But that opportunity is rare enough, at least for some (in my time playing I've only seen two, though I did capture one so I don't need it for the museum). It is also surprising enough of an occurrence that it can cause stress. There are studies monitoring cortisol levels when a person hears their phone make a normal noise (incoming call and incoming text). Those create a noticeable spike in cortisol. While I haven't seen the same testing done for Animal Crossing, I would expect the sound indicating wasp falling out of trees does the same.

If one were to take pokemon, it would be reduced to much the same where the penalty for loss is fainting and in rare cases losing a chance to catch a rare pokemon.

Even if one were to take something like Path of Exile, any failure only costs some amount of time to restore from that failure. Some cost more (a death on hardcore can mean dozens of hours while a death on normal can be recovered in minutes). In general, I think you can reduce most game conflicts/battles down to a time cost in the case of failure, with a few games introducing horror as the main alternative cost (any game where death involves a jump scare).

If I spend 3 hours looking for a tarantula and it wins, that is a cost of 3 hours compared to many games were losing a battle cost only a minute or two.

Dark Souls style games are another interesting look into this, as the first death generally has low cost (you have to go pick up the dropped souls), but if you die a second time before you pick them up, the cost is much heavier (the souls dropped are permanently lost). I notice when playing that I am more on edge when I'm trying to recover dropped souls than when I am not.

> If I spend 3 hours looking for a tarantula and it wins, that is a cost of 3 hours compared to many games were losing a battle cost only a minute or two.

Why just the tarantula, then? If you see a rare beetle on a stump, you can re-interpret trying to catch it as a "battle" with a "winner" and a "loser".

I think you are right. It is even less of a battle in some aspects, but at least for very rare insects it can be more of a battle in that the cost of messing up is higher.

When you break down a game into these many sorts of conflicts and see which ones the player feels joy for winning and which ones the players struggle against with no benefit even when they win, it hints at an interesting framework to evaluate games by. It feels deconstructionist almost to the point of absurdity, but so far I don't think it crosses that line.

You could use that argument to dismiss any loss condition in games that allow arbitrary saves.

In Pokémon the players and monsters only “faint” in a battle when lost