Winning is fun. It feels great when your strategy comes together and you stand victorious over your opponents. It’s one of the main reasons why we designed Captain’s Gambit to allow for multiple winners. After all, if it feels good to win, why wouldn’t we want as many players to win as possible? In fact, in very rare and specific circumstances, it’s even possible for everyone to win!
Unfortunately, there is one major drawback to winning: losing. By necessity, if it’s possible to win a game, it has to be possible to lose (or, at least, “not win”). Ideally, as players become more skillful, they will eventually win more often than they lose. But regardless of player skill levels, many games mandate that a significant proportion of players lose by design. For example, in your typical 1v1 or team-based multiplayer game, half of the players must lose. It’s even more dramatic in free-for-alls or tournaments, where you can have dozens (or even hundreds) of losers, but only one winner.
Losing is a core part of playing games. Games are inherently built on a cycle of failure, where players learn from their mistakes and improve over time. This is part of why winning feels so good in the first place. After all, overcoming a challenge is only satisfying if you struggled. But even if losing is a necessary part of games, that doesn’t make it feel good in the moment.
Many games try to compensate for the bad feeling of losing by making winning feel really really good. These games pile on rewards like in-game currency, cosmetics, or new game content to make the victory taste even sweeter. The idea is that if winning feels fantastic, you’ll forget all the negative losing experiences it took to get you there. This is great, and games should definitely reward players for achieving their goals. But there’s a tricky assumption baked into this design approach: your players will want to stick around until they win.
See, here’s the thing: If winning is the only positive experience in your game, and most of your players must lose, why should they keep playing your game? Winning might eventually feel amazing, but if losing sucks right now I won’t want to keep playing long enough to find that out. If you want your game to be fun, losing must also be fun.
There are lots of ways you can try to make losing a more enjoyable experience. One way is to treat winning and losing as a spectrum (such as by using a score or ranking system). For example, while it might feel amazing to get 1st, you can still make players feel good about getting 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th. Even when players don’t get one of the top placements, giving players feedback on how they are improving can help give them satisfaction in their increasing skill at the game.
You can also design your game to allow for multiple winners, or multiple types of winners. Let’s say you have a game where whoever gets the most points wins. While whoever got the highest score is the overall “winner” and the other players by definition are the “losers”, you can still make the “losers” feel like they won in different ways. For example, you could reward whoever dealt the most damage, or helped the most teammates, or collected the most resources. This lets players feel like they accomplished something meaningful even if they didn’t win overall.
You can also reward players just for playing the game rather than only for winning the game. For example, you could award the winner 100xp but still give all players 25xp regardless of if they win or lose. That way, even when players lose they won’t feel like their time was wasted.
Finally, and most importantly, you can focus on simply making the game fun to play in the moment. This means that the controls are tight, the UI is easy to understand, the special effects are crunchy, the music is evocative, and the story is compelling. While this doesn’t make losing itself feel better, it gives players plenty of reasons to keep playing your game regardless of if they win or lose.