Jesper Juul is a sore loser.
That’s not an insult. He admits it himself, right at the start of The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, just out from MIT Press. But while Juul wants to win at video games, he also wants to lose, at least some of the time. “I dislike failing in games, but I dislike not failing even more,” he writes.
This “paradox of failure” in video games has parallels, he notes, in the ways we consume tragic fiction, film, and theater that engender sadness, fear, disgust, and other negative feelings. That phenomenon is commonly explained through Aristotle’s concept of catharsis: that our unpleasant feelings in everyday life can be purged by experiencing such emotions in fiction. This doesn’t happen in games, argues Juul, a visiting assistant professor at the New York University Game Center: “Games do not purge these emotions from us. They produce the emotions in the first place.” Frustration and anger bind players to games, along with fun. Video games involve the “art of failure,” allowing us to both experience and experiment with failing.
Juul even spotlights a few games in which success for the player is not success for the fictional protagonist. Among them is a Western-themed game in which the player eventually discovers that if the game is completed, it means the death of the troubled hero. It’s a surprisingly “sophisticated device,” Juul says, which may produce a stronger feeling of tragedy than in other art forms.
Failure in games also comes with the possibility of denying responsibility. We may take such failure seriously, but we may also deflate it. We may even court it. A player might decide to perform badly to keep the game interesting, explore more of its facets. Failures have different shelf lives, too, depending on the goals of the game.
The uncertain or flexible meaning of failure in games “is a feature, not a bug,” he writes. Our decision, for example, to care or not care about failing grants us a freedom from consequences.
Juul also invokes freedom when considering the instrumentalist view of video games espoused by, for example, Jane McGonigal in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Games can be great for teaching and learning, Juul agrees, but they “are not a pixie dust of motivation to be sprinkled on any subject.”
On the phone from New York, he elaborates. “When you fail in a game, it’s up to you to decide what that means. Whereas if you have a game structure in education or a workplace, it will be up to the manager to decide what it means.”
What worries Juul is the idea that “it would be great if we all got points for whatever we’re doing and this in itself might make things better.” Recalling gamelike aspects of Wall Street behavior leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, he sounds a cautionary note.
Born in Denmark in 1970, Juul grew up in the first decades of video games, from Pong on. But his shift to studying the medium was unplanned. “I’m not sure I would have done it if I had planned it.”
He was doing a master’s degree in Nordic literature. “I wasn’t quite loving it all the time.” In breaks from his studies in the 1990s, he helped develop Web-based games. “I thought this was a completely different silo than my academic studies,” he recalls. But gradually his focus shifted, culminating in a doctorate at the IT University of Copenhagen. His dissertation, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, became his first book, for MIT, in 2005.
As a doctoral student in 2001, Juul says, he helped organize one of the first academic conferences on video games. “We were used to going to these literary-theory conferences that had 10 people in a room,” he remembers. “And then we announced this and we had 100 participants. There was this incredible hunger for talking about these issues. It’s been a great ride to do this from the ground up.”
With video-game studies, Juul says, “it’s not entirely obvious which department it should be in, necessarily. There have been a lot of turf wars going on.” The author is more ecumenical. “If you think there’s a particular theory that is perfect for examining video games, and it happens to be the one you were trained in, then you’re very lucky, right? But perhaps it shows you something about a self-serving aspect of thinking about it like this.”
The Art of Failure is the inaugural volume of a new MIT series, Playful Thinking. Juul is one of its three co-editors, with Geoffrey Long, of Microsoft, and William Uricchio, a professor and director of the program in comparative media studies at MIT. The series promises books that are “short, readable, and argumentative.”
In an e-mail, Doug Sery, in-house editor for Playful Thinking, says that the press is looking for books that go beyond a theoretical game-studies approach and instead approach games with a more accessible voice. “Politics and games, activism and games, the environment and games, romance and games, these are the sort of topics that might be of interest,” he says, “preferably with something of a personal slant.”
In addition to Juul’s, a second book in the series is also just out: Uncertainty in Games, by Greg Costikyan, senior designer at Disney Playdom’s Dream Castle Studio. Three more titles are signed and slated for 2014: Possibility Space: The Strange Beauty of Games, by Frank Lantz; Works of Games: Art Games, Game Art, and Aesthetic Perspectives on Games, by John Sharp; and Gut Wrenching: How Games Shape Our Emotions and Transform Relationships, by Katherine Isbister. Lantz is a scholar and game developer who directs NYU’s Game Center, where Isbister teaches. Sharp teaches digital media at Georgia Tech.
Today more than 50 percent of the U.S. population are playing video games on a regular basis. (That includes everything from the simple game on your smartphone to productions with visual effects that rival Hollywood.)
The plethora of new players has pushed games in easier, less punishing, less time-consuming directions, much to the disgust of some traditional gamers. Traditional video-game culture had valued an extreme of dedication, Juul says. “You play the game to the detriment of everything else.”
Still, as he outlines, there’s plenty of nuanced failure and abuse out there for gamers. Consider Portal 2, in which players solve a series of puzzles while being insulted by a cruel computer called GLaDOS. Then there’s the frank advice for the “nightmare” skill level in Doom: “This skill level isn’t even remotely fair.”
Instead of dissuading players with near-certain failure, that approach actually can be encouraging, he argues. It says this is so difficult that it is understandable and expected that you will fail. “There’s a weird meta-playfulness about it,” says Juul. “It’s completely OK that you only get five seconds in” before you fail.
