Rewarding Failure

I'm not going to start complaining about Extra Credits topic today. They opened it with a disclaimer that the games they were discussing were "interesting", not necessarily "good". And I can vouch for that, I've played some of those games and two of them (that I played) were utter crap. But they seem to have ignored one aspect of gaming journalism and fandom these days; "unique" is a code word for "excellent". The long and short of it is that an excellent game can be criticized for not being new and different enough, while an awful game can be lauded for doing something different irregardless of actual results. Let's say I did something different, like hunting tigers. That would be wildly different for me (and I'm pretty sure incredibly illegal). So I go on a tiger hunt, but instead of bagging a tiger I accidentally shoot and kill one of my porters. Well, props for trying something different I guess.

Frankly, I don't care how much effort and thought went into it, I'm not a fan of rewarding failure. Actually, if that much effort and thought went into a failure, that's even sadder. And if there wasn't much thought or effort put into it, then it's just a gimmick. And the gimmick failed. I don't want to reward that either. It may sound like this kind of thinking will stifle creativity, but think about it. You tried something new, you failed, try again and do better. As opposed to trying something new, you failed, but you tried something new. And that's just as complacent as Yet Another Call of Duty.