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[jwk5]

Enter the PAINSTATION! 

Sum cool bros representin for Austria, yo.

Also, if that's the future for gaming, I guess I'll have to find something else to waste my time with. 

Sadly, I really want to play it. It reminds me of wood shop in junior high when we'd all put a dollar into a winning pool and then take turns standing at the end of the belt sander, then we'd lift up our shirts as a penny gets placed on the belt sander then launched into our guts. After a while the penny's edges would get sanded down and it'd get very sharp like a razor. Last man standing got the money pool. I actually still have scars from it (I won many times). It was painful and utterly retarded but somehow incredibly amusing. I think it is the adrenaline rush that makes the belt sander penny launcher and the painstation so entertaining.

Another retarded but funny feat I recommend everyone try at least once is to heavily grease up your PS2 controllers with baby oil and then play a match with a friend with the rumble turned on for King of Fighters 2006. It's hilarious trying to battle while trying to keep a hold of the damn controller as your fingers slide across the buttons and as the controller rumbles its way right out of your hands. The physical exertion involved somehow makes the game even funner.

...and yeah, I get bored often.

[PogueSquadron]

In game penalties are good. Out of game penalties are not.

Out of game penalties

What?

Mainly things that you value IRL like time and money. Something like, I put $15 in to make my char have higher strength, then someone puts a spectre with a weaken spell that permanently reduces strength. Or something like spending 15 minutes in the game without a save, then getting killed and having to start over, even though the player knows to avoid whatever killed him later.

On the other hand, killing someone 15 times, when each death costs only 1 minute isn't as bad. As long as you give an out of game reward, like an achievement, or letting them explore a new area.

Well I think that whenever penalties in games are too severe, it always affects a gamer's time.  That's why it's important that game penalties shouldn't be TOO severe, or else the player will just stop having fun, which is really the whole point of a game.

I mean, like the Pokemon example I used.  In the game right now, if you go out and train, and all of a sudden come upon a trainer who kicks your butt, you still keep all of the experience you gained after your last save.  How much of a pain would it be if a game over reset you back to your last save, as you were?  All of that time would've been wasted.

I don't know how common that payment option is (I guess it happens in MMOs) but is it that common?

Anyway, I guess any unfair game penalty resorts to out of game frustration.  If a game doesn't adequately prepare you for the challenges in store, then it leads to frustration and wasted time on the part of the player.

For me, as far as deaths vs. no deaths goes (some of the Wario games, for instance), I think if the game isn't going to have deaths, then the penalties have to be frustrating enough so that the player will feel very inconvenienced so that they won't want to screw up.  Either that, or the rest of the game (its presentation, possible humor, music, etc) have to be engaging enough that the player won't care as much about challenge (I suppose Kirby's Epic Yarn and the 2008 Prince of Persia are examples of this?).

[krasimir]

Well, there's always the electrocution option if you fail a quest...

[IQpierce]

Here's the types of penalties I can think of:

- Destroy the player's progress/time. (Mario setting you back to the beginning of the level when you die, and to the beginning of the game when you game over.)
- Destroy something the player has accumulated. (In Starcraft, your buildings being destroyed. In Sonic, losing rings.)
- Remove an opportunity from the player. (In Farmville, you have the opportunity to reap your crops during a certain time period, but if too much time passes then the crops rot. Nothing is taken away from you, but the opportunity to accumulate gain is lost.)
- Reduce the player's autonomy (reduce the number of things he can do; losing your fire power in Mario when injured is a penalty... or in Limbo, being "possessed" takes away control of your character, which feels like a penalty to the player).
- Reduce the responsiveness of the game (make the controls sluggish, e.g. "Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy" in Yoshi's Island... or, being blinded by a flashbang in Counter-Strike, which removes ALL audio/visual feedback temporarily).

I'd also be interested in experimenting with the idea of increasing OR reducing challenge, as a penalty - however this is a weird and recursive idea, since usually the "penalty" in question is meant as a "consequence of failure", the failure being that of not conquering the challenge in question.

Trial-and-error gameplay can actually be the least punishing type of gameplay. Super Meat Boy is one of the least punishing games ever made. The only "punishment" ever inflicted on the player is that of losing progress; but

• 1) the progress is always less than 30 seconds' worth, and
  
• 2) this progress is NEVER lost due to factors outside the player's control (there's no randomness in the game, everything is deterministic).

A truly punishing game is NetHack, or an old-school MMO featuring permadeath: one where the player can easily lose hours of progress due to circumstances that they had absolutely no control over - a failure that they couldn't have prevented. Even when a failure is PERCEIVED as being one that couldn't be prevented, the player feels frustrated - this type of "penalty", one that is feels like an undeserved punishment, is particularly harsh and frustrating, and each time one happens, you have a large chance of your player quitting!

Of course, your player will never "like" any of the penalties I described, which is why they're penalties - they're undesirable! But it's impossible to make a game that features challenge without including failure of some kind, so it's up to you to decide what form that failure takes. Note that more mainstream successful games feature less harsh penalties. (Again, it's impossible to ever lose anything in Farmville, actions either give you a reward or no result at all... it's only possible to lose an opportunity to gain something new. Though that kinda equates to the same thing as losing something, it's not perceived that way for the player.)