Juul and The Art of Failure

While reading Jesper Juul’s The Art of Failure, I could relate with his frustration with failing the game Patapon to my own frustration with the word game WordCheese.  The game begins with four jumbled letters and the player must create words to fill the empty tiles in the shortest amount of time (as the player progresses in the game the difficulty and number of letters increase). Players are not penalized for taking longer but rewarded (in tokens or hints) for completing quickly. The game has no real narrative but definitely makes you think and possibly learn new words. However, this game definitely makes me feel inadequate as well as very frustrated when I am only missing one word that, when solved, is extremely obvious. For these reasons, I have not played WordCheese in quite a while. On the positive side, I feel satisfaction when I swiftly complete the level with ease and solve the longest word first.

Jesper Juul uses the studies of philosophy, psychology, game design, and fiction to consider video games as, “the art of failure, the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience and experiment with failure” (30).The paradox of failure is that we will seek out games, where we will experience failure, something we usually avoid which is parallel to the paradox of tragedy, that through experiencing these unpleasant emotions, they are purged. Juul believes that games “promise us that we can repair a personal inadequacy- an inadequacy that they produce in us in the first place” (7). According to Peter Arnold, there are three types of sportsmanship (taking success and failure seriously but controlling our emotions) are the form of social union, means as a promotion of pleasure, and as altruism. Psychology uses the attribution theory do demonstrate we blame our failure on and/or the person, the entity, or circumstances.  There are two types of failure and tragedy: 1. Real- when a player invests time and fails, thus experiencing painful emotions and 2. Fictional– the unpleasant emotions of the protagonist’s story as a representation of our performance in the fictional world.  We can experience failure as normal, it reflects our shortcomings as much as outside the game, or deflated, failure in a game is irrelevant to the outside world.  The paradox of painful art has three solutions: 1. Deflation- art isn’t painful, 2. Compensation- pain is compensated for, and 3. A-hedonism- we don’t always seek pleasure. The contradictory desires of failure and tragedy can be seen through the immediate desire to avoid failure or to succeed and the aesthetic desire for partial failure or suffering.  Self-defeating behavior, or self-handicapping, is the paradoxical response to the paradox of failure and can be used in four different ways: playing with defined handicaps to balance a game or playing badly to keep a game interesting, in order to avoid social consequences of success, and to explore other aspects of the game.  The three dimensions to learned helplessness are internal/external, stable/unstable, and global/specific. In order to determine the “fairness” of a game we must differentiate between failure and punishment then examine the three paths to success: skill, chance, and/or labor. These paths to success depend on which type of goal the player is attempting to reach, completable, transient, and/or improvement goals. Because the player mirrors the protagonist while playing, Juul says a video game needs three characteristics to be considered a tragedy: 1. Protagonist undergoes many painful experiences, 2. Player is aware the goal of the game is suicide, and 3. the player exerts extra effort to achieve suicide. Tragedy in a game can be the protagonist’s inevitableend and their complicity towards it.  Unlike fictional tragedies, games arouse the feeling of responsibility for the protagonist’s failure and suffering. Juul concludes his essay with his final point, “while games provide a space in which we can experiment with failure, we should always grant ourselves one important right: the right to be genuinely frustrated when failing” (31).

Works Cited

Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: an Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press, 2016.