Yes but a lot of people are also saying that they don’t like bad/sad/not good endings as well, not just “game overs.” I think if used well, having the potential for an ending that isn’t rainbows and bunnies (unless they’re the monty python variety) can actually add a lot to some games. Not everything has to have a happily ever after ending, it would make some of the darker games boring IMO if there was zero potential for things to go wrong. (I’m not talking about instadeaths here which I’m not a huge fan of, I’m talking about properly set out bad endings.)
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I don’t mind “bad endings” in the sense of tragedy at all. I guess there’s a confusion of terms here, since I assumed that a “bad end” was dramatically unsatisfactory. If it just means a tragic turn of events, then that’s a different matter.
Still, I feel that a “bad end” should be perceivable from how the story unfolds, which the reader affects with their choice, so that it doesn’t just suddenly appear out of nowhere. This way, if you hate bad endings you should be able to avoid them if you were so inclined. Frankly, if there wasn’t a chance for characters in the story to have miserable endings, it’d be strange. Isn’t that the whole point? That the reader can shift the stories to their desired direction.
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I think people are using about three different defintions of ‘bad ending’ here. There’s the early game over type as in the ‘because you picked right instead of left, you fall in a pit of spikes and die’ ; the type where the MC has any possibility of dying due to actual earlier decisions; and the type where you reach an actual ending of the story but it’s not a ‘happy’ ending (for example, the Wise Use of Time ending where you end up on the run )
I’m not a fan of the first kind - they tend to be annoyingly arbitrary - but the other two can certainly be used well.
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I can see a lot of people are sort of saying what I’m about to say, but I’ll just go ahead and ramble about my own opinion while I have the opportunity.
I actually don’t mind bad endings and/or game overs, although I tend to dislike the former if they don’t feel like satisfying conclusions in and of themselves, and that’s just because an ending in general should feel complete and logical (unless it’s a surrealist work, there are exceptions to everything) whether it’s primarily negative or primarily positive. Bad endings can show the reader that the character’s decisions- or their own in the case of interactive fiction- have drastic consequences, which can send a message about the story’s themes to the audience.
Game overs, however, are unique to games (obviously) and so comparisons to literature and film don’t help to address this aspect of the medium. I think that in a dramatic work, there needs to be some sort of failure state, and other people have said this as well. It’s for the same reason that people get upset with the latest season of Game of Thrones- it doesn’t make sense or feel engaging when characters succeed easily despite bad odds.
I would not appreciate how amazing it feels to have my followers alive and loving me after the winter in XoR if I wasn’t keenly aware of how easily they would have died and fallen to despair. I don’t think I’d care that much about my scheming in the Choice of Romance series if I didn’t know everything could and might go wrong if I’m not careful. Slammed!'s fights get my heart beating very fast as they reach a climax because I’ve realized that I can lose, and that loss can have series consequences.
Maybe this is a difference between readers, but I don’t like it when my protagonist always somehow succeeds. It makes my choices feel less meaningful, and the entire struggle of my character hollow. It just seems wrong when I can win without any consequences.
Now, there are ways to implement Game Overs poorly. I’m not fond of games in which a seemingly minor choice, or a choice made for flavor, leads to potentially devastating results. It just isn’t fair to the reader in that case.
To conclude, and to provide a summary for the people who (justifiably) skipped my lengthy explanation on my opinion: Bad endings and game overs are great for increasing the stakes of the story, but they need to be satisfying and fair. They need to tell some kind of story, and most importantly, the player needs to know what they’re fighting against, why they failed, and what to do to avoid it. If those criteria are met, failing in a game feels interesting and engaging, at least to me.
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This is well put. You make me realize that we need to distinguish “bad” end for the character, and “bad” end for the player. If I fail, I want to fail awesome and feel like I did something cool and interesting and novel. The character might not like what happens to them, but I had a fun time.
I think sometimes calling an ending a “Bad End” sounds pejorative, like, “you screwed up, player.” Sometimes that is what the game is going for, and that’s the kind of game over that I am leery of in IF.
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Shakespeare didn’t just write tragedies, you know. 
And I’d far prefer to see Twelfth Night than sit through Hamlet (although I guess that’s not just about the ending…)
But I don’t really have a problem with “bad endings” generally. I’m a big fan of Greek myth, and that didn’t really do “happy” endings, and when a story needs a “bad” ending, giving it a happy ending would be failing to fulfil the story. That said, one important part of tragedies is the fact that they are set up by the characters themselves, and thus IF is not a good place to use bad endings (without good endings, too, at least), simply because forcing a bad ending on all characters despite their actions would not be fulfilling the story in the same way that, say, Hamlet’s death does fulfil his story.
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I think another problem is that bad ending in the sense of tragedy can often feel like the bad endings which are just game over because a good ending exist.
If there is a bad ending and a good ending the bad ending often feel less like tragedy and more like ‘you suck’ or ‘you played the game wrong’ (in fact a bad and a good end might intensify the game feeling of the IF.)
Well, in short words for what I said before: I don’t have problems with “bad endings” if they’re not meant to be “wrong endings”. I don’t mind if the ending of a story is everybody dying (I mean, it… is not what we expect but I also wouldn’t like if every story was happy. I’m a huge fan of French movies after all).
But I do have problems with me dying in 2 of 3 options and having to restart the whole game again.
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The nature of CYOA-style fiction makes it REALLY difficult to have every single path come to a dramatically satisfactory ending. You’ve either got to constantly make them choices of the ‘slightly different text but changes nothing’ variety, or let them grow exponentially until you’re forced to cut them off. Although good writing can uplift even a fairly abrupt or dramatically unsatisfying ending.
But sometimes the player really does screw up and it’s OK to give them the equivalent of dropping Mario down a pit. (And let’s face it, the bad endings of the old CYOA books were the best parts…)
Since someone just mentioned the Rebellion story, there was a point where I felt like I really shouldve gotten a game over, when I let almost everyone starve in the woods and they all abandoned me. I was already making plans for how to do better next time when the game was suddenly like ‘lol it’s fine, some of them came back and 40 slaves in the woods is totally a viable number for overthrowing an empire and also they still trust your leadership for some reason.’ It felt a little silly to me but I’m guessing now it was done because the author apparently knows his audience pretty well.
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Caveat - Others may or may not have said what I am about to say. I apologize for any overlap.
A “Game Over” state is different from a “Bad Ending”. The former ends the current session that is being played. The latter is a subjective conclusion, either within a game session (a character gets killed half-way through the narrative is a possible “bad ending”) or ending a game session. (the race car you are driving crashes into the wall, ending the race you were in is also a possible bad ending.)
Due to their nature, a “bad” ending may be bad for many different reasons. It could mean: poorly written, frustrating, unsatisfying, bitter, abrupt or any number of things. One of the most common cited qualifiers I see involving games is: rushed.
A narrative-bad-ending can be quite satisfying, fulfilling, ironic, sad, etc.
The implementation of a narrative’s ending within the game is what most people judge. Everyone’s favorite example of a poor implementation is Mass Effect 3 narrative endings. From a writer’s stand-point the various endings were decently written. From the gamer’s viewpoint, the implementation of these endings and the mechanic leading up to them were really something horrid.
A “cliff-hanger” ending is considered by many (judging from responses in another thread) “bad” endings to IF games. Again, I think a cliff-hanger doesn’t have to be qualified as “bad” depending on how it is implemented. A cliff-hanger is often judged to be “bad” because, often, it comes very near a game-over state. This often causes ill-will among readers.
My favorite endings, cliff-hangers aside, are those that have a multitude of qualities. It makes the game-world more developed and richer when the ending I experience in the narrative is multi-layered and something not easy to categorize in basic generic terms. It is these types of ending which showcase the designers/authors/developers ability to implement narrative.
I’m going back to working on the ending of my game. Ironically, I just realized, Everyone have a good day.
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I think they really are important for the story and good to have replayability, mainly because in the real life all the things usually don’t go all good.
But if the story has really a lot of them, it probably gonna need some checkpoints or saves.
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Both bad ends (in the sense of reaching the end of your journey, and meeting a tragic or unsatisfactory end) and game overs (abrupt disruptions in save states caused by mistakes) can be done well, and have their place in COG as much as any other game. It’s a matter of skill with which it is implemented, as well as the environment it’s used in.
With bad ends, having the story be a tossup between a variety of bad end and a single good end works for adventure games and visual novels, and even for CYOA games, but for COG-style games, it’s better to have a variety of satisfactory ends instead of a single optimal end state. Or, if you’re going for an especially dark game, go ahead and make every ending some flavor of “bad”. Either way, the goal is to not have a single optimal route through the game, or at least to give some room in the middle for deviation in the main path. And, as others have noted, put time and attention into these endings. Good writing is a magical salve that can soften most blows.
Game overs are more of a sticking point. In games more on the “game” side of the gameplay/story spectrum, game overs are perfectly acceptable. In games mean to be solved, giving a game over makes sense. In a game that isn’t necessarily meant to be solved, the threat of a game over needs to be clearly established. Things like “it’s probably not a good idea to punch the hydra in the face” need to be either heavily hinted or outright spelled out, but the danger of a game over is capable of bringing a heightened sense of drama and tension… unless your game consists entirely of hard-to-avoid game overs, in which case, it creates an atmosphere of Kafka-esque nihilism instead.
And, of course, don’t have game overs if you don’t have checkpoints.
That’s all.
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I believe bad endings are useful but can be done badly.
Rpgs, visual novels and choice of script games are still games - there has to be a consequence for objectively terrible decisions to keep the suspense. You say "You wouldn’t read 700 pages of a book to end on “and then they all died” but this isn’t a book. The idea behind choice of games is that you get to decide how the story is going to play out while the book doesn’t offer the same flexibility.
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This is an interesting thread. One thing that’s clear is that as @Scribblesome pointed out there is a confusion in the use of the term ‘bad ending’. This might be an unsolvable problem. The way that @Aamano wrote his remarks it could be taken one of two ways. ‘Bad’ could mean, poorly done, poorly conceived, clunky, a waste of time etc. Or ‘bad’ could mean any less than positive resolution for the character. As @Moxie pointed out in fiction you always have the dark and tragic option. And if IF is really fiction, then not only should it have the ‘bad ending’ in sense two, but to be something worth our time it must have the possibilities of horrifying, frustrating even sad (@Eli_Knight) conclusions. Why shouldn’t our emotions be fully engaged? But I suspect that for many the game element comes first. And in the game, we hate to lose. For me the fiction element should be allowed to breathe more. And thus the genuinely tragic and the frustrating should be welcomed openly. (I’ve been thinking about this, but I’ll save this for a separate post later.)
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The first time I played Dragon Age: Origins I played as a human female who ended up romancing Alistair (even if it felt more like mothering him).
She ended up giving up the man she loved so he could marry Anora and bring peace to the land (and with Anora by his side he at least wouldn’t do anything stupid while he lent legitimacy to her reign). And then she died saving all of Ferelden when she slew the Archdemon.
Ferelden was safe and its future assured and nobody else had to die. Her parents had been avenged and so many wrongs righted. She probably thought it was a good death. I almost cried when the Mabari came to her grave.
No other playthrough of this game (and I’ve done like ten or so in total plus tons I started but didn’t finish) ever affected me as much as that outcome. Even though it was a ‘bad ending’ in the sense that my MC died. As a story, it all played out perfectly.
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That is a much more succinct way of what I was saying, thank you.
It is possible to have good “bad endings” after all. For a film example, the ending of Empire Strikes Back, topically enough, is pretty bad for the characters, but the audience feels engaged and like the conflict matters. Interactive Fiction can totally deliver experiences like that, even created improved ones, but it does have to avoid punishing the player. In general, I would say don’t provide the player an option that they can literally never succeed at no matter what they do (there are exceptions to this, some narratives are all about failing to meet impossible goals), because that creates the expectation there’s some sort of hidden content to unlock if the player can just figure out how. It is much more rewarding to learn that something you thought was impossible can be achieved through specific methods than learning that something you spent hours trying to figure out will never work.
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Bad endings are bad M’kay
Why are gifs such a pain to post now? Its pretty dumb to be honest.
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Is this necessarily so, though? I would have thought it’d be possible to write a compelling IF with only ‘bad’ (or at least, not enjoyable by PC/NPCs) endings, as long as the narrative and genre (maybe with some help via the advert copy) make it clear that the game in question is a definite tragedy.
I have a ‘which of these unpleasant endings do you dislike least’ outline floating about for the distant future, a little bit in the style of certain Gothic novels; this discussion is rather making me wonder if there’d be any sort of interest…I do think that even blank-slate PCs can surely be set up for a degree of failure due to their background/position, even if the endings are ‘flavour of tragic’ instead of good. It’s interesting to think about, anyway.
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The CoG guidelines partly agree with you: “Every ending should be awesome, even if it’s a failure or a tragedy. There should be something dramatic and satisfying about every ending… [And] the player should understand why they got the ending they did. There should be enough clues in the text to show how the story led to that destination: references to past events, allusions to stats, etc.”
In other words, every time you read through a CoG work, you should get a satisfying, complete narrative that emerges from player choice. Combined with CoG’s guidance on choices (make them balanced, so that no single option is consistently inferior, and make the consequences of the player choice clear at the time of choosing), the result should be a story that’s both different and good (i.e. fun to read) on every single playthrough. It can end in failure, but it should be a satisfying failure.
Choice of Rebels may well be the game that had so frustrated you. 
It does allow you to die in lots of places (though not until the back third of the game) and some of those deaths are pretty Hobbesian. Does that break the rule about making failures “satisfying”? I’d say it depends on the reader.
I’m writing about insurgency, and like @Cataphrak, I want to write honestly and forthrightly about a lot of unpleasant and unfair things–the horrors of an unjust regime, the struggle to survive in the wilderness, the anarchy that can make people nostalgic for even an awful order (see future games for that). On a cosmic level, like our own, the world of Rebels is brutal and unfair. It can’t be one that clearly telegraphs every bad outcome, or makes a good outcome easy or without trade-offs. The fact that some of its stories end in pain, disappointment, and frustration (as with, for obvious point of comparison, Game of Thrones) is a feature, not a bug.
It’s unsatisfying, but so in the same sense were (GoT spoilers) Ned Stark’s fate or the Red Wedding–by breaking our sense that we’re in a safe narrative space where we know the rules, it reinforces the story’s overall sense of consequence. And there are books and movies that end that way; my favorite horror movie of the last decade (also about narrative rules and how to break them) ends with everyone dead.
This is, of course, a feature that reasonable people can loathe. Not everyone has a taste for the bitter; of those who do, not everyone wants it in their games. I’ve made other creative choices in Rebels that for some readers will enhance the sense of realism, while for others will be absolutely maddening. The fact that the world has its own vocabulary, for obvious example. And the mechanics of surviving the winter will legitimately seem to some “cluttered with unnecessary realism”.
These are matters of taste, and you can’t write for every taste. I’ve written for my own, knowing it’s not universal. Some people don’t have a taste for bad endings–as witness this thread–and others do, as witness a good number of Choice of Rebels reviews. (Especially on Steam. I guess any community where the Dark Souls series can become a massive hit is ripe for other masochistic art…)
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