I posted a new game design-related post on my Gamasutra blog a couple of days ago, titled “In Defense of Major Setbacks.”
I actually intended for this article to be larger in scope and talk about failure in general; but I thought that the article was getting too long and decided to leave it as ruminations about the size of “setbacks” (i.e. progress loss upon gameplay “death”); the fact that significant setbacks are increasingly out-of-vogue in game design; and the fact that there are some interesting psychological dynamics that are lost when large setbacks are lost.
Most of it feels tautological for anyone who’s thought about game design before… not exactly groundbreaking. But I reference a few interesting/obscure examples, and hopefully it’s still interesting to students and so on who haven’t thought much about the subject before.