Illustrates the title, not the trope: Unwinnable By Design

Much as I love XKCD, the image on Unwinnable by Design is not an example of the trope: the trope means that a game can become unwinnable as a result of certain player actions, not that it is unwinnable from the get-go.

Can we think of a better replacement?

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

It just one-ups the Hell subtype :)

I second this. The image is fine.

"We are not a stuffy encyclopedic wiki. We're a buttload more informal".

It is clearly not the "hell" subtype. "Hell" means you did something obscure wrong but aren't told what. XCKD Tetris means that there is nothing at all you can do, and this is immediately clear from the start.

Yes, the image is funny, and we can surely find a place to put it, but the image is unrelated to this particular trope.

edited 31st Aug '11 1:36:29 PM by Spark9

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

I think your opinion on this may be being based on the Example As Thesis. The Example As Thesis mostly just explains how it's used in Adventure Games and Interactive Fiction. Other genres can be Unwinnable by Design as well, and that is a game of Tetris that is designed to be unwinnable.

edited 31st Aug '11 2:13:42 PM by Balmung

The point is that the trope description tells us that this isn't about games that are unwinnable from the start, but about games that become unwinnable as the result of certain player actions.

Perhaps this means the title should be changed, or the description should be changed, but the description is clearly different from what the image shows.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

I'm thinking you ought to take this to TRS to be sure. Only the sliding scale for interactive fiction really implies that it has to be some sort of player action that makes it unwinnable, and it doesn't seem to rule out games that are literally impossible from the get go. Alternatively, look at it this way: the player action that rendered the game shown impossible was hitting "play".

edited 31st Aug '11 2:40:04 PM by Balmung

The current image was picked in the last thread. I know this, because I was the one who started the last one.

edited 31st Aug '11 2:43:24 PM by DRCEQ

I never said it's the Hell level of this trope; I said it one-ups it, being its Ultimate Infernal Punishment level. A lot of people find it amusing and fitting (as it was picked in IP); you'll have to find a better suggestion before suggesting changing it.

edited 31st Aug '11 2:45:22 PM by peccantis

Technically speaking the trope describes a game that IS winnable. It's just designed in such a way that it can become unwinnable, usually without you noticing. Therefore, it seems to be a poor name. Even so ... the image does not match the meaning of the trope, and since an images job is to help explain a trope, it's apparent that the Tetris image fails terribly.

In (barely) related news, there's a Tetris mod that plays like the current picture. Do a Youtube search for "Not Tetris 2". It's Tetris, but with a physics engine!

Now that I think about it ... regular Tetris is "unwinnable"!

I have never liked this title from the start, but that's a different matter.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Here's the most direct way that I can think of to get the tropes actual point across. This is NOT from any game. I threw this together myself.

Choose Wisely

edited 2nd Sep '11 12:21:40 AM by LordGriffin

I don't think it works very well. A few influential games have had "Save & Quit" options on their Game Over screen (saving only the recorded level number / Plot Coupons, not the full gamestate that led to the Game Over)....

edited 3rd Sep '11 8:31:29 AM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Well, we don't seem to be able to agree on a GOOD image, but the original point still stands. The image is not actually an example of the trope. The description and all the examples that I'm familiar with depict games that CAN be won. The image is of a game that cannot, under ANY known circumstance, be won.

I vote to pull it on these grounds. (And probably a Repair thread opened to discuss the confusing name).

seconding

Thirding, obviously.

(edit) Also, this definitely needs a rename. The entire previous image picking missed the fact that this trope isn't about "games that cannot be won in any way".

edited 3rd Sep '11 5:02:24 AM by Spark9

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

If the image is not an example of the trope, then why was it agreed on by the last Image Picking thread to be the best example of the trope!?

Against pull.

Alt account of Angeldog 2437.

Because they were basing the decision solely on the name, which doesn't imply the same thing as the trope description.

• Name: Game cannot in any circumstances be won. Regardless of what the player does, they'll always lose because there isn't a "win" condition.
• Description: The game is winnable if the player makes the right choices, but the game becomes unwinnable if the player takes certain actions. The player can win, but the developers included a means for the player to screw themselves over.

If you go by the name, the picture is an example, but if you go by the description it isn't, because the trope requires that a player action renders and otherwise winnable game unwinnable. The tetris image isn't that because there's no win condition for the player to disable. If it started out like regular tetris, but changed to that because the player hit a certain button or something, it would count.

In any case, we should wait for the TRS thread to come to a conclusion before we mess with the picture.

edited 3rd Sep '11 12:44:39 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Reaction Image Repository

The previous IP thread was pretty short and had only two candidate images; more importantly, nobody in that thread appears to have noticed that this trope is badly named (i.e. it isn't really about "unwinnable" games).

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

There seems to be enough clarity at this point in the two threads that I think it's safe to pull this one. We can hold off on the decision of the Repair shop before we put up another image, but for now the Tetris one is wrong.

Motion to pull

Pulling (not an example)

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Maybe this could make a decent image for Unwinnable?

edited 5th Sep '11 8:02:15 AM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Unfortunately not, because of the same reason. Unwinnable is also not about games that cannot be won, but about games becoming unwinnable as a result of player action.

What we need is a trope for Impossible Joke Game, or something like that, i.e. games that give you a clear goal and intentionally make it impossible to reach that goal. For that page, this would be an excellent image.

(edit) I've started a YKTTW here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=shjymr4he2bpof1m9bfhrcem

edited 5th Sep '11 8:58:19 AM by Spark9

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

What about games that are impossible to win de facto? As someone noted above, regular Tetris is unwinnable, as where several old school and arcade games (they where more about the score, if anything), yet they're definitely not "jokes". That's just another way a game is structured. Which makes me wonder: do we even have a page for those kind of games?

Edit: Nevermind, seems like those are Endless Games.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:49:41 AM by plenum

"We are not a stuffy encyclopedic wiki. We're a buttload more informal".