The concept of winning and losing, you know, sort of goes back to our original days on, on the chess board and those kinds of conventional or, or gambling games or, you know, the older sorts of games of all were, were multiplayer games and you, you know, you played against somebody else and you either won or you lost. Um, in modern video games that definition has gotten kind of blurred because particularly with single player games, you know, eh, when, eh, when you lose you know that it’s premature. In a single player game you know that sooner or later you are expected to, to finish the game and to, to , to “win” it.” Um, but, of course, a great many players abandon games before they get to the end either because they’re, you know, they’re tired of the game world or they’ve learned everything there is about the gameplay and they’re simply not interested anymore or whatever. It’s not really appropriate to characterize finishing a long game as winning the game. I, eh, it’s really just kind of completion. And for my own part, uh, eh, I, I do want to complete games. I want to find out, find out what happens because I, I play games for the experience and, and for the story of the game even if it doesn’t have what you would can an explicit story, an implicit story. And, and, so, I want to know how it comes out in the same way that I want to know how a story comes out. Uh, eh, but, eh, you know, uh, within the game you have individual challenges and you have to overcome them. And, and, so, there’s winning and losing in that, in that sense. And we’re always, of course, thinking about that. But I, eh, at the kind of macro level, um, the definition of winning and losing becomes rather complicated because we would like to be able to create sad endings. We’d like to be able to create tragedies. And that’s actually rather difficult when the player has this concept of achievement, you know, that they spend 40 hours or however long it was trying to, to reach this ending and then when they get an emotional downer as a result, you know, what exactly does that mean? We’re, we’re still trying to work that out. Uh, Americans in particular tend to prefer happy endings. You know, Disney has rewritten all, uh, the fairytales, the fantasy stories to give them happy endings. You know, the, the ending of The Little Mermaid, the original story is really very sad indeed and, you know, we don’t do that in America. So, players we’ve kind of taught them to expect that if they, if they achieve something, they will get a positive emotional reward and we’re still kind of working out how do you tell a story that is capable of having a tragic ending without being it emotionally incoherent with everything that’s gone before?
