One of the greatest failings in game design is the failure to properly explain the rules of a situation to the player. When this occurs, the player can find themselves repeatedly in a game’s fail state through no fault of their own. Games can explain the rules of a situation in several ways. The Legend of Zelda series springs to mind as perhaps being slightly heavy handed regarding this in some situations, though it is not exempt from this failing itself. In general though, the series tends to let the user know what is required through a set of visual and audio cues; more often than not a camera zoom / pan and/or audion jungle. The other main way in which games can help in this regard is to force the player past the solution in the environment, before activating the obstacle.
I recently played through Dead Space which failed in this regard on a number of key occasions. I say key occasions because they had a detrimental impact on my opinion of the game. On one occasion I was left repeatedly dieing and on another wondering around aimlessly due to the game not being able to impart crucial infromation about how a situation was supposed to be tackled. The result is that there were a number of occasions where the game was unnecesarilly frustrating, meaning my opinion of the game as a whole was damaged. In this case it left me feeling that the game was just good, falling short of greatness by some small margin because of these failings.
It’s particularly heartbreaking when a game commits this sin as it’s something which could be solved quite easily with an adequate level of playtesting. Often the game designer is in a uniquely poor position to determine if the game is adequately explaining the rules of a situation to the player, as they already know and understand the rules. Adequate playtesting can account for this however. It’s no surprise that the developers which carry out the highest levels of playtesting rarely fail in this regard.