Article:
LARP Plot Tips: The Players Must Lose Myth

I've heard this myth a few times, most recently as a comment on my Resource Sink article. People have this idea that the players need to lose every once in a while to make the game more fun.

I don't know how this myth got started, but it's dead wrong.

I'm not saying that the players shouldn't lose every once in a while. If you're writing challenging plotlines and not coddling your players, there will be times when they lose. But players don't need to lose, they need to be challenged.

Now, I'm going to approach this from a semi-scientific standpoint. Most of the information in this article is based off of concepts I read in a book called A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

The exact reasons that people play games like this vary, but ultimately everyone plays games because it challenges the mind. When you're given a complete ruleset which dictates how the game operates and a situation within that game world, your brain sees a puzzle with patterns it needs to recognize. And your brain absolutely craves patterns - hence why it feels so good when you figure something out. This is what we call the concept of 'fun'.

Koster explains that puzzles that are too difficult don't have a discernable pattern (for a specific individual), and when there's no pattern, the brain doesn't reward the person with that feeling, that fun. On the flip side, something that is trivial also offers no new patters, so once again, the brain tells the person that it's not fun, it's boring.

A great example he uses early in his book is a simple game with a limited pattern - Tic-Tac-Toe. When kids first learn about tic-tac-toe, they are absolutely insatiable and will play the game over and over again. This is because every new game is a new pattern to them. But eventually, they start drawing the game and it gets boring - not because of the draw, but because every play is known and the brain is not seeing any new patterns.

So what does this all mean to LARP? Ultimately, it breaks down into a couple of core concepts in order to keep the game fun.