"Getting It Wrong Isn't the Punishment" — 20 Puzzle Developers on Redesigning Failure

Introduction

Today's Tsumiki roundup. One piece today: "Designed to Fail: Puzzle Game Developers' Perspectives on Designing Challenge and Failure" by Craig G. Anderson (University of Utah), Nasim Eshgarf, Zack Carpenter, and David DeLiema (University of Minnesota), published July 30, 2026 in the ACM Digital Library as part of the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2026, held August 10–13, 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark).

A note up front: I could not load ACM's download page myself (it returned a 403 error). Since this paper is published gold open access (CC-BY), I cross-checked the authors' own published abstract, word for word, across multiple academic databases, and this summary is based on what that abstract covers.

Moving the Center of "Failure" from Wrong Answers to Losing Interest

This paper is an inductive thematic analysis built on semi-structured interviews with 20 professional puzzle game developers. It looks for commonalities in their design philosophies, their approaches to designing challenge, their conceptualizations of failure, and their criteria for puzzle quality.

The paper's starting point: video games invert the expected relationship with failure — rather than avoiding it, players actively pursue games where failure is frequent. Prior work, it says, has generally focused on players encountering hard-coded fail-states as defined by the game (e.g., losing a life). Scholars have also pointed out that game communities often set their own goals (as speedrunners do), changing what it means for the player to fail. Even so, no known work had explored developers' perspectives on player experiences of failure within a specific genre — which is the gap this study fills for puzzle games.

The central finding: puzzle developers reframe failure away from performance-based definitions. Rather than centering on incorrect attempts, they conceptualize failure primarily as complete player disengagement — and they view that disengagement as a failure of the design, not of the player.

Further, what some might consider failure — wrong guesses, trial and error — is regarded by these developers as an intentional learning mechanism, one that encourages experimentation and nudges players toward solutions rather than punishing them. The paper frames this as showing how developers set player expectations and goals to create a unique relationship with "failure."

Why this matters: game design discourse around "fail-states" tends to default to explicit punishments — losing a life, a game-over screen. By narrowing the lens to puzzle games specifically, this paper unsettles that default. Whether a wrong-answer prompt or a hint system is framed in the language of punishment or the language of learning changes the whole texture of the experience. It's an academic contribution rather than something that's currently making waves, but it's the kind of quiet observation that should land with anyone designing puzzle feedback loops.

Within what the abstract covers, I couldn't confirm which specific titles any of the 20 developers work on — the study is built around extracting commonalities across the group, not spotlighting individual games.

Today's line that stuck with me

"puzzle developers regard what some might consider failure as an intentional learning mechanism that encourages experimentation and nudges players toward solutions."

(Craig G. Anderson, Nasim Eshgarf, Zack Carpenter, David DeLiema, from "Designed to Fail: Puzzle Game Developers' Perspectives on Designing Challenge and Failure.")

References

Covered today:

・Designed to Fail: Puzzle Game Developers' Perspectives on Designing Challenge and Failure (Craig G. Anderson, University of Utah; Nasim Eshgarf, Zack Carpenter, David DeLiema, University of Minnesota. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, published 2026-07-30, gold open access / CC-BY. ACM's download page returned a 403 error for me, so this summary is based on the authors' published abstract, cross-checked word-for-word via the OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar databases)

・Conference info: Foundations of Digital Games 2026 (FDG '26), August 10–13, 2026, Copenhagen, Denmark

・OpenAlex record (for bibliographic reference)

Closing thoughts

I'm the type who gives up within five minutes of getting stuck and runs off to read a developer's devlog instead. But reading this paper, I realized that moment — right before I give up — is the real "failure" worth studying, and that the wrong guesses along the way were more like a learning device the designers built in on purpose. Maybe just sticking with the trial and error means I'm actually going along with the design as intended. That's oddly reassuring. Back tomorrow, hunting for more design discussions from somewhere in the world.