Needs Help (New crowner 21 June 2021): Unwinnable By Insanity

The Problem
Should Unwinnable by Insanity be a YMMV trope? What should be done about it, either way, and what is its relationship with Unwinnable by Mistake?

Context
In Trope Talk, a lengthy discussion was had regarding UnwinnableByInsanity, in particular the question of whether it should be a YMMV trope.

The suggestion was made at some point that the trope be merged with Unwinnable by Mistake.

If I recall correctly, the idea was that the amalgamated trope would simply describe cases in which the game included some element that the player could miss, and by doing so render the game unwinnable.

Motivation
As a merger of the two tropes doesn't require a judgement call regarding whether the oversight is reasonable or not, the resulting trope would no longer be YMMV, thus obviating the uncertainty regarding Unwinnable by Insanity.

Furthermore, the two tropes are, it may be argued, not really all that separate: In both the game allows some action that non-obviously results in the game becoming unwinnable. The only real difference is that Unwinnable by Insanity requires that the action be unreasonable for the player to perform or the devs to discover, if I'm not much mistaken.

Proposal
The aforementioned suggestion, then, is what I propose here: that the two tropes be merged. (Presumably under a new name, since neither "mistake" nor "insanity" covers both cases.)

Wick-checks
Two wick-checks have been done, one for Unwinnable by Insanity, and one for Unwinnable by Mistake.

The former should be available here: Forum post by WarJay77: Wick Check By Insanity

The latter should be available here: Sandbox: Wick Check By Mistake

The short version might be summed up thusly:

• In usage, both tropes leaned heavily towards describing the player's actions, rather than the design or implementation of the game—especially in the case of Unwinnable by Insanity
• There's little overlap between examples of the two tropes

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 20th 2021 at 10:00:22 AM

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Opening.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Both seem like they'd be better suited to Trivia than YMMV, since they're background information on the work rather than a way audiences react to the work. It's something the work does to the audience, rather than vice versa, but only due to a developer oversight. As for whether to merge them, I'm currently undecided, but if I decided to merge, merging Unwinnable by Insanity into Unwinnable by Mistake seems like it would make more sense (but again, I'm not completely decided on that). (Edit: Alternatively, they could both be merged back into Unwinnable itself.)

Fighteer previously mentioned in a Project thread (I forget which one, but I think it might have come up in the Real Life cleanup thread for some reason) that Game-Breaking Bug would be Trivia instead of YMMV if it's reclassified as Not a Trope (which is why I put it on Tropes Needing TRS as such) since players' opinions on the bugs are irrelevant (unlike with Good Bad Bugs).

Edit: This is what YMMV.Home Page has to say about Unwinnable by Insanity:

I don't think the part about "doing something 'dumb' or 'crazy'" is a very good reason just because of the claim that it's hard to define, since doing something "dumb" or "crazy" could result in a Game-Breaking Bug showing up, and I previously mentioned why Game-Breaking Bug should be Trivia. Alternatively, doing something "dumb" or "crazy" could simply, you know, cause the player to get a Game Over. Out-of-universe doesn't automatically mean YMMV; Word of God is out-of-universe, but it's not YMMV. The fact that not all players will do it doesn't matter; not all players will play through every level of an NES Super Mario Bros. game instead of warping, but that doesn't make Warp Zone usage subjective (there could potentially be YMMV items related to them, but they're not subjective on their own).

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 12th 2021 at 3:56:09 AM

You can't always get what you want.

Thank you for doing so! ^_^

I think that my argument for it being YMMV is less that some players will encounter it and others won't, than that whether the thing in question is "insane" requires a judgement call—one that might vary from person to person.

Which is to say: as I see it, the YMMV element of Unwinnable by Insanity is in the distinction between it and Unwinnable by Mistake.

Specifically, that distinction depends, as I understand it, on whether it's reasonable to expect that the devs were aware of the actions involved in the unwinnable state, and if so, whether it was reasonable for them to fix it. If the answer to either is "no", then it falls under "insanity".

Except that what's deemed reasonable in either case is likely to vary from person to person. (And only more so when one considers the question of whether the person in question has knowledge of game-dev!)

I'd argue that, as in-game actions that lead to (presumedly) clear in-game states, these things are within the work.

It's just this distinction of "mistake" and "insanity" that seems troublesome to me—and that I'd like to do away with via a merge.

Not necessarily at all. You might be surprised at just how many bugs are knowingly left in! There may be many reasons for this:

• There may be insufficient time (or money) for the fixing of the bug
• The bug may not be deemed worth fixing, if it's thought to be rare and/or a significant investment to fix
• Fixing the bug may touch on fragile (or perceived-to-be fragile) parts of the code, and it might be thought that the risk of destabilising important elements is too high

And likely more besides!

I would very much agree, I believe!

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 12th 2021 at 10:32:39 AM

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Fair enough; requiring a judgment call on the player's part does sound like better reasoning than "'dumb' and 'crazy' are too hard to define", so maybe we could at least revise the wording on YMMV.Home Page. I'd probably get more insight on why it was made YMMV if I read the discussion regarding it, but I wouldn't know where to look (I have a gut feeling that it was done in that now-closed YMMV thread, which would take a long time to get through).

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 12th 2021 at 5:52:40 AM

You can't always get what you want.

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Edited by AGuy on May 14th 2021 at 8:39:48 AM

I'm just.. a guy....

I was actually waiting to see what you had to say before making a definitive decision in this thread, since your posts in the Trope Talk thread are no longer there. But anyway, merging By Insanity and By Mistake into Unintentionally Unwinnable sounds like a good idea (but merging them into the main Unwinnable trope would also be fine) — that's certainly a better name than either of the current names.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 12th 2021 at 7:05:45 AM

You can't always get what you want.

I like that idea. from me to merging into Unintentionally Unwinnable.

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

A merge sounds fine, however we merge it.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

>no indication in the examples whether the situation existing was an oversight or willful

Hoo boy, old tropes and context problems.

Merging seems solidly a good idea. Whether we should merge just M+I or merge all three, we're still on the fence about.

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

@AGuy:

I agree with your conclusion here, if not with your exact reasoning.

(Since I do agree with the conclusion, the disagreement with the reasoning doesn't seem all that important. If you're interested, here is some of it in this parenthetical:

I really don't think that it's about stigma. I do also think that there are some elements of many games that assume familiarity with gaming, and that can be non-obvious to people without that familiarity.

Pretty much all of that was on display in the "MomVs" threads by Rami Ismail on Twitter, in which he chronicled getting his mom into gaming. There were a number of interesting things that gamers might take for granted that just weren't clear to her—but conversely, she did pick things up as she went.)

If we do merge the two tropes, then I do like this as the new name.

However, the above aside:

I think that this might be a better idea, indeed!

I mentioned above some of the reasons that a bug or unwinnable state might be left in a game. And many—perhaps most—seem to me to be likely to be pretty much opaque to people who didn't work on the game.

After all, how can one know, just seeing a set of unwinnable-causing actions in a game, whether the devs knew about them or not? (You'd be amazed at how easily a player can find a set of actions that the dev didn't even realise were possible, I think.) Or if the devs knew, why they left them un-fixed?

And really, from the perspective of the player, does it matter much why the actions are present in the game, as opposed to the fact that they are present in the game?

So I say let's indeed merge Unwinnable by Insanity and Unwinnable by Mistake into Unwinnable!

I might then further suggest that we preserve some of the distinction made by these tropes via a note added to the description of Unwinnable, mentioning some of the reasons that such a thing might be present in a game.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 13th 2021 at 11:15:57 AM

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Edited by AGuy on May 14th 2021 at 8:39:58 AM

I'm just.. a guy....

One issue with Unwinnable by Insanity is more that it's often a self-imposed challenge sort of deal, and not something someone could get into by accident. If you trap yourself on Cinnabar Island with a Magikarp, it's your fault, and you probably did it with the goal of soft-locking yourself. So on one hand, I sort of get why it's YMMV (because insanity is subjective), but it's also usually not something people do unwillingly.

If nothing else, a definition-only Soft Lock page will also be useful here.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 13th 2021 at 7:03:50 AM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

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Edited by AGuy on May 14th 2021 at 8:40:10 AM

I'm just.. a guy....

There is another problem with the trope name here.

Namely, "unwinnable" in this context doesn't mean "a game that cannot be won" (and it is sometimes mistaken for that). Rather, it means "a situation FROM WHICH the game cannot be won any more, even though the game itself is winnable". This is sometimes known as a "dead end" or "walking dead" situation. Note that the trope Unwinnable Joke Game does refer to games that are unwinnable; whereas the other three tropes on Unwinnable do not.

Anyway:

• Unwinnable by Mistake is trivia, and is a subset of Game-Breaking Bug (which should also be trivia).
• Unwinnable by Insanity is The Same But More (and the distinction between this and UBM is YMMV) so it should be merged.
• Kill Screen is also a subset of Game-Breaking Bug and is also trivia (the distinction is that Kill Screen applies to an Endless Game whereas UBM applies to games with an actual end).
• Unwinnable is a pretty pointless "index" of only three pages, and I'd be ok with merging it too.
• Unwinnable by Design is actually a trope (in that the game designers intended the player to get dead-ended) so this page is probably fine.

Edited by Spark9 on May 14th 2021 at 3:41:41 AM

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

I agree with what you said about the Unwinnable series and Kill Screen.

Edit: Kill Screen might be outside this thread's scope (if only because there was no wick check), but making Unwinnable by Mistake Trivia in this thread is doable, partially because of the recent decision to move Trivia dicussion to TRS instead of the now-closed dedicated thread, and partially because there was a wick check for that in addition to Unwinnable by Insanity.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 14th 2021 at 6:42:12 AM

You can't always get what you want.

Hmm... I'm in two minds about the move to Trivia:

On the one hand, I can see the argument that these things aren't part of the intended experience of the game; they were left in by accident, or because it was infeasible to fix them, or whatever. The devs didn't want there to be a dead-end there.

On the other, these things aren't really behind-the-scenes matters or suchlike. They're very much present in the work itself.

One analogy might be to "Corpsing" in other media: it's something that's not meant to be present in the work, but that nevertheless is, and that impacts the experience.

Regarding the name, I'm open to changing it—the argument in favour makes sense to me. However, I gather that name-changes require indication of misuse stemming from the name, and I'm not convinced that we have that.

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I added a TRS notice to the page. I'm too tired to reply to anything (I was out of town until a bit ago), so I'll probably come back to this thread tomorrow.

You can't always get what you want.

I still don't think it's YMMV, but I'm too fatigued to repeat the reasons I stated in that Trope Talk thread.

Regarding the merge, I support it, as long as we can still add examples in the context of them being unwinnable by player actions (and hopefully preserve the current examples, since we're not dealing with a case of misuse).

135 - 158 - 273 - 191 - 188 - 230 - 300

To the latter, that would indeed be the idea, at least as I have it in mind.

The merged trope would include examples that would have fallen (or currently do fall) under either of the two current tropes. (And possibly more, if we merge into "Unwinnable"!)

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- Your post Link, just so everyone knows: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16147197280A60747600&page=2#comment-42

My feel is that Unwinnability isn't finely split enough, actually.

• Lack Of Resources Unwinnability, such as deliberately exploiting mechanics to render unwinnable, like selling everything until you're out of money, weaponless, etc.
• The there's Sequence Breaking Unwinnability, where you go where you're never intended to be.

There's likely more...

Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576

Both of those are currently covered by Unwinnable by Insanity.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

- Right, so my vote for what to do with Unwinnable by Insanity, is... "Split".

Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576

...Why? It's not that big.

That doesn't solve any of the problems we have though.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness