Week 2: The Taxonomy of Losing

A four-part hierarchy for failure — time, progress, resources, death — and the games that don't fit it cleanly

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Before you can compare how two games handle failure, you need a vocabulary that isn’t just “harsh” or “fair.” This lecture proposes four tiers, ordered by what actually gets taken away from the player: a few seconds, a chunk of progress, a stock of resources, or the character itself.

Outline#

• time loss: the mildest tier, and why it’s still not free
• progress loss: what a checkpoint is actually protecting
• resource loss: lives, ammo, currency — failure with an economy attached
• death: the tier that ends a session rather than a moment
• the games that sit across two tiers at once, and why that’s usually deliberate