UC Irvine

Failure is a crucial part of a game experience. Players expect to be challenged to a level that invites failure, showing lower engagement if they don’t fail at all. While an important aspect of the game experience, the ways video games frame failure and how players react while playing remains understudied. Borrowing from literature in psychology, this dissertation uses mastery orientation, a measure of how individuals react to failure, to develop a behavioral measure which observes how 56 individuals reacted to failure while playing notoriously challenging video game, Cuphead for two weeks.

Results validate this measure, showing that those who reported higher mastery orientation scores also show more mastery-oriented behaviors in-game, show more mastery-oriented behaviors sequentially, and are less likely to abandon a level before completing it. No change in mastery orientation towards game contexts was initially found after playing Cuphead for two weeks, although closer inspection shows a leveling out of mastery orientation scores as those who started on the lower end of the scale increased while those who started in the higher end of the scale decreased. This is shown in women significantly increasing in their mastery orientation scores after playing Cuphead for two weeks while men significantly decreased. Visualizing these effects suggest that some women began the study underconfident in their ability to persist through failure while some men began the study overconfident, with mastery orientation scores leveling out through the course of the study. Finally, distribution of gameplay behaviors shows that players persist for longer when further into the game, suggesting that the more time and effort the player expends, the more likely they are to continue to persist through failure. This sheds some light on how players react to failure depending on where in the game they currently are.

This study opens a new perspective for how researchers and game developers can understand the behaviors players take when they encounter failure, develops a new methodology to gauge mastery orientation, and begins to show where and why in a game players begin to give up. The implications of these results and areas for further investigation are discussed.