The Art of Saving in Games (2014)

Yep. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a game is just a game.

> Games aren't supposed to be anything.

I personally find this to be a very narrow minded take on the issue. While a game may be great without having any pretensions to being "immersive" there is no harm in analyzing and trying to abstract away what we might consider to be an essential element of a "great" game.

Of course you will be taken more seriously if your argument is on firmer footing than the article's writer. I urge you to read Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga if you haven't. It will change the way you look at video games and any sort of sport physical or otherwise.

If these guys stopped to define "failure state", this article would be golden. It seems that they use "fail state" exclusively to refer to situations where progress is reset, as opposed to any situation where the player has failed (i.e. died). It wasn't entirely clear until they started talking about Dark Souls that they weren't arguing against loss being part of fail states, only against fail states resulting in total, irreversible loss.