Jesper Juul, in his Art of Failure essay, talks about, well, failure in games and how it straddles the line between a motivating and demoralizing factor. Failure is required to exist in a game to present a challenge, without failure, there is no point in playing a game. On the other hand, as Juul points out, making failure the only outcome or setting the bar for success too high leads to players abandoning games, often blaming the game in the process. The question then comes down to, for a designer, how do you deal with failure?

Juul places this paradox of failure within a larger context, the paradox of painful art. He puts forward three competing ways to compensate for the failure; either the art is not painful, the pain is compensated for or that we, as humans, do not always seek pleasure. I think this concept of trying to solve the paradox of painful art, and the paradox of failure, is approaching the problem in a too straight forward of a way. The pain generated by art is not true pain, nor is the feeling of failure generated by games true failure. The medium, be it the art or the game, acts as a firewall between us and the true emotions attempting to be conveyed.

The medium itself might be the firewall in the most literal sense. Juul talks about people blaming soccer as a whole for the poor performance of the US team. There, the game was scapegoated and the players, be it the actual team, their coaches, country and supporters, are spared the anguish of defeat. Games can also be a firewall in the sense that, while a character that we like in a game might die, and we might be sad or disappointed, the character was never meant to live. He or she was written and intended to die and we can take solace in the fact that we had no real agency as to the outcome. In addition, if the game did have an option to save the character, we have the ability to go back and change the outcome, to win. Ultimately, if all else fails, we also have the option as players to replay the game, or the portion of the game, contain the character that we lost. It is not real, the medium makes sure of this, and we can take solace in that fact. The medium, be it a game or movie or book, is an emotional firewall. The paradoxes conflate actual emotion with simulated ones. The game or art is an artificial construct. All fault for its existence lies with it.

I do, however, think true emotions can grow from games in some situations. Multiplayer games, be it chess or soccer or Halo, do create true emotions, but that is because you cannot replay and change the outcome. There is more riding on the results of a competitive title than the in game results. While I might rank up during a match, I am far more concerned with the interpersonal results that arise from the match. Those are not simulated and are very real.

Even then, I would contend that there are multiple forms of failure. I have lost countless games to friends and strangers alike in which I may have lost, but felt content in the outcome. There was no sting or pain in that defeat. They were close matches that, while I may have failed, I still played well and could feel both acknowledged for my skill and acknowledgment of the other player’s abilities. The game may have facilitated these feelings by creating the framework for them, but, unlike a single player character or other piece of media, the actual emotions were generated by the interactions between the people.

I think the biggest problem with this piece was placing all feelings of failure and pain generated by art on the same level. The feelings I get playing a single player game are different than those I get when watching a movie. All those feelings, though, are dwarfed by what it is like to loose a friend or to break up with a significant other. Media might be able to reference these feelings or generate a facsimile, but it cannot replicate then. Watching a movie about loss when you yourself have experienced none generated a different feeling than that same movie just after you yourself have gone through that experience. The movie references the feelings, it does not create them, and I think this is the problem that Juul is running into.