Examining How Games Balance Empowerment and Struggle to Shape Player Experience
Video games often promise players the extraordinary. Whether through lightning-infused swords, demon-slaying shotguns, or the ability to manipulate time, the fantasy of power—over enemies, systems, or fate itself—has always been central to gaming. But alongside this seductive empowerment lies an opposing and equally vital design philosophy: vulnerability.
When players are fragile, when systems are oppressive, and when defeat is a real possibility, the experience of play shifts. Every choice gains weight. Every action feels consequential. And every victory, however small, is earned—not granted.
This tension between power fantasy and vulnerability is not just a mechanical question. It’s a narrative, psychological, and rhetorical one. Designers who understand this tension can craft experiences that are not only fun, but meaningful—experiences that reflect themes of growth, sacrifice, oppression, resistance, and more.
In this blog, we explore how games across genres—and especially in tactical and role-playing games—navigate this dynamic. We examine what it means to be powerful, what it means to be weak, and how intentional difficulty design can elevate or undermine a player’s engagement with a game’s core ideas.
I. Defining the Terms: What Is Power Fantasy? What Is Vulnerability?
🎮 Power Fantasy
A “power fantasy” is any game experience in which the player is placed in a role of extraordinary capability—physically, mentally, or socially. These games focus on agency, control, and superiority, often granting players:
- Dominant weapons or abilities
- Superior knowledge or perspective
- Control over the environment or NPCs
- Immunity to long-term consequence
Examples include DOOM (2016), where the player is faster, stronger, and angrier than everything else on the screen, or Assassin’s Creed, where players seamlessly dispatch hordes of enemies with style and flair.
The appeal is obvious: power is fun. It feels good to win. It feels good to dominate. And in a world where most players have limited real-world power, games offer a kind of cathartic release.
😨 Vulnerability
By contrast, games that emphasize vulnerability reduce player agency and emphasize limitations, threats, and consequences. These games may:
- Punish mistakes severely
- Withhold resources
- Obscure information
- Emphasize moral or narrative consequence
Examples include Dark Souls, where death is constant and the world is indifferent to your suffering, or Pathologic, where illness, misinformation, and scarcity combine to make the player feel helpless.
Yet these experiences can be just as rewarding—not for the fantasy they provide, but for the struggle they simulate.
II. The Psychology of Power and Fragility
The emotional effects of empowerment and vulnerability are very different—but both are designed outcomes.
🧠 Power Fantasy: The Brain on Control
When a game makes you powerful, it triggers a neurological reward loop. You execute a skill or tactic, receive positive feedback (e.g., a kill, a combo, a level-up), and are encouraged to repeat the behavior. These loops produce dopamine-driven satisfaction—a sense of mastery and competence.
This experience is often tied to flow state, as theorized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: a state where challenge and skill are balanced, and the player feels both capable and immersed.
😔 Vulnerability: The Brain on Stakes
Vulnerability, by contrast, can trigger anxiety, dread, tension—but also deeper emotional investment. When failure is possible—or even likely—players become more deliberate. They form emotional bonds with outcomes. The tension heightens the stakes.
This is why permadeath games (see our previous blog) can cause real grief. Why horror games can evoke genuine fear. And why some games remain memorable not because you were powerful—but because you were afraid to lose.
III. Difficulty as Design Intent, Not Obstacle
At its best, difficulty is not a wall to be overcome—it’s a mirror reflecting the designer’s intent. A good designer doesn’t just make a game “hard”—they make it hard on purpose, in a way that supports the game’s themes and systems.
Let’s look at some examples.
IV. Case Studies: Power vs. Vulnerability in Practice
⚔️ Fire Emblem: Three Houses – Earned Empowerment
In the early chapters of Three Houses, the player character (Byleth) is moderately strong—but not overpowered. Your students are under-leveled, fragile, and green. You feel responsible for their growth.
By midgame, however, your choices—who to train, which classes to promote, what battles to fight—have produced a customized, powerful army. You’ve gone from caretaker to commander. This earned empowerment makes success feel meaningful. It also sets up the emotional weight of vulnerability—because losing a trained unit (especially on classic mode) hurts.
The game blends power fantasy and vulnerability through long-term investment.
🧟 Darkest Dungeon – Vulnerability as the Point
Darkest Dungeon is unapologetically cruel. Heroes are weak. Dungeons are brutal. RNG looms like a blade overhead. And most runs end in failure.
But the game’s systems—stress, madness, debuffs, death—are rhetorical tools. They simulate a world where victory comes at cost. The player is not a savior. They are a triage officer, sending broken soldiers into hopeless battles.
The message is clear: you are not in control—and that’s the point.
👿 DOOM Eternal – Unrelenting Power with Required Precision
DOOM Eternal is a power fantasy—but it’s also a discipline fantasy. The game makes you feel like a god—but only if you play correctly.
Ammo is limited. Health is tied to melee finishers. Armor requires flame attacks. Enemies require specific counters. If you ignore these systems, you die quickly.
Thus, DOOM merges empowerment with constraint. The fantasy isn’t just “I’m strong”—it’s “I’m strong because I mastered this dance.”
🏚️ Pathologic 2 – A Weaponized Experience of Powerlessness
No discussion of vulnerability in games is complete without Pathologic 2. You play as a healer in a dying town. Everything is stacked against you: time, sickness, starvation, lies.
You can’t save everyone. You can’t save most people. The game makes you feel the limits of your body, time, and knowledge.
This isn’t frustration for frustration’s sake. It’s a designed simulation of despair and futility—and yet, also of care. Players who embrace the helplessness discover a kind of strange grace. You become vulnerable, but compassionate. That’s the power the game wants you to earn.
V. When Power Backfires: Disempowerment Through Excess
Not all empowerment improves the experience. In fact, excessive power can flatten games.
🧠 Predictable Mastery
If enemies die in one hit, and nothing threatens you, tension evaporates. The game becomes a treadmill: pleasant, but meaningless. If nothing is at stake, nothing matters.
This is a frequent pitfall in late-stage RPGs, where power scaling gets out of hand. Enemies become obstacles rather than threats. Players fall into optimization loops, and gameplay becomes less about decisions and more about execution.
😴 Monotony of Invincibility
Even in power fantasies, players crave resistance. Superheroes need supervillains. If power is never challenged, it loses its narrative and mechanical potency.
Games like Skyrim or Cyberpunk 2077 often suffer from this. Once the player “breaks” the economy or skill tree, enemies stop being credible threats—and the world becomes shallow.
VI. The Middle Ground: Empowered Fragility and the Fantasy of Growth
Some of the most compelling experiences come from games that fluctuate between empowerment and fragility, offering the player a sense of progression, regression, and dynamic challenge.
🔄 Rogue-likes and Rogue-lites
Games like Hades, Dead Cells, or Slay the Spire give players increasing power within runs—but remind them that failure is inevitable. The permanent upgrade systems create a feeling of growth, even as vulnerability remains baked into the moment-to-moment gameplay.
🎓 Tactical Games with Permadeath
In XCOM, you may have a highly trained sniper—but if you misplace them by one tile, they die. The player is powerful—but only through respecting the system. Power is conditional. The system gives, and the system takes.
💔 Narrative Games with Consequence
In The Walking Dead (Telltale), the player can’t “win” through skill. The choices you make often result in pain no matter what. But you feel powerful in the sense that you shaped the narrative through difficult decisions. The emotional vulnerability becomes the player’s primary interface.
VII. Difficulty Options and Player Identity
Modern games increasingly allow players to select their difficulty level. This accessibility is vital—but also carries rhetorical weight.
🧩 Customizable Challenge
Games like Celeste let players toggle assist features, making precision platforming accessible to all. The game even acknowledges this: you are not lesser for choosing help.
By contrast, Sekiro offers no difficulty options. Its message is one of mastery through suffering. The designers want you to feel disempowered—so that when you succeed, it is entirely yours.
Both approaches are valid. But each communicates a philosophy. Difficulty is not neutral—it is narrative.
VIII. Empowerment for Whom? Designing with Cultural and Identity Awareness
One often overlooked aspect of power fantasy is whose fantasy is being fulfilled.
Games have historically centered white, male, cisgender protagonists with physical dominance and savior arcs. As the industry grows, more games are exploring different forms of power: emotional resilience, community leadership, knowledge, survival.
Games like Heaven Will Be Mine or Night in the Woods explore personal and political vulnerability, queer identity, and neurodivergence—not through weapons, but through dialogue, exploration, and emotional labor.
Empowerment doesn’t always mean strength. Sometimes it means being seen, heard, or understood.
IX. Final Thoughts: Designing with Intent
Whether you’re designing a god-slaying FPS or a fragile survival sim, the balance between power and vulnerability defines the player experience. The key is not in choosing one over the other—it’s in knowing why you’re choosing.
Ask:
- What should the player feel?
- What should the player fear?
- When should they feel in control?
- When should they feel exposed?
- What does victory mean, and how is it earned?
When these questions are answered with clarity, difficulty becomes more than a setting. It becomes a story.
Conclusion: The Dance of Power and Fragility
Games are one of the few artistic mediums that give audiences control. But the most compelling games understand that too much control is sterile, and too little is paralyzing.
The tension between power and vulnerability is what gives play its drama. A player must feel capable—but also at risk. They must be reminded, at every turn, that victory is meaningful because defeat was possible.
Some players seek the power to crush. Others seek the struggle to endure. The best games give them both—not in equal measure, but in intentional tension.
And that tension? That’s where the magic lives.