American gamers find failure difficult to swallow, claims Don Daglow

In an otherwise uneventful Gamescom 2012, industry veteran, Don Daglow threw the cat among the pigeons, in Cologne this week. Daglow claimed that American gamers have trouble dealing with failure when playing games.

"The idea of failure has been dramatically reduced," Daglow told attendees during a panel at GDC Europe. He went on to say that American students don’t "fail" anymore, but instead they are ‘challenged.’ He thinks this is something European developers should bear in mind when designing games, if they want them to succeed in the American market.

He believes that the American education system has all but eliminated the idea of failure. Daglow seems to be saying that Americans don’t subscribe to the old adage, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’. Rather than recognising and learning from their mistakes, American gamers will blame the game itself and lose interest in a game.

It wasn’t all bad news though, as Daglow pointed out that once a player’s interest is piqued by a game, Americans and Europeans are equally as likely to keep playing.

Daglow is no fly-by-night game developer, with the likes of Neverwinter Nights and Dungeon under his belt, as well as being the creator of the first ever sports sim, Baseball. His impressive career means we can’t dismiss his comments out of hand, but I’m sure American gamers will have something to say about his claims, which make generous use of a very broad brush.

I don’t know much about the American school system, but I do know that UK schools are becoming adverse to losers and failure. Everyone has to have a part in the school nativity these days, even though the central cast equates to about 10 people. Nowadays, teachers have to invent parts to get everyone involved. Likewise, school sports day offers everyone a prize, just for taking part. ‘There are no losers because everyone’s a winner’ is an ethos we seem to have inherited from the US, but I’m not sure it’s going to breed a nation of gamers with failure intolerance.

Surely, failure is at the very heart of gaming. That’s why we have lives and medi packs, respawn points and the retry countdown. Added to that, I’m not convinced that American gamers are more adverse to failure than anyone else or where Daglow gets his information from.

Crucially, we need to know whether Daglow is suggesting that European developers should ‘dumb down’ their games to appeal to American gamers or whether he’s just saying that games need a kick-ass intro to maximise the chances of success in the US. During the panel at GDC, he did say, ‘Don’t wait to entertain people’ because once Americans are grabbed by a game, they will stick with it.

Maybe the lesson here is that European devs need to focus on a strong start to a game, rather than slow, meandering build-ups with no reward. But I’d want that of any good game. What we don’t want is a homogenisation of games from different parts of the world.

Whilst the US is well known for favouring American remakes of foreign cinema or television, rather than watching anything with subtitles or unfamiliar cultural references, I think gamers are generally more open to other cultures. Japan is the home of videogames, bringing Japanese culture into the mainstream. In addition, games often trawl mythology and new locales to ensure they stand out from the crowd and we lap it up. Just look at the success of Assassin’s Creed, which has taken us from the Middle East to Renaissance Italy. Okay, so it’s heading to America now, but it had a good stint on other continents.

Regardless of Daglow’s failure issue, there’s probably more of a cultural gulf between Western and Asian tastes, than there is between American and European gamers. Whatever the differences, a gamer who doesn’t like failure isn’t going to last very long. If I gave up on a game every time I died or got the gameover music, let’s just say, I’d have a lot more hours in the day.

A quote for gamers: In order to succeed you must fail, so that you know what not to do the next time. –Anthony J. D’Angelo.