In a Sim, do you let players limp along?

Here is an interesting question in simulation design. Do you let players limp along through your simulation never failing, but never really succeeding either?

This approach certainly has some fidelity to it. There are plenty of people in real life, and some would argue most people in real life, that just simply limp along. Imagine a simulation on stewardship, where treating your land poorly early on leads to a long-term addictiveness to chemical fertilizers, that continues to cost more money while producing less healthy crops. For turn after turn, the player stays in business, but just barely. Pretty soon, the player cannot stop using chemicals or he or she goes out of business, but also can't be successful when so much of the farm profits go to a chemical company. While realistic, this experience is neither satisfying for the player nor is it especially educational when all is said and done.

You don't want a situation where people who are having trouble with the sim have an increasingly miserable experience as they progress. You don't want to let people dig too deep of a hole. The mediocrity of the play may encourage players to try again. But the challenge could easily be, as is often the case with sims, that people want to change but don't know how.

It may be better to have performance gates over which players have to get in order to continue. These all or nothing moments may end up being contrived, but they may also force players into states of more extreme frustration that leads to new behaviors. This is from where the "aha" moments come. And then on the other side of performance gate, players get a sense of "starting over." They get new land and a new opportunity. While this is hardly realistic, isn't that the point of simulations?

To some degree, having a sim in a classroom environment can force a student to a) reflect on their lack of success and come up with reasons for it, and b) start over. But the more sims are in a self-motivated environment (and training in corporations today more resemble a self-motivated environment than a classroom), the more they have to resolve false assumptions quickly.