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

Okay. Something a bit more useful then, hopefully:

Split Unwinnable by Mistake and Unwinnable by Insanity:

UBM becomes Unwinnable By Bug, and Unwinnable By Bad Design.

UBI becomes Unwinnable By Poor and Unwinnable By Sequence Break.

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And they become Objective by not focusing on what a player does to make it unwinnable, but that such a state is possible to achieve in the first place.

Unwinnable By Poor would be impossible to occur if Can't Drop the Hero is in place, ensuring that at least someone in the party is strong enough to climb out of any hole the player tries to dig themselves into.

Edited by Malady on May 14th 2021 at 3:56:53 AM

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

I personally don't think Unwinnable by Insanity has enough wicks to justify a split. I previously said the same thing about Underwater Boss Battle.

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Isn't that achievable by just merging UBI and UBM together and focusing on the fact that it's possible to put the game in what is essentially a soft-lock state, instead of splitting them down even further with arbitrary qualifiers? Unwinnable By Poor isn't even a good name for this sort of thing.

Edited by YourIdeas on May 14th 2021 at 6:37:51 AM

I feel like creating more splits wouldn't be particularly helpful, since the semantics of the current pages' names has already caused a lot of trouble and the proposed names for the further split won't do much to mitigate that. Making use of a more unified name like "Accidentally Unwinnable" (this is just an example, by the way, I'm not saying this should be the name of the combined article) will help us encompass all examples of unintended unwinnable scenarios, be they by glitches or by player actions.

Edited by MyFinalEdits on May 14th 2021 at 8:11:00 AM

135 - 169 - 273 - 191 - 188 - 230 - 300

I know we're fairly lax with Trivia, but I'm not entirely sure this is entirely worthy of a dedicated page? I dunno, it just seems kind of nebulous to me.

Also, any page merge should probably have Softlock in the name since that's easily the most established term.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

I don't think splitting further is a good idea here, and it will likely lead to arguments (or duplication) about whether some particular exploit is a bug, or bad design, or both.

I could see a case for cutting (or going definition-only) on grounds that We Are Not Gamefaqs, yes; but this is the kind of trivia that gamers love.

Also, "softlock" is not the same thing. A game is softlocked if you can't progress (e.g. you can no longer leave the current area); and a game is walking-dead/unwinnable if you can't reach the end. The catch is that the former is usually obvious to the player and the latter isn't, hence people complain about the latter much more.

Edited by Spark9 on May 15th 2021 at 2:20:45 AM

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

Yeah, no. These names are confusing enough and have caused enough confusion in the past that splitting these into several similarly named tropes can't be a good idea.

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

It's just that they all have different trigger mechanics and mitigations.

But, lumping them all into a singular concept is fine by me, especially since it makes Unwinnable a trope I can add examples to.

Edited by Malady on May 15th 2021 at 4:36:00 AM

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

The Unwinnable page references both terms to mean 'rendering the game in an unwinnable state' and honestly, I've never heard of the term walking-dead, walking-dead state, etc. being used to refer to these instances. Whether you're forced to do a reset because you fall into a non-bottomless hole you can't escape from, or you put the game in such a state that it becomes impossible to trigger story flags to move towards one of the game's endings, I've seen the general concept be referred to mainly as softlock.

I'm inclined to agree with those who have argued against a further splitting of the tropes, for reasons given by them above.

Regarding the choice of terminology, Wikipedia offers this:

Reference: [1]

Based on that, the term "unwinnable" is likely fine, but so too is "softlock".

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I'd prefer retaining the term Unwinnable since it's the first term Wikipedia uses when referring to video game examples, meaning we might not have come up with the term ourselves.

Edit from May 17: I accidentally wrote "itself" instead of "ourselves" because I was tired at the time.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 17th 2021 at 7:43:38 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

I still favor making the soft-lock page a separate entity, but it could also be a decent redirect I guess.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Given the confusion and/or overlap between "unwinnable" and "softlock" and "walking dead", it makes sense to combine them on a single page, and explain hair-splitting differences (if any) in the description as needed.

to merge.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

I'm not particularly passionate about merging or not merging Unwinnable by Insanity and Unwinnable by Mistake, though I do think there's something to be said for keeping "a game becomes unwinnable through a programming bug, design flaw, or honest mistake in player judgement" separate from "a game becomes unwinnable through a series of player actions that are so counterintuitive or counterproductive that they would almost have to be deliberate to actually occur."

Anyhow, this is what I might do if I were the God-King of TV Tropes:

1. Leave Unwinnable by Design alone. Out of all the Unwinnable pages, this is the only one that I'd call an unqualified trope, as it's purposefully and deliberately put there by the game's creators. It's essentially a Difficulty or Fake Difficulty trope, albeit a particularly nasty one.

2. Change Unwinnable by Mistake into Unwinnable State, and use it to cover bugs, design issues, or player errors that trigger a state where it's impossible to continue. This would likely include a few of the UBI examples as well, so it might be considered a partial merge. I'm on the fence whether it should be Trivia or YMMV, mainly because it's not so much based on audience reaction so much as something that isn't guaranteed to appear, but it's not external to the game so it doesn't wholly fit Trivia either.

3. Change Unwinnable by Insanity to Unwinnable Through Effort, because as I understand it, it's supposed to cover only unwinnable states triggered through player actions that are so counterproductive, counterintuitive, arcane, or onerous that one wouldn't really achieve it unless they were actively trying to. Honestly, I don't know that this is even a trope, but I think it's interesting and fun to read. This is probably the one I'd make into pure Trivia, because I think it has the most tenuous claim to being a real "trope".

I'm not convinced that UBI/UBM not being external to the work disqualifies it from being trivia. Trivia's meant to be about fun facts for a work after all and a game having an unintentional unwinnable state isn't a storytelling convention or a deliberate design choice by the developers.

- It's technically less about the state and more about how things work together to allow the possibility of the state's existence.

Like how Can't Drop the Hero is a trope, providing a minimum level of party strength, with its aversion leading to possibly trapping yourself in a too-hard location.

Give Me Your Inventory Item can easily create unwinnability since the item can be sold, etc.

Game-Breaking Bug is a trope... But their ability to create, a.k.a the fusion of it with, Unwinnable, that's what creates Unwinnable by Mistake.

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

I'd argue that Game-Breaking Bug is also trivia but I'd prefer to leave that rabbit hole alone and just focus on UBI/UBM for now.

With the other two, an unintentional unwinnable state being the product of a video game trope being poorly implemented doesn't seem like a trope-worthy concept to me. If an NPC asks you to give them a healing item, but you instead give them the one existing Key to the Evil Overlord Castle which leads to the game's one ending, and the game isn't Unwinnable by Design, that's just a poorly implemented gameplay element where the developers didn't code in an exception to reject a Key Item and keep it stored in your inventory.

Regarding the matter of trivia, I still think that the steps are in the game, are part of its possibility-space, and thus these things are tropes, not trivia.

@HeavyMetalHermitCrab:

Regarding Unwinnable by Design, I'd be okay with that as long as it had the requirement of official confirmation of some sort. Otherwise we're speculating about what the devs intended, and that's not as transparent as it may sometimes seem.

Regarding Unwinnable State + Unwinnable Through Effort, I'm really not convinced that it's that cut-and-dried a distinction. I think that you'd be amazed at what players will do without considering it to be out of the ordinary—especially when you consider that there may be thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people playing the game.

Further, the question of whether a series of steps is indeed that counter-intuitive, counter-productive, arcane, or onerous, seems to me like something different people may differ on. What's onerous to me might be a relaxing day's grinding through combinations to another. What makes perfect sense to me might be arcane to another. And so on.

So, to my mind at least, the proposed reworking doesn't change the YMMV element. I thus remain in favour of a merge, myself.

@Your Ideas: This is perhaps tangential, but such things aren't necessarily the result of poor design. I think that I listed possibilities previously, but in short it's sometimes either infeasible or unwise to attempt a fix.

Even the example that you gave, though perhaps obviously a matter of poor design, might not actually be so: it could be a consequence of a system that allows the player to ask another NPC to hold the key, and this one other NPC out of hundreds wasn't tested; or it could be a result of a single missed character in an NPC script; or, well, a number of other things!

My Games & Writing

I'm not terribly concerned with the reason for why the final product of a game ended up with an unintentional unwinnable state. The executives may have decided they need it released before Christmas, maybe the playtesters didn't experiment enough, maybe they thought it was a rare enough case and figured players would run into it, maybe the developers are just incompetent and their game's just a tangled spaghetti-code mess. The result's the same regardless of how the state gets hit.

Rushing a game out for Christmas is covered by Christmas Rushed and not just Executive Meddling itself. Both are Trivia, if that matters.

Edit: I should probably add that this post is just a comment regarding the Christmas Rushed Trivia item and not an argument regarding any of the previous posts. I still haven't been feeling the best lately, but I'm getting that looked at this week.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 17th 2021 at 12:39:33 PM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Hum...

As someone who likes reading the Unwinnable pages, merging Mistake and Insanity feels... kind of iffy to me.

I always thought "Mistake" meant something a player could easily do by accident, while "Insanity" meant it'd take a lot of deliberate effort on the player's part. Merging the two means putting examples like "on some computers, an item you need ends up covered by the UI so you can't get it" or "this port changed the physics but not the levels, so a late-game jump is impossible to do" right next to "if you find this specific pit and deliberately kill all enemies and remove every possible foothold, you can make it impossible to get back out".

There's a lot of arguing about Insanity and how to change it and all that, so I don't think I can change anyone's mind there, but if we do move Insanity into Mistake ... I kind of had a thought in the opposite direction, instead? What if we make a trope like "Easily Unwinnable", for games where the unwinnable state is extremely easy to reach or impossible to avoid? That way the spirits of the old tropes remain, but it's a bit easier to tell what goes where(if you have to do more than fall into a pit, it's not easy).

And now to have anxiety over having said anything.

I dunno, that kinda calls into the same judgement call of "is this easy?"

Like — "save in Lorelei's room with a team insufficiently powerful to beat her, at least one of which is a Psychic-weak mon that knows Rage", is that easy to do accidentally? Game Freak must think so; they added an escape hatch in Yellow Version.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on May 18th 2021 at 10:08:37 AM

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

I looked into the stats for that example a bit, and there's only two gen 1 pokemon that both learn Rage and are weak to Psychic (Beedrill and Primeape). Combining that with the fact you must have no other pokemon available, nor any other moves, and no items (such as revives or ethers) that could rectify either of these issues, and it really doesn't sound easy to get into that situation. It's technically possible to do it by accident, but you'd have to be really unlucky, so I don't think it'd count as easy.

(I think it being possible at all is enough reason for Game Freak to want to fix it, so that's not an is-it-easy thing.)

Well, it was just an idea, anyway. Sort of a compromise for those who don't feel comfortable with a full merge.

And now to have anxiety over having said anything.

'Is it easy' just seems like going in the opposite direction of 'is it hard', which doesn't seem like much of a compromise. We'd be back at square one later down the road when someone realizes two Unwinnable tropes have the same problem that UBI and UBM currently have.

I'm inclined to agree with the others here on the "Is it easy" approach: it seems to me to still be a judgement call that's likely to differ, possibly greatly, from one person to another.

In that case I do think that we agree, for the most part.

My only real quibble is that I don't think that it's necessarily easy to tell whether an unwinnable state is unintentional or not.

Looking at Unwinnable by Design, there seems to be indication that it may be done intentionally. If one has developer confirmation, then that's fine! But examples without it are opaque (even when they seem obvious, I argue).

Feeling so is fair, I do think—especially if it's a set of pages that you particularly enjoy.

I may not feel the same as you, but I won't gainsay your dislike itself.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on May 18th 2021 at 10:59:25 AM

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