PAX Australia: Losing in Multiplayer Games

Losing is an interesting topic in single player games and idiogames. But what about multiplayer games? What about orthogames? What about role playing games? How do you design a game to make losing fun? After all, if there’s more than one player, someone’s always losing. Winning is good, and losing is bad. We strive to win, and this is the basis for most of the games we play. Challenges are binary: we either overcome them, advancing the story, or fail, and must try again. But, what if we were to toss th