In Juul’s The Art of Failure he talks of how gamers in a certain way enjoy the feeling of failure to a certain extent. Juul talks about the ability of the game to make the player feel failure not only as the character they are playing, but part of themselves as well. The aforementioned feeling causes the player to either want to quit or rectify what they feel is wrong with themselves through virtual gameplay. I enjoyed the book, I felt that this part of the book was interesting in the fact that he separated the two failures: the failure of reality that has to deal with the player and the failure of the fiction, which has to do with the endgame character. I felt that it is a distinct divide and part of gameplay that nobody has touched on. It struck my curiosity that although the failure in-game had to deal with only the fictional character, the player technically felt the sensation of failure twice due to having the experience of causing the fictional character to fail.
I identify with the frustration that causes a player to continue. In my personal experience once the game provides a significant amount of frustration, I am more enticed to play it. If a game provides little to no challenge for me I am more likely to play it once and then drop it due to my lack of interest. However, the more frustration I experience the more I have trouble continuing experiencing the failure of the character I am playing as that represents my own failure and lack of skill at that moment. At that moment I have to take a break in order to rethink my strategy and come back to the game to see if I can overcome in what Juul says is the inadequacy of the player.
Game Studies 
Did reading “The Art of Faiure” by Juul in any way change your opinion on failing when you are playing a game? You said when failing you usually have trouble continuing the game, with the feeling that your own skills are lacking in many areas. Did reading this book deter you from this feeling at all, being that Juul talks about the enjoyment of failing?
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I like how you mention the types of failure between the protagonist and player. Even if I knew that in the end my protagonist would fail, I would probably still play it for the game (if its decent) for a challenge rather than the fact that it’s depressing. Some games I am motivated to play because of the story while others like tetris are simply to escape “real life” for a little while. I enjoyed this book, we wouldn’t know what winning is if failure did not exist, games would cease to be fun is they are not challanging or you always win, and usually when you fail it is a learning experience and you will improve for the future.
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To your point Chase, you mention that “Juul talks about the ability of a game to make a player feel failure not only as the character they are playing, but part of themselves as well.” This reminds me of Juul’s Paradox of Painful Art. The are three aspects to Juul’s Paradox of Painful Art.
1) We generally avoid failure.
2) We experience failure when playing video games.
3) We seek out games, although we will experience something that we normally avoid.
We resolve this paradox in one of three ways: deflation, compensation, and A-hedonism.
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