We all may hate losing at video-games, but what would happen if we never lost to any of them? Let’s paint a picture of who we are as gamers. Every day (including today), hundreds of millions of people around the world play video games, and most of them will be pressing the start button continually as we speak. It’s safe to say that all of us have a deap-seated desire to win and feel victory flowing through our veins, yet why do gamers choose to play games that they’re nearly certain they’re doomed to fail at, or at least some of the time. There are an army of players dedicated to the Dark Souls and Super Meat Boys of the world. So it is that this paradox of failing speaks to our very strengths as it does who people are.
This “failure paradox” is the very reason why so many of us tend to scrounge up every jump scare of Psycho’s, every Studio Ghibli tear-jerker, and every grim-faced Breaking Bad episode we can. If these don’t sound like actual paradoxes to the average reader, it’s simply because we’re so used to their presence in our lives that we sometimes forget that they’re paradoxes at all. The dilemma is simple: we genuinely try to avoid the uncomfortable emotions we get from our real life tragedies. So why do we so enthusiastically seek out these feeling in our art, our stories, and our games?
That paradox can be best described by Aristotle’s own term of catharsis. We live life with unpleasantness every day to some degree or another; chores we hate doing and tasks left unattended. Experiencing fear, anger, regret all in a fictitious tragedy, however, allows us a freedom ordinarily not granted to us: we can purge them from us on our own terms, or better yet, control them. The same can oddly not be said of video-games. Whenever we experience bone-crippling defeat, falling into that ditch or forgetting to save, we really are filled with the aftereffects of dejection. Games don’t purge these feelings from us, rather, they produce them in the first place.
The easiest answer to give is that we simply enjoy failure within the world of gaming because “they’re just games”, without any serious consequences at hand. That’s true to an extent, but it reemphasizes the powerful emotions we feel over video games: The sailor words, the playstation controllers dropped in front of us. They’re philosophy and art theories galore to explain the game paradox, but what strikes this writer personally is that games measure a part of ourselves. You test yourself to discover a part of you that you didn’t know existed at no cost whatsoever, hence: video-games.
Games promise us not the mere repair of our personal inadequacy, but rebuilding and reshaping what feelings that are derived from them in the first place. Games are a meditative fountain of thought to me, a mirror that I can see myself in, amplified, distorted, and reconfigured within pixels and polygons able to reinterpret myself in accordance to the virtual world around me.
Why do some of us sit down to horror films? When we so willingly expose ourselves to what is genuinely terrifying scenery, our experience is outmatched by the joy of discovering and conquering the fear of what we’ve witnessed. Horror is just a price we’re willing to pay to reach the thrill of learning from the monster.
The failure paradox is what explain why “gamification” so rarely works when corporations trying to motivate their employees. If failure is indeed the focal point of why we play games, it’s clear why you can’t as easily make a game out of your job or schoolwork. The philosophical eccentricities of what makes video-games games is all too clear to the average office drone: you can’t make a desk job of paperwork and voice mail engaging by including achievements and glowing user interfaces. When game mechanics become a part of our emotional clockwork, capable of replicating life rather than mere tasks, then the become something authored as well as tailored to the players sitting in front of them.
