Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33164
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The first thing that came to my mind when I read your question was the [Black Mirror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror) Netflix series. It has very high ratings despite the dark tone and the fact that few episodes actually have a happy ending. Even the happy endings are seldom purely happy, often they just mean that it wasn't the worst possible outcome for everyone. It's really hard to describe the series without spoiling it, so I recommend you just watch it, reflect it, and learn from it. The point is, you can absolutely tell a compelling story without a happy ending, but the reader should probably somehow be made aware in advance that that's the name of the game.

Next I thought of some games that would match the situation. The first one I thought of was [80 Days](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_Days_(2014_video_game)), a work of interactive fiction where you are supposed to circumnavigate the world in 80 days or less. If you don't make it you've lost the game, but you don't feel too bad about it because the characters just go like "Oh well, it was an interesting adventure anyway, and we've got a lot more to come!" or something like that.

But more importantly, when you play the game, you learn about the world, and _that knowledge carries with you to the next playthrough_. So if during your first game you learn that there's a way to travel from, say, Budapest to Kiev, then in the next game you know there will be such a connection right when you start the game, and this time you don't need to buy a train map or listen to some gossip or anything like that to find that out. And even if you know about a connection, it might not be as useful a piece of information as it was in the previous game, due to random events or other kind of change of plans.

Finally, I thought about [Nethack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack). It's a roguelike where the default expectation is that you will die, and there are dozens of ways to die. People are known to have played it for decades already without ever completing it. But even when your character dies in the dungeon, you will have learned something that you can use in your next game. What's more, dead characters may actually appear in the future games as ghosts of themselves! Then you might be forced to fight a previous version of yourself, or, in case of online servers, the ghost of some other poor player. And should you defeat your ghost, you'll get (at least some of) the items you were carrying when your game ended. So this way your previous losses may again help you in your current game.

Anyway, how long are you planning for one playthrough to last? Because I can tell you I feel a lot worse if I spend 30 hours on a game just to be told "Everybody died, game over, you lost", versus spending, say, just three hours and encountering this ending. I love the [Civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)) series, but when I lose after a loooong playthrough, I don't feel like starting a new game any time soon. So definitely plan and balance the play time carefully. Don't go for anything too long with the format that you've chosen.

And if you can add any upside to the bad endings at all, I think that would be good. (The Old One didn't enslave the entire world, only the Americas! The whole family didn't die, one of the children only lost their legs! Etc...)

Original score: 4