>>5926189I think this is a bit of a misnomer.
To say that disempowerment or fragile characters/settings aren't uplifting or aren't appealing I think is incorrect. I think they are very appealing but only in the specific context of the genre or story they are written in.
The most simple form of disempowerment story would be horror. Typically, horror is where things continually get worse and worse over time. Ie, you start with the protagnists in an isolated shack in the woods, but at least they have friends, a gun, and electricity. Then they get attacked and slowly get picked off one by one, eventually the power goes out, and the gun is lost or out of bullets, and now it's just the cheerleader by herself running through the woods but she can still get rescued at the last second. People love stories like that, but it's only because its framed as a horror story. I'm running one right now, for example. However I don't really think it's a disempowerment story, it's still empowering or achieving, just against greater odds. Very rarely do stories focus on things just exclusively getting worse and worse. The most prominent example through gameplay I can think of is Cry of Fear, the Half-Life mod, where you later on in the game lose your backpack (half your inventory slots) and then even later on lose a chunk of your maximum health (permanently), which means your player character is objectively weaker at the end of the story then at the start, but you (the player) persevere and use the skills you gained throughout the game to reach the conclusion.
However I think most players here (as well as some of the responders to your post) DO NOT like the concept when it is framed as being in an open world game, a fantasy or sci-fi quest, etc. If I had to armchair a guess I'd say its because the main character feels uniquely like THEY are suffering, they are constantly on the backfoot, that it's misery porn, etc. My other Quest has been accused of that multiple times, perhaps with good reason.
However several people have expressed their interest in exactly that; both Pathologic as well as the guy continually asking for a "Fear & Hunger style Quest" for that past ~2 years. So I think as long as you're upfront about it at the start and make a quest set in a very bleak world or in a very dire situation right from the start, I think people could get invested and enjoy it. But if you make a paint-by-numbers generic fantasy quest and have it be about an escaped kobold slave just barely scrapping by I think people would be less forgiving and the negative events would quickly wear the players down until they don't want to play anymore.
