GAMBIT, the Singapore MIT Game Lab, have developed a series of games based on "research questions" from game academics. The inspiration behind Pierre: Insanity Inspired is this question from Jesper Juul: "How does [sic] different ways of communicating failure influence the player’s experience and performance?"
In Pierre, you control a little critter on a rotating circle, divided into three segments with different illustrations in each segment. Thingies fall from the sky, and if a thingie with the same illustration as a segment happens to be over that segment at the moment, and you move through it, part of the illustration lights up. You complete the level by lighting up all three illustrations. You can move clockwise and counterclockwise about the circle, and can jump; spiky balls also fall from the sky, cutting you off from thingies. You can either wait from them to go away or jump over them. Later on other enemies, such as spiky balls that whoosh through space or shmup-like attacks of lines of spikey balls appear.
If this was all to the game, I probably wouldn't be writing about it; it's mildly entertaining at best, not terribly interesting as a game qua game, in other words.
What's more interesting is its engagement with Juul's question; the game imparts 'failure' in a variety of ways, from the mild to the extremely rude. On the mild end, when you run into a spikey ball, your character blinks rapidly, Mario-like; conversely, when you trigger a thingie at an inappropriate moment, an image of Pierre appears from one screen corner, tongue stuck out, and says something like "You're the worst player ever!". And if you fail a level, you get a screen like the image above, with a prominent "F", while sardonic laughter plays and Pierre says "Loooooserrrr!"
What's missing here, I think, are the signifiers of success, which exist but are far less prominent; a completed symbol glows, Pierre occasional shows up with a smile on his face, and you get a grade for the level of, say, B. The negatives are far more impactful than the positives, the reverse of most games -- I'm thinking of Ash Ketchum. Yes! I got the Volcano Badge! Tada!
Before you begin to play, you're warned that information is sent back to the server to record your experience of play for research purposes. I imagine the most important datum is where in the game you stop playing, and what event triggered that. But the actual research value of this is debatable, since "stopping playing" is more probably triggered by annoyance over time than by a single event. Still, it's an interesting approach, and the rudeness of the feedback is in its own way amusing.
Developer Aetherbyte is 
