[DECEMBER] The Art of Failure by Jesper Juul

[Liz England]

The reading for December is The Art of Failure by Jesper Juul.

Overview:

In The Art of Failure I ask: why do we do it? Why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? The Art of Failure discusses the many possible explanations of this paradox, and while I propose an answer to the problem, the journey itself is meant to offer a new explanation of what it is that games do. The book combines personal confessions about failure with philosophy, game design analysis, psychology and fiction theory.

You can get a few more details on the author's site: http://www.jesperjuul.net/artoffailure/.

It's available in ebook or dead tree format from MITPress or Amazon (or your favorite local independent bookseller, etc).

[Liz England]

I just finished The Art of Failure. Hopefully I am not the only one - I liked this one a lot more than I was expecting to.

This took me ages to get into it and a few restarts. Once I got through the introduction it was so, so much better. I don't know why (I haven't looked back at it yet) but I found the intro such a slog and it's a whole 1/3 of the book. I'd say if you found yourself really slowed down, just skip the intro and start with the second chapter. I think that chapter - on the Paradox of Failure - was a much better introduction by going right into defining failure and tragedy.

There's a bunch of places where I found I disagreed with the text but still found the points really engaging. I also thought that some of the text was a bit windy? The author seemed to lose sight of the main topic and meandered around it in a kind of off-topic way. Generally I didn't mind it (after the intro) because there was just a lot of interesting bits in it.

The whole chapter "How to Fail in Video Games" was probably my favorite since he goes into how failure ties to player motivation and goal-setting. It covers some pretty useful concepts (games as skill/chance/labor, goals as completionist/transient/improvement). It felt like a really good mix of theory & practice because I could take a lot from this chapter and immediately apply it to my games as a tool to evaluate them.

I also liked the chapter on the feeling of failure (the psychology chapter), but found it mostly repeated information I've read elsewhere. However it was nice seeing those concepts talked about in the context of failure, specifically. The fictional failure chapter was a bit more hit-or-miss with me but this is because I have a lot of personal investment in the topic of tragedy in game narratives. It wasn't bad, just seemed not as well fleshed out as I would have liked. There's been a lot of games and thoughtful criticism done more recently in just the last couple of years (granted, after this book came out) on tragedy and complicity in game narratives that I feel like there should have been more here to chew on.

[Christian Selbrede]

I liked it a lot. I feel like it's a good complement to Flow. Theory books like these are always the most useful to me. Here are some choice quotes:

Through fiction, we can feel that we are smart and successful, and stories politely refrain from challenging that belief. Games call our bluff and let us know that we failed.

I love this. It reminds me of a quote from Chris Lombardi's Wolfenstein 3D review in Computer Gaming World

No longer can the player hover detachedly (and safely!) over a little stick figure while it struggles and dies within a Nazi nightmare. Id has put the player inside the head of Our Hero, now named B.J.Blazkowicz, where s/he will see first hand what it’s like to tip-toe cautiously past daydreaming guards, to sprint frantically out of a stream of lead, and to machine gun an advancing SS Trooper in bloody detail. In Wolfenstein 3D, the player is ‘there’ like no game I’ve ever played.

In other words, it might be easy to imagine either in a movie, book, (or the original Castle Wolfenstein as mentioned above) that there is a safe disconnect between the player and the protagonist. Good games obliterate that barrier, leaving no refuge. Not as if players don't still seek one out, because they certainly do! As Juul mentions in Chapter One, when he failed at Patapon (terrible example game btw, but it's beside the point):

I blamed Patapon: I searched for a solution, and I used the fact that many players had experienced the same problem as an argument for attributing my failure to a flaw in the game design, rather than a flaw with my skills. As it happens, we are a self-serving species, more likely to deny responsibility when we fail than when we succeed.

How many times have we heard that before? Somebody we know and care about plays a favorite game of ours, fails at some part of it, then immediately cries "bad design!" In some circles, it's like clockwork. I think it's telling that Juul later calls games "a mirror in which I can see my everyday behavior reflected, amplified, distorted, and revealed". I wonder what most people see in that mirror?

But just as we learned from Flow, it's all about intrinsic motivation. It must come from within. Juul mentions the sport psychiatrists counseling "to see failure as a learning opportunity, and to play for the pure joy of the game, rather than for whatever material or psychological gains we hope to achieve by succeeding." Well said. All for the "love of the game". I especially like the quote about Magnus Carlsen, the chess grandmaster:

Carlsen wasn’t thinking about being the best, he recalled: ‘I was just enjoying the game, really. I don’t think I’ve ever really been much into setting myself these goals. It hasn’t been necessary. I mean, just playing the game has been enough for me.

This leads to the most critical point of the book: "Failure then has the very concrete positive effect of making us see new details and depth in the game that we are playing." In other words, when we fail, it affords us the opportunity to engage more deeply with the game. And if it's a game we deeply love and enjoy, then even failure itself begins to lose its sting.

I also liked his highly intriguing quote, "Games have become easier, and therefore we fail more". He mentions the arcade model, comparing it to the present, and says to himself, wait a minute. I think we're failing at games at pretty much the same rate we always have. The only difference is that now we're actually "completing" them. And this is basically what he means when he says in the beginning that, "By now, commercial single-player video games tend to come with the promise that all players will be able to complete them ... that rewards mere time investment rather than skill." At which point, these games now come into focus as really being disguised games of labor, (FarmVille is his prime example of the labor game), which developer "Chris Hecker denounces ... as encouraging 'junkie behavior'".

Sounds an awful lot like Flow to me. And what was the key to Flow? Complexity. Juul's contribution is that in order to see that complexity, we must be able to fail.  

[Christian Selbrede]

Here's a relevant quote from Firaxis's Jake Solomon - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/02/24/xcom-2-too-hard/

I had been pushing the mantra for a long time that we need to make Normal or Veteran difficulty basically an ‘I want to see the cinematics’ mode, an ‘I want to see the story’ mode, and the player can get through it and it shouldn’t be that difficult. But very, very late in development all the team was playing the game and they were coming back saying “yeah… it’s fun. But it’s pretty easy.” And I started to get kinda worried.

On the one hand you’ve got all these developers who are super-hardcore XCOM players, but then on the other hand I was ‘if we don’t make the game hard, a lot of the design systems don’t engage.’ If the player isn’t put under pressure, then on the strategy layer a lot of things don’t kick in. The player just doesn’t have to engage with the systems.