Attribution of failure
Also said as Attribution theory, Fair death, That was my fault
What people decide caused their failure: themselves or the game, something they can change or something they cannot. Bernard Weiner built this into a theory of motivation in the 1980s.
Players who think "I jumped too late" try again. Players who think "that was cheap" quit, and the same death can land either way. Weiner's framework comes from classroom research, so applying it to games is reasoning by analogy, though designers have found it useful for a long time.
Say it
“When an unseen enemy kills the player, they blame the game. Add a half-second warning sound, and show the killer on the death screen with what hit them and for how much.”
Where you’ve seen it
Super Meat Boy kills you constantly, restarts you at once, and at the end replays every one of your failed attempts at the same time, so you can see that the mistakes were yours and that you got better.
Not to be confused with difficulty
Difficulty is how often you fail. Attribution is who you blame. A very hard game can feel fair, and an easy one can feel like it cheated.