Many of the rules of games started in the arcades with one simple concept, keep the kids spending money. Difficulty bred profit, ensuring that the earliest games were built on the principle that a game could be beaten, but it required a certain degree of skill and practice to do so. Donkey Kong, Pacman, Q*bert, regardless of the game the same formulas repeated, ensuring players pumped coin after coin into the machines. Adding in rewards like high scores - or offering olive branches like extra lives - meant that the experience wasnt futile and further encouraged spending. As gaming developed, arcades ported titles onto consoles and home systems, meaning games had to adapt to the idea that players wouldnt need to add money to play, but needed the same motivations to win. If you look back at many of the early games they were incredibly short, consisting of a limited number of levels notoriously difficult to beat and only through learning the physics and patterns of the game would you eventually beat them. By the time PS One appeared and games began to grow larger and more intricate, these rules were firmly in place, and so games naturally evolved off the back of them. Options such as saving your game started to become the norm, meaning the three life system went out of fashion, and so in order to progress characters would die and repeat from a set point, instead of the start of the game. Regardless, right up to today, most gamers still enter a game knowing at some point they will inevitably lose and try again.
