As we move into the busiest season of the year for gaming, I'm beginning to suspect that videogames are developing a serious problem: They're scared to let you fail.

Oh, sure, there are still plenty of games built around the idea of pestling you into a fine paste (hi, Dark Souls). But in the big-budget game world, those are outnumbered by experiences like Rise of Iron, the latest (and final) expansion for Bungie's sprawling shooter Destiny. At the onset of its campaign, you are introduced to a new galactic thread, an ancient techno-biological virus called SIVA. Long ago, you're told, SIVA killed and took control of some of the most powerful beings in the world, the Iron Lords.

And you? Oh, not you. You defeat SIVA 90 minutes later without breaking a techno-sweat.

From one perspective, this is to be expected. When we buy a $60 game for our Xbox, it's a challenge that we expect to conquer. For all their differences, Destiny has more in common with Gone Home than it does with, say, a Rubik's Cube. You're supposed to win. You wouldn't want to lose to SIVA, would you?

Well, I kind of would, actually. Not an absolute failure where I never beat the final boss, mind you. But losing is important. I'm not saying that games should be harder. I'm talking about the importance of failure to narrative. SIVA comes off as a pathetic pushover of an enemy entirely because you never come close to being defeated by it. Like a warrior DJ Khaled in space armor, all you do is win.

Without failure, there are no stakes.

This feeling also struck me while playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, wherein the harsh oppression of Prague never seems to touch you, and the machinations of the Illuminati never seem to slow Adam Jensen down for more than a second. Or while playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, how Kevin Spacey's scene-chewing villainy bounces off of you like rain against sheet metal. Without failure, there are no stakes. Without a villain winning at least once, you'll never be afraid of them, never feel threatened by them, and you'll feel nothing when you finally beat them.

Indeed, a story without failure is perhaps no story at all. In traditional three-act story structure, the hero fails twice: once during the inciting event, and then a second time during a climactic confrontation in the second act. Each loss catalyzes the hero's growth as a character and builds the antagonist's reputation as credibly dangerous. Think of Star Wars: Luke loses his family, then his hand, before he wins.

Videogames have long had a built-in system to punish failure, the Game Over. In the arcades, this was a necessity. At home, it's a measure to slow you down and remind you that you have made a mistake. A Game Over doesn't affect the stakes of the game's story, but handled properly, it can increase the tension of a given encounter by gating it behind a personal challenge. Handled poorly, death offers an unsatisfying and shallow form of failure, slowing you down but not much else.

With a few notable exceptions (again: hi Dark Souls), a game design approach that emphasizes death has fallen out of favor. It no longer matches the goals of blockbuster game design. If a game wants to effect a sense of continuous narrative flow, punitive deaths detract from that goal. There's a reason why games like Gears of War let you revive downed teammates instead of immediately punting you to a game over screen. If Gears of War 4 cost $100 million to make, and players quit halfway through the game because it's too hard, from the developer's perspective that's kind of like wasting $50 million.

So for the sake of argument, let's say that for the time being, triple-A production houses are going to keep drifting away from the Game Over. In that case, the other option is to weave defeat into the narrative itself. Unfortunately, this is usually done in a pretty shallow way. How many games have we played in which, after dispatching about 200 enemies, we enter into a cut scene in which our hero is surrounded by 5 of the same goons he just took down and puts his hands up in surrender? Usually, the player will be frustrated that a threat they could handle in the game's action thwarted the protagonist in a cutscene. Creating dissonance between a player and their avatar can be an intriguing technique, but only if done on purpose specifically to create and capitalize on that dissonance. Usually, it's just maddening.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered Activision Blizzard

Now consider this example: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Considered to be a risky concept during its development (moving the series away from historical war reenactment), this is a more surprising, experimental game than it's usually given credit for. In its first and second acts, you invade a fictional Middle Eastern capital city in a clear riff on the Iraq War. As Sergeant Paul Jackson, you're hunting the country's leader. He eludes you; a television station airing a "live" broadcast of him was merely a decoy. You press deeper into the city as the Americans commit more and more troops to the area. As you do, you begin to hear rumors: The tyrant has a nuclear device, and he's prepared to detonate it. You press on. The mission is everything.

Until it isn't. The bomb threat was real, and it's happening. You evacuate, but not in time. The bomb detonates, and you watch it. You feel it, as your helicopter careens to the ground. You try to walk away, but you can't. The in-game interface falls apart as Jackson's body fails, and you are with him as he dies.

It's a haunting failure, one that sticks with you, defining the rest of Modern Warfare's campaign. From then on, the threats feel more real, and the violence takes on a tinge of reality that it didn't have before. When you race to stop another nuclear threat as another character at the game's climax, you feel the urgency of it. Because now, you know exactly what will happen if you fail. Moments like this accomplish what a simple Game Over cannot. Sadly, they are few and far between.

Instead, games can and should embrace failure—the type of failure that crosses into both storytelling and play—as an essential part of creating an involving interactive experience. Failure offers texture, complexity, and a chance for growth on the part of player and character alike. More importantly, it offers a sense of authentic danger. An enemy that can actually beat you—an enemy that has—is an enemy worth fighting. Games need situations in them that include fights you can't win, or engagements that you're forced to retreat from, or moments where you as the player character experience loss. If games want to tell good stories, these moments aren't just nice inclusions. They're necessary.