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tags:failuregamesculture
rel: Drift into failure by Sidney Dekker Homo Ludens - A Study of Play-Element in Culture
NOTE
I love failing.
The cover of this book is a retro game. It strikes me that games of this era (nintendo-hard concept) were challenging, quite often differently, than games of the modern era (in general).
Intro
I dislike failing, sometimes to the extent that I will refuse to play, but mostly I will return, submitting myself to series of unhappy failures, once again seeking out a feeling that I deeply dread.
Anticipates a game then, ” I played the game to completion on my very first attempt without failing even once. Naturally, this made me very angry. I put the game away, not touching it again for more than a year.”
Proposes a paradox of failure in Games:
- we generally avoid failure
- we experience failure when playing games.
- we seek out games, although we will experience something that we would normally avoid. Equated to film and watching a horror film.
Catharsis from Aristotle, where experiencing a fictional tragedy we are purged of these emotions which are unpleasant.
We appear to want this Unpleasantness to be there, even if we also seem to dislike it (unlike queues in theme parks, for example, which we would prefer didn’t exist). rel: Difficult Date
Also games are a safe space for experimentation, “it’s just a game.”
Thought
“It’s just a game” normally said when the emotions are high, as a kind of grounding. I’m not sure if this is the correct point to make.
Game balance and not being “too hard or too easy” so they attain flow.
Argument is that the paradox of failure is unique in that when you fail in a game, it really means that you were in some way inadequate.
Forms of sportsmanship
- as a form of social union (the noble behavior in game extending out of the game)
- a means in the promotion of pleasure (controlling our behavior to make this and future games possible)
- as altruism (players forfeiting a chance to win in order to protect another participant.)
rel:Difficult Devices
Consider how the designer of a car, computer program, or household appliance is obliged to make sure that users fi nd the design easy to use. At the very least, the designer is expected to help the driver avoid oncoming traffic, prevent the user from deleting important files, and not trick the user into selecting the wrong temperature for a wash.
Thought
Doesn’t really seem to be the case always in practice, though ideally yes
- Conflicting aims and establishing dark patterns
- Complex systems might have internal conflicts between components
- Developer ineptness and inadequacies
However, if you pick up a single-player video game, you expect the designer to have spent considerable effort preventing you from easily reaching your goal, all but guaranteeing that you will at least temporarily fail.
Image of a button with the text “press button to complete game.”
Meta communication
By performing simple actions such as saying “ Let’ s play a game ” or tilting our heads and smiling, we can change the expectations for what is to come. Gregory Bateson calls this meta-communication : humans and other animals perform playful actions where a bite is understood not to be an actual bite.
Discussion of Magic Circle and a criticism “This idea of a separate space of game playing has been criticized on the grounds that there is no per- fect separation between what happens inside a game, and what happens outside a game.” the circumstances of your game playing, personality, mood, and time investment will infl uence how you feel about failure, but we nevertheless treat games differently from non- games, and we have ways of initiating play. We expect certain behaviors and experiences within games, but there are no guaran- tees that players, ourselves included, will live up to expectations.
It’s easy to tell what games my husband enjoys the most. If he screams ‘ I hate it. I hate it. I hate it,’ then I know he will finish it and buy version two. If he doesn’t say this, he’ll put it down in an hour.
Failure can result in a permanent loss (such as a losing a multiplayer match) or a loss of time invested towards completing or progressing in a game.
This game Is Stupid Anyway
They blame the game.
Motivational Bias: “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.”
Does in-game performance reflect skills or valuable traits?
Benjamin Franklin notably declared chess to be a game that contains important lessons: “ The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions … we learn by Chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources.”
Failures
- real = investing time in a game and failing
- fictional = what befalls that character in the world
In The Birth of Tragedy , Nietzsche discusses the notion that tragedy adds a layer of meaning to human suffering, that art “did not simply imitate the reality of nature but rather supplied a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, and was set alongside the latter as a way of overcoming it.”
The Paradox of Failure and the Paradox of Tragedy
Thought
The paradox of failure: Why am I doing this?
Occasionally I pose this question when watching movies, such as an extreme horror film or some dreadful oddity.
Why would you be drawn to some horror film which causes you to divert your eyes because the image is too much to bear? Some challenge? Some spectacle? Curiosity of exploring the extremes within safe boundaries?
Creates a game. Tests. The ones who enjoyed it the most were the ones who failed some, then completed the game.
This confirms the intuition that though we try to avoid failure while playing, failure nevertheless gives a positive contribution to our evaluation of a game
Thought
Failure and Success are two individual states. It’s not necessarily an attraction to failure, but a kind of perseverance, overcoming and engagement. Are these more “process” oriented designations completely tied to the states of failure and success?
The scale of the failure or success can have deeper consequences (failure involving loss of life, of time vs. little league game), but maybe the majority of low consequence games aren’t affected by scale so drastically.
Such as described in Little League Scale.
Do failure and success exist as a binary? What does a successful failure entail?
The Paradox of Painful Art
- people do not seek out situations that arouse painful emotions.
- people have painful emotions in response to some art.
- people seek out art that they know will arouse painful emotions.
Thought
People do not avoid all painful emotions?
Solutions
- Deflation: Art is not Painful
- Compensation: Pain is compensated for
- a-hedonism: We do not always seek pleasure
Thouht
Next section will discuss these, but I’ll comment prior blindly and in scrappy way.
Oh, this is actually fun.
Art is not painful.
What if I assume this is true (because I think of all the solutions, this one is false).I have certainly cried during a film (and that can be painful.) But if I say “art is not painful” then whatever pain I feel must be some kind of ersatz pain, something that is mimicking pain but not actually. A virtualized pain (loss of a loved one in a book, versus the actual grounded loss of a loved one - certainly these are two distinct emotions, magnitudes between them.)
What if I am the creator of a film? How will that affect how ingrained my life is to the art? Is that a path to genuine emotion? Similarly, what about a documentary or something based on a true story? Do these ground the emotion in “reality”?
This is quite intriguing that there can be “virtual” for lack of a better word analogs of emotion, related to real world emotions but not precisely. Then again what is a happy day?
Pain is compensated for. This pain can be compensated for. But I also feel art can destroy and negatively compensate (take, sap, leech, smash, rip, slice, suck…). If I had an art device, which constantly pulled from me, like a supremely Difficult Devices would I come back to it? I’d have to find an egoless, or selflessness to act on it.
My intuition is that I am compensated by a difficult experience (wisdom, experience etc) and some kind of meaning comes from even a completely sour experience, but will I return to it in the absence of this?
Say there’s an art device where I can put a dollar in, or some years of my life, the void consumes the dollar and that is all. I look at it, “hmm” and kick it, expecting a response. Do I gain anything from the loss of the dollar, or the loss of life? Would I engage with this device again? Really, I’m searching for a real world analog for this device, but I can see the value in the single use of it. The challenge would be a device that I’d literally pour my life into, bill after bill, watching my body decay in the process, and say “this process is worth it.” I have no compensation and yet…
We do not always seek pleasure. This strikes me as the most accurate. People are not fully aware of their best action, nor the choice that would maximize (or even connote marginally better) pleasure.
I don’t require a film to make me feel good in a traditionally good way, or make me uplifted (though this may be a secondary consequence of a walk in the dark.)Anyway…
Thought
Exploring the idea: Real world has the maximum potential for art emotional experience, compared to the “virtualized” form of film. You help rehabilitate a bird that has fallen from a tree and that’s your pure secret art. Still, might be flawed, in the communicative power of an art. Say, you make a movie about rehabilitating birds and people see it and even one of these watchers is moved to recognize a bird can be saved.
Art is not painful argument
We are only pretending to feel sad when we experience a tragic story.
We intuitively disbelieve the worlds that artworks present to us, but we make an effort to disregard this belief in order to engage with fictions and to have an emotion response to us.
We have emotional responses to events, regardless of whether we believe them true or not.
Control theorists: because we have the option to disconnect, (turn off the movie) we are protected from experiencing genuinely painful emotions. In this view, art is special because it grants us a kind of control that we lack outside art and this process protects us from experiencing genuine pain.
Hume: the artistic qualities of tragedy transform painful emotions into something that is positive: that we experience pleasure over “the very excellence with which the melancholy scene is represented.”
Pain is Compensated for Argument
Other factors outweigh the pain we feel.
There is a purgative nature:
Tragedy, then, is mimesis of an action which is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions - Aristotle
Noel Carroll’s theory of horror: we do not purge something but we receive something else. When watching a horror film, we genuinely dislike being horrified but there is cognitive enjoyment of learning more about the enigmatic monster at the center of the story. The experience of horror is simply a price we are willing to pay in order to reach the enjoyment of learning a monster.
A-hedonism argument
The idea that we commonly enjoy or take pleasure in seeing Oedipus stumbling around with their eyes out is peculiar
Pleasure is incorrect description of our reaction to tragedy.
Satisfaction is more accurate, since it doesn’t appear paradoxical when describing a painful response.
Thought
I remember when I was really invested in studies, I couldn’t turn it off. I think my brain began to associate pain and struggle as growth. In certain places it wasn’t warranted. Maybe an aspect of the success and failure states are here, in that we are faced with a challenge “to suffer through the unpleasant art experience” at the hopes that our brains have summited this challenge at the end.
We might also bond. Few go to the haunted house alone (and those who do generally do the scaring).
Gregory Currie’s angle on the paradox of tragedy: We watch Othello and we want Desdemona to survive. However, we would be angry if some rogue director staged a version where she really did make it through the play. So we hold two ideas, we want Desdemona to survive and we want her dead.
He says “we do not want Desdemona to survive and we only have a type of imaginary desire for her to do so.”
Deniability of Game Failure
The most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have one, but to have fought well.
- The Olympic Creed
Saving face when we fail
- To deny that we ever find game failure painful cannot be the full explanation, but games at the same time give us the option to deny that we care about failure in this particular session.
- Fight emphasized over triumph.
The Feeling of Failure
Ways of play that make the game harder but are not self defeating
- playing with defined handicaps in order to balance
- playing badly in order to keep the game interesting
- playing badly in order to avoid social consequences of succeeding
- playing badly in order to explore other aspects of a game
Attribution theory: for every event, such as a failure - we search for a cause (blame self, game, or other factor).
Mood Management theory: we choose entertainment in part because we want to control our mood.
Reversal theory: We seek low arousal, and normal goal-directed activities such as work, but high arousal, and hence challenge and danger, in activities performed for their own sake, such as games.
David Jaffe: players are fundamentally lazy and require failure to concretely push us towards personal improvement.
How to Fail in Video Games
There is a modern trend to smaller punishments for failure.
Thought
I think modern games do have more understanding of the years of video game balance, but there are pockets of communities which do seek high punishment gameplay. Competitive multiplayer games can have this.
The introduction of hardcore modes (single life) and various challenge runs do provide this. One thing with these modes is that though the community might be smaller than traditional modes, the spectatorship is often high (it’s often more compelling to watch a glorious failure, such as the permanent loss of a character in a hardcore mode, versus an instantaneous respawn.)
Three game modes of success: Skill, Chance, and Labor
Skill
When we fail in a game of skill, we are marked as deficient in a straightforward way: as lacking the skills required to play the game.
Chance
Failing in a game of chance marks us in a different way than failing at a game of skill does: as being on poor terms with the gods, or as simply unlucky, which is still a personal trait we’d rather not have.
Labor
Grinding to success. Investing time in something is worth more than actual skill.
Some theorists say games have built-in values. But how can we distinguish between a game that, celebrates economic inequality and one that warns against it?
Monopoly
Elizabeth Magie, 1903 game The Landlord’s Game was the original Monopoly. The game was designed with didactic goal of warning against the evils of monopoly land ownership and promoting a single tax system.
Fictional Failure
We are comfortable with tragic stories and unhappy endings, but it is the distance from the viewer to a fictional tragedy that converts negative emotions into something pleasurable.
In 2001, fiction theorist Marie-Laure Ryan argued against the idea of game tragedy by saying: “ Interactors would have to be out of their mind — literally and metaphorically — to want to submit themselves to the fate of a heroine who commits suicide as the result of a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Any attempt to turn empathy, which relies on mental simulation, into first-person, genuinely felt emotion would in the vast majority of cases trespass the fragile boundary that separates pleasure from pain.
In Burnout Paradise, there’s a crash mode in which the player has to race a vehicle into traffic in order to cause maximum damage. The experience of self-destruction has an unpleasant aspect to it, but the game presents no human characters, further after the crash you are immediately reset.
In Shadow of the Colossus you kill large melancholy creatures that inspire pity rather than fear in order to save the girl Mono. Although the girl is eventually saved, the protagonist is punished for having killed them.
The Art of Failure
Brief segment on gamification techniques.