When Punishment Can Be Good

I played the game Scene It! for the Xbox 360 (I'm not sure which of the versions we were playing) with some friends at a party.  During the first round, I quickly realized that a wrong answer was not reducing my score like I expected.  At first, I figured it just wasn't going to drop me below 0 points, but once I finally had a score, it still didn't go down when I was wrong.  I was pretty excited about this during most of the game and speedily guessed every question whether I had any clue of the answer or not.  I went into the final round with quite a lead (thanks to the Pictogram part of the game) expecting to lose it all because surely the final round will punish people for randomly guessing.  Instead it had a score multiplier it would give you for right answers and reset for wrong answers.  I wondered if no answer was the same as a wrong answer, so I waited until the timer ran out (much to the annoyance of  my friends) and sure enough, my multiplier got reset to x1.  I still ended up winning the game, but it didn't feel like a great victory because the game rewards random guessing by not punishing you for wrong answers.  I made the mistake of wondering this aloud and learned another lesson - never ever ever question or analyze why you won, what you could have done better, or why the game is flawed in front of the people you just beat; wait until you get home.

But this did get me thinking about how this was a case where a game should be punishing players for mistakes.  By not punishing wrong answers, the game is telling you to guess randomly because you have a 25% chance to win (more than that if you're any good at educated guessing).  This means that the winner isn't necessarily the person who knows the most about movies, but is more likely the person who is the best multiple choice test taker.  I don't know about my friends, but I wanted to play Scene It! not SAT It!.  The game should instead subtract the points you would have gotten for a right answer when you answer incorrectly and have a button so you can skip answering (so you don't annoy your friends waiting for the timer to go down).  This way, you can wait to guess so it's not as punishing or just only answer when you know the right answer.  The winner in the end will be the person who knows the most about the movies displayed (or is a fantastic guesser, I guess).  And in the end, isn't that what we want from our trivia games?  To win because you know more useless information than your friends?