some of these losses are tangible: careers, relationships, communities; while others are intangible: identity, goals, trust.
The loss experienced in games is a type of non-death loss, which can result in its own kind of grief. It’s a different texture than grief caused by real-life loss, but grief can take many different forms. Grieving after a layoff might not look like the grief experienced after the death of a loved one. This, of course, varies from person to person. The point is, just because player pain might appear different, doesn’t mean it’s not grief.
In our discussions, we found grief to be a helpful analogy for player pain. Viewing it in this light allowed us to identify and evaluate design tools that help players process pain rather than avoid it. As such, we thought it was worthwhile to gain a better understanding of theories related to the grieving process and how they might apply to games.
The Assumptive World is a framework that encompasses everything a person assumes to be true (Parkes, 1971, 1975, as cited in Harris, 2019). How you view others (e.g. trustworthy or untrustworthy), the world (e.g. fair or unjust), and yourself (e.g. in control or lacking control) are all part of your assumptive world. Challenging or breaking this set of assumptions can cause significant distress (Janoff-Bulman, 1989, 1992, as cited in Harris, 2019).
In a game context, we can think of a player’s assumptive world as their mental model. As designers, it is our responsibility to help players build their set of assumptions without having them break unnecessarily.
Meaning-making is the act of assigning meaning or significance to an event as an attempt to better understand one’s own life (Harris, 2019). While not exclusively related to grief, some argue that meaning-making is an essential part of the grieving process and that understanding a loss or taking something valuable from it is correlated to more positive outcomes afterwards.
Players most commonly engage in meaning-making through learning or gaining a deeper understanding of a game’s mechanics or systems. However, as we will explore shortly, there are many ways for people to make meaning.
Combining the assumptive world and meaning-making allows us to express loss and its resolution in a way game designers can easily understand: as a loop.
While obviously a reductive breakdown of the grieving process, the loss loop helps us clarify what we’re solving for. The problem isn’t pain, it’s a player’s inability to assign positive meaning (or any meaning) after a loss compromises their assumptive world.
Meta-progression side-steps this problem easily. By extrinsically rewarding players after a loss, these systems bypass the need for meaning-making and quantify the value of a loss or experience. What might have once been a “bad run”can now help players make progress toward their next unlock. While these rewards are valuable to players they are ultimately dopamine triggers that distract from meaning-making rather than facilitate it. Meaning-making, on the other hand, is an active and internal process. Meaning cannot be gifted to players, it’s personal and must be found on its own.
Throughout Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, thanatologist David Kessler gives a variety of examples of meaning-making after a loss such as telling stories, using it as a catalyst for change or action, creating rituals, and using it as a reminder to appreciate the time you have (Kessler, 2019).
The takeaway here is that meaning is subjective, can be found in a variety of places, and comes in many shapes and sizes. However, all these examples acknowledge what was lost and offer the griever a positive way to honour it (e.g. stories, new behaviours, a changed perspective).
In the same vein, here are some examples of meaning that players might derive from a significant loss in a game:
As mentioned, meaning-making is an extremely personal process, so this list is in no way exhaustive. Hopefully, it gives you an idea of what finding meaning after loss could look like in your games and others, but there will inevitably be a great deal of variance — perhaps even within a single game! We encourage you to consider the types of meaning players might find in your game, and where they might find it.
As for how you can assist players in finding said meaning, that’s where you’ll likely need some design tools.
The following toolset was assembled with the goal of providing designers ways to:
Again, it’s important to note that the intention of this toolset is not to distract from player pain, though that may be a byproduct of some of these tools. As we’ve mentioned, pain after a loss is an understandable reaction for an invested player.
It’s also worth mentioning that none of these tools can guarantee that players will find meaning in a loss. Meaning-making is an internal process and entirely player-driven, but hopefully these tools can, at the very least, allow for the experience around significant losses in games to be designed with more intentionality.
The tools have been organized into categories and presented in rough chronological order:
The goal of priming tools is to prepare players for pain. These tools help introduce the possibility of loss to a player’s assumptive world. While these tools may minimize feelings of pain, they do so by managing player expectations beforehand, rather than dulling the sensation after a loss.
Telegraphing helps build a player’s assumptive world to prepare them for significant loss. When the possibility of loss is not clearly telegraphed it can make it that much more shocking (which may be the desired effect). For more information on player expectations, see the Rewriting The Player Contract report from Polaris 2025.
Ideally, the process of telegraphing begins before the game is launched. The name, marketing art, and trailer all contribute to setting player expectations well before they start playing. These assumptions are then reinforced (or challenged) by the initial tone set by the game. Between these two Main Menus, which game would you expect to encounter more loss in?
Once play begins, there are still plenty of opportunities for telegraphing. Narratively, loss can be explicitly weaved into a game world, setting, or plot. This can be done either symbolically or materially. In the social deduction game Blood on the Clocktower, the Storyteller (aka gamemaster) is the first to die. This is narratively consistent with the many player deaths that will occur throughout the game.
Loss can also be telegraphed systemically. For example, a game might inflict small losses throughout play to raise the stakes and tension before the player dies or experiences some other form of significant loss.
Caves of Qud uses both narrative and systemic telegraphing. The player starts off in a wasteland of salt and ruin, hinting at the kinds of stories the game has in store. Further, the player will generally experience the loss of an item, ability, or limb before their character’s death.
Engaging in meaning-making requires emotional investment from the player. However, a sudden and unexpected loss could completely taint the experience for someone who cares deeply. One way to address this tension is by starting the game at a high difficulty level instead of gently raising it over time. Players will lose many times in quick succession and either come to terms with it, or decide the game isn’t for them.
The opening of Bloodborne is a great example of acclimation. The player starts off without a weapon and is quickly thrown into a fight they are not meant to win. After dying, they are respawned in a new area where they receive their weapons. This is a simple, yet effective way of showing the player that death is an expected part of the game, but it doesn’t end there.
The opening of the next section, Central Yharnam, is notoriously difficult and requires players to gain a thorough understanding of the combat system before the game opens up. Once the player crosses the skill threshold required to beat this area, they’ve likely built a relationship with loss that they’ll carry throughout the rest of the game. By experiencing a large number of deaths so early, players develop the tools to deal with future encounters and gain the belief that it’s within their ability to overcome the game’s difficult challenges.
If a loss is the result of player decisions or actions, many will attempt to delay or avoid it. Even when loss is an expected or integral part of the game, using it as a consequence can understandably be interpreted as a failure on the part of the player. Making loss inevitable decouples it from failure. This shifts the focus from “living” or surviving as long as possible, to instead maximizing the joy, interest, or sense of accomplishment you can achieve in the limited time you have.
Some games implement this by ending after a set time limit. In The Yawhg (building on the town phase of Dungeons of Fayte) each player visits a total of 6 locations before a storm destroys the town. While players can succeed or fail at rebuilding the town as a result of their actions, the fuzziness of these decisions and reflecting player choices in the game’s epilogue emphasizes collective storytelling over winning or losing. The players literally cannot choose to delay or change the final conflict; like real life, the choices and experiences themselves become the texture and meaning in the play session.
Inevitability can also be implemented at the entity level. In the Monster Rancher series, monsters have finite lifespans. Death is a guarantee, but how long a monster lives is obscured and influenced by a number of factors, both in and out of the player’s control. This certainty of loss mixed with the uncertainty of when it will happen encourages players to make the most of their time with a monster.
Ownership tools allow players to become invested in their experience. These tools help players build attachment prior to loss and invite them to co-author the experience in ways that feel meaningful to them.
As we’ve already mentioned, not every player wants to experience loss. Even players who do enjoy loss may not want to engage with it at all times. A single game does not need to be all things for all people, but if a design allows for it, having players explicitly opt in to loss can help filter out highly resistant players.
For example, Caves of Qud began its long development with only permadeath, and retained it as “Classic” mode but as its audience grew they added “Roleplay” and “Wander” modes to easily enable popular player variants.
Gaining consent doesn’t necessarily need to use a broad solution such as game modes. Offering settings to manage different types of loss can also help ensure player buy-in and author their experience in a more granular way. There are a number of mods for The Sims that allow players to enable the potential for significant losses related to difficult subjects (e.g. miscarriage, abortion, infidelity). Many of these mods provide extremely detailed content toggles, allowing players to tune the probabilities of specific events, and trigger (or disable) them in-game.
By allowing the player to explicitly opt in to the concept of loss and all possible flavors thereof, they can feel some level of ownership over that eventual outcome. Even if they aren’t in full control of the timing and nature of the loss, it wasn’t just inflicted on them, it was co-authored and therefore more deeply personal and meaningful.
Loss without attachment doesn’t tend to feel very impactful. Giving players tools for customization or creative expression is a common way of getting players invested quickly, creating the opportunity for meaningful losses down the road.
What this looks like can vary greatly in terms of complexity. For example, naming soldiers in XCOM is a simple but effective method for making players feel connected to their squad and can create a richer emotional quality to the loss when a named soldier dies.
In Dwarf Fortress players regularly take aesthetics into account, with some players embarking on fairly involved style projects. While these decisions come with gameplay consequences, players can primarily enjoy a fort for its appearance. Like with the XCOM example, this can deepen the relationship between the player and their creation, potentially changing the tone of its eventual loss.
In some cases, the player may find themselves with an opportunity to choose their death, either by means of self-sacrifice or by simply resigning themselves to death to receive a form of closure when they stop playing.
A player may choose to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others. For example, someone that can no longer continue playing with their tabletop roleplaying group might have their character die heroically to save or benefit the other player characters.
While self-sacrifice is most often found in multiplayer games, it can also be achieved in singleplayer experiences when the game’s narrative can carry through a conclusion from the sacrifice. In the final moments of The Swapper you must choose between taking over the body of your rescuer, or remaining stranded on a planet and ultimately plummeting to your death.
For closure purposes, games with long play sessions may find the player taking an extreme risk or impossible challenge as a way to ensure they end on a dramatic note instead of requiring the player to remember where they last left off. As a theoretical example, allowing players to choose a cataclysmic event in a city-builder (e.g. Cities: Skylines) could allow them to say goodbye to their creation in a more satisfying way than simply abandoning it.
Soap Opera Deaths allow players to undo a loss after the fact. While this might seem inconsistent with the goals of this toolset, allowing players to avoid or delay certain losses enables them to decide in real-time whether a loss is meaningful or not, letting them engage with meaning-making on their own timeline.
The Sims 4 uses this approach in a few different ways: pleading, strengthening connections, and resurrection. Pleading lets the player instruct one Sim to beg the grim reaper to spare the soul of another after they die. It is not guaranteed to work in the base game, but if it does the Sim will come back to life. Strengthening a connection requires the player to visit a Sim’s gravestone or urn to stop their ghost from fading into nonexistence. Resurrection allows players to bring ghost Sims back to life. There are a number of ways to resurrect dead Sims.
While Soap Opera Deaths can be used as a way to accommodate a wider range of loss-tolerances, they could also be used to try and minimize the perception of “meaningless” losses. For instance, a mechanic like pleading could be used to give players a high possibility of cheating early deaths, but become less probable or unavailable the longer they play.
Repetition makes losses feel less painful over time. This can be a great way to prime the player (see: Acclimation above) but can make games feel less personalized. Making playthroughs or losses noticeably distinct from one another can give players a sense of ownership over them. Even though it doesn’t require player input, the fact that it’s not easily replicated can make an experience feel like it belongs to the player.
There are many ways of accomplishing this. Procedural generation to make the world feel like it’s been created just for the player. Character creation to let the player start the game in a drastically different context or try a new playstyle. Supporting many novel types of loss can make the end of a player story feel more personal and blur the bounds of the system. These can be combined together along with other forms of variable content. Caves of Qud, for example, uses all of these methods to make each playthrough feel highly personalized.
Analysis tools try to help players process or understand the loss. They give players information to interpret so they can attempt to understand why a loss occurred, and what they might want to change moving forward.
The type of grief experienced by a sudden, surprising, and especially “unfair” loss is not the type that fuels catharsis and emotional growth. Instead, these losses elicit a deep sense of frustration.
In order for players to really engage with loss, it must feel justified and (with hindsight bias) largely predictable. Ideally, under this paradigm, all of the information related to a loss is so clear that the player feels they understand why it happened, even if they wish it hadn’t. Some tactical games (e.g. Into the Breach, Invisible Inc) have thoroughly embedded this clarity with explicit user interfaces and by allowing some number of “undos” in a player turn. This lets players experiment and ultimately decide for themselves which kinds of loss they accept before moving on.
Some game genres, particularly those of the tactical strategy fantasy variety, are better suited to inflicting “fair” loss than others, as loss is an understood component of military leadership. However, if the information to analyze is instead emotional (e.g. Sephiroth’s slaying of Aerith in Final Fantasy VII), perhaps this is the wrong tool to deploy.
A replay system can be an effective tool to help players understand loss after it occurs. Used heavily in eSports, replay analysis helps players try and understand why they lost and what they need to work on moving forward. Analyzing and learning from replays allows players to actively engage with meaning-making at their own pace in complex systems.
Replays are strongly associated with multiplayer games, but they could be equally effective in single player experiences. Single player games could just as easily support replay analysis after a loss (as described above), but the lack of competition gives them the flexibility to blur the lines between replay analysis and gameplay. For example, single player replay could take the form of a rewind mechanic, like the one found in Life is Strange, allowing players to make adjustments and see how it affects the outcome in real time. If that level of player control isn’t desirable, a time loop (as seen in Elsinore, Majora’s Mask, Outer Wilds, etc.) allows for a slower feedback loop without requiring a discrete mode for replay analysis.
Reflection tools provide an opportunity for players to sit with a loss after it happens. They acknowledge what was lost and dedicate time and space to it instead of immediately moving on or distracting from it.
Giving players the ability to memorialize something grants them an opportunity to reflect on the journey that led to the loss.
Funerals are the most straightforward type of memorial. In the original Monster Rancher, the player is given the option to hold a funeral after a monster’s death. During a funeral; NPCs offer their condolences, the monster is laid to rest, and the player is shown a stat overview of their companion (e.g. attributes, ranking, battle record). The funeral has no mechanical advantage, its only purpose is to give the player a moment to honour and remember their monster. The sequel, Monster Rancher 2, builds on this by allowing players to visit and upgrade the shrines of deceased monsters, though there are mechanical reasons for doing so.
A memorial doesn’t necessarily need to be immediate or even player directed. As long as a loss is recognized and the player is given an opportunity to reflect, we consider it a memorial. For example, in Project Zomboid, players can run into their previous characters as zombies. This small moment can have a lot of impact: it acknowledges the existence of a player story in a systemic way, it gives players the chance to reminisce about past experiences, and it makes players choose whether to end the (zombie) life of their fallen character or let them shamble on.
On a larger scale, cemeteries can provide players the ability to reflect on a larger number of losses. In The Sims 4: Life & Death, cemetery lots can be built to house the remains of deceased Sims. The player can customize plots and group them together in any way they see fit. However, cemeteries can extend beyond in-game physical representations. If players are given the ability to revisit a collection of past losses, for example the Dwarf Fortress Legends Viewer, it is functionally a cemetery by our definition.
Composing or sequencing notable moments around loss and then showing them to the player, can offer a new perspective on why the loss matters. While similar to the replay tool discussed above, we consider montages more geared toward reflection since the player isn’t granted any means of control. How to effectively use this tool largely depends on the nature and frequency of the losses experienced.
In games where players accumulate a high number of losses, many of them will likely feel meaningless to the player. One way of getting the player to engage with meaning-making around these forgettable losses is to show all of them simultaneously. Super Meat Boy uses this technique to great effect. When viewed as a whole, even the “bad” losses become recontextualized as a meaningful part of the player’s journey toward their goal.
In games where loss is infrequent, a more traditional montage (showing clips sequentially) could be used to present highlights of the character or run that was lost. As a theoretical example, in a tactics game, players could be shown a few clips of a unit’s accomplishments in their dying moments.
The death of a player character poses unique challenges for processing loss, especially with game worlds that persist after a player has died. It’s understandably difficult for a player to find meaning in the death of their character when their access to that world is cut off. Games that include an “afterlife” address this problem by allowing players to remain in the game after the loss.
A common example of this, largely seen in competitive multiplayer games (e.g. Counter-strike, PUBG: Battlegrounds) are spectator modes. Giving players the ability to continue watching a match after they’ve died allows them to see how their character’s life and death influenced the outcome. For example, a player dies to save their teammate and then watches that teammate ultimately secure the victory for their team.
Another means of providing an afterlife to players is to let them return as a ghost, allowing them to continue to impact the game in smaller or different ways. In Blood on the Clocktower, players are still able to participate after they’ve been killed. A dead player can still talk with other players and may cast one final vote before the end of the game.
While the above examples highlight multiplayer games, an afterlife could theoretically be used in other contexts. In a single player experience, such as the Crusader Kings games, a spectator mode could allow players to see how the world progresses after their dynasty has ended.
As we near the end of this report, we felt it was important to address what hasn’t been included and interesting avenues that might warrant exploration in the future.
This toolset largely operates on two assumptions: that pain is a potential sign that a player cares, and that meta-progression systems reduce a player’s emotional investment in the core experience of a game. We did not have the time, resources, or expertise to do extensive research on either of these topics, but are very interested in the findings should anyone decide to take that work on.
Also, we’ve only briefly discussed potential ways that players may derive meaning from loss in games. An in-depth exploration of the different forms of meaning-making is far beyond the scope of this paper, but could provide insight into new types and categories of tools to encourage additional ways to help players find meaning after experiencing a loss.
Additionally, this paper presents embracing pain and avoiding it as a dichotomy, but that is not necessarily the case. The dual-process model of grief suggests that people often vacillate between experiencing the pain of loss and avoiding or coping with it (Stroebe, Schut, and Stroebe, as cited in Harris, 2019). Perhaps, game designers too can guide players in and out of the experience of pain in interesting or helpful ways. However, exploring this highly nuanced topic almost certainly warrants its own report.
Finally, we have generally avoided discussing the potential negative consequences of avoiding loss entirely. Monetizing loss aversion and games that “fake” multiplayer arenas to give players higher win percentages are just a couple of examples of weaponizing our natural resistance to loss. Drawing attention to and investigating these dark patterns is not the focus of this paper, but could be an interesting companion to our toolset.
This brings us to the end of our toolset. We hope you now see how loss can be a powerful tool and that player pain doesn’t need to be seen as a problem. By outlining tools and illustrating them with existing and theoretical examples, we’ve hopefully made you think about how to support players through the pain of loss without relying on extrinsic rewards and what types of meaning they might derive from your game.
Ideally, we’ve inspired you to explore some of these tools on your own. Perhaps you want to try reducing unnecessary pain with clearer telegraphing, helping players feel more ownership with expressive tools, or even allowing them to co-author the timing and nature of the losses they experience. Maybe you’re curious about what players will choose to memorialize or how they’ll find meaning when given the ability to analyze and process their losses with a replay system.
We’re especially interested to see how these tools combine with one another or what new tools you discover or create when interpreting player pain as a form of grief. What does it look like when you allow for player expression during a memorial with a eulogy? How does a system that incentivizes a player to take time off after a significant loss feel? Questions like these make us excited by the prospect of new games boldly designed around moments of loss and guiding players through the resulting pain.
We understand that all of this is an inherently scary prospect. In the current economic climate, both publishers and players alike seem to be increasingly risk averse. When the success or failure of a project is so heavily dependent on recommendation algorithms, commercial game designers are strongly incentivized to attract as many players as we can and retain them at any cost.
However, as resistance to the attention economy continues, we are seeing people make concerted efforts to be intentional about where and how their time and energy is spent. If this trend persists, perhaps players will begin to push back against systems that prioritize retention. Maybe by adding more loss to our work, we can do our part to guide the pendulum back toward something a bit less coercive and a little more human. Loss and pain are, after all, necessary parts of life — maybe we should honour and explore that more in our games.
We would like to thank Jason Grinblat for talking to us about meaningful deaths in Caves of Qud and other RPGs and Cat Manning for introducing us to the nuanced fantasies and granular control given to players in mods for The Sims. Elements from both of these conversations at Polaris 2025 made their way into this paper and helped shape its direction. We would also like to thank MJ Johns for taking the time to edit and provide feedback; as well as Jenny Glozman for editing and helping with the citations. Finally, we would like to thank everyone who took the time (at Polaris 2025 and elsewhere) to tell us about their most memorable and meaningful deaths in games.
Our focus while exploring this topic has primarily been on significant loss experienced in dynamic systems (unscripted loss). However, when speaking to others about losses in games that felt impactful, many pointed to instances of loss in linear or narrative games (scripted loss).
Instead of positioning these two types of loss as a dichotomy, we treat them as opposing ends of a spectrum. Scripted loss simply occurs in a much narrower possibility space than unscripted loss and each has its own set of strengths and weaknesses.
Scripted loss can be deliberately paced to ensure that previous beats are paid off in a satisfying way, which is much harder to achieve in a dynamic system. Unscripted loss can be highly reflective of an individual player’s choices and experience, which can’t be true for an event that is guaranteed to happen for all players.
With that in mind, while the tools we’ve outlined were identified with unscripted loss in mind, they may still prove useful for linear experiences. Similarly, there are likely techniques used in moments of scripted loss (not explored in this paper) that can be applied to larger possibility spaces.
Designers should compare and contrast two extremely different, almost ideologically opposed paths designers have created to routinely inflict loss, in Balatro (2024) versus Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (2017).
Both lead to the player disengaging from the loss and discarding it as ultimately meaningless, while experiencing very different emotional states.
Balatro artificially extends the magic circle to enclose the game more fully in a strong cycle of meta-progression rewards, unlocking more content and thereby more strategies with which to play again and earn more points. Eventually, the player can enter what we’re calling “Balatro Nihilism”, a state in which they care neither about winning nor losing, nor even the outcome of this run at all, but only whether or not this current run appears to be achieving a secondary meta-progression goal. The player is calculating probabilities and evaluating their time before deciding whether to continue a run or end prematurely.
By contrast, Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy not only offers no rewards or unlocks for winning (nor losing), but also no points, abilities, cards, or probabilities. All extrinsic motivators are removed, leaving only the intrinsic. Very quickly, players who continue often enter (another term we’ve coined) “Getting Over It Acceptance”, a state in which they care very much about winning, but already understand the stakes are so high they may lose at any time.
Winning Getting Over It welcomes you to the top of the mountain, presents your “clear time” in small font, and asks the player to confirm that they are not recording or streaming the ending, as “only those who have climbed are welcome”. You’re not allowed to show off here.
In A Profound Waste of Time (Issue 3), Bennet Foddy is quoted in an interview as saying: “In today’s high-budget games, there seems to be a presumption that the way players derive pleasure from the experience is to move smoothly through it, and digest the whole thing, with only a modest number of failures and setbacks – just enough to keep them engaged, and playing thoughtfully.
[…]
Maybe what I’m doing as a designer is imposing on the player a sort of admonition against caring too much about winning and losing. […] It’s not exactly asking players to set their own goals. Rather, it’s to stop worrying about progress. Stop worrying about victory.
[…]
A huge part of the idea behind Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy is to offer people that experience of feeling like something’s on the line. They’ve made a lot of progress. Now they’re in danger of losing that progress. Now they’re making an idiotic mistake. And, lastly, just feeling that plummeting feeling. That was at the core of what I wanted to get across.”
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[deleted]. (2018, July 7). Why are XCOM soldiers so easy to get attached to? Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/8wvhm7/why_are_xcom_soldiers_so_easy_to_get_attached_to/
Design strategies. (2025, November 14). In Dwarf Fortress Wiki. https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Design_strategies
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