Week 2 Run: The Taxonomy of Losing

Sorting failure into a real hierarchy — time, progress, resource, and death — and testing it against games nobody in the room can agree on

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1 March 2027

Not all losing is the same size. Losing a few seconds of progress is not losing a run, and losing a run is not losing a character permanently. The hierarchy from the lecture — time lost, progress lost, resources lost, death — gives the rest of the course a shared vocabulary for comparing games that otherwise look nothing alike.

Before the session#

Bring three failure events from three different games, and a first guess at where each sits in the hierarchy.

In the session#

We test the hierarchy against edge cases as a group — the ones that don’t sit neatly in one tier are usually the more interesting design decisions, not failures of the taxonomy.

Afterwards#

Pick the game for your Fail-State Postmortem before next week. The taxonomy is the tool you’ll use to take it apart.