Games Teach Us How To Fail Well
This article is cross-posted with permission from the wonderful blog Screen Therapy.
Games Teach Us How To Fail Well
It’s getting dark outside, you’ve been playing this game since lunch. It’s your day off and you’re spending it in front of a screen, cursing under your breath every 5 minutes. You died. Again. You were so close. One more hit and you would’ve beaten the boss, but you got impatient and lunged at the wrong moment. Now you have to start all over.
It’s infuriating. But you won’t stop.
We might be tempted to think that our hours on games like FromSoftware’s Dark Souls, games that push us to spend days trying to farm experience and defeat bosses, as a waste of time. After 3 hours of fighting one enemy we might feel like we wasted the afternoon. And although, yes, the dishes are still dirty or our homework might be incomplete, we don’t need to worry that we wasted our time.
We have been sharpening a very important emotional skill which we use every day: Resilience.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is our ability to cope with failure. It is our motivation to get back up and try again after a negative experience. Extending this, it is our belief that we can eventually find a solution to a difficult problem or accomplish our far-fetched goals.
Resilience is failing well; seeing our failures as transitory and as learning opportunities for future success.
We are resilient when are at school or at our jobs and we make those dreaded, but unavoidable mistakes. We will always reach problems that are very, if not “too”, difficult to solve. We will fail and others will see it. On a more personal level, whenever we have a fight with our partner we exercise resilience by talking through it calmly without flying into a rage or a sulk. When our first choice for our education or career falls through we are resilient when we, after a time of mourning, try again or develop new plans to get us where we want to go.
How Do Games Help Us Cultivate Resilience?
Games are perhaps best praised for their capacity to teach us resilience, it is one of the most obvious uses for games.
Every time we’re killed, we can and usually try again. Game developers invite us to seek out other solutions that won’t result in failure. Unless the game is terribly bugged, there is always a way to “win” and we are taught how to patiently cope with our failures on our way to victory.
In game designer Jane McGonigal’s article “Building Resilience by Wasting Time”, she discusses the research that games help us develop our resilience by, “tackling a pointless but mildly challenging task as a scientifically backed way to improve willpower.”
However, not all experiences generate the same kind of resilience. There are a few different kinds of resilience that games help us with.
The sub-types are Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Social Resilience. Let us focus on the Mental and the Emotional sub-types. For this article, which is part one of two, let’s narrow in on Mental Resilience.
Video Games and Mental Resilience
This is the kind of resilience we have been talking about so far. It is the type of resilience we think of first; the most common type. You are given a task, from mildly to very challenging, and you continue to work at it until you succeed.
Almost all games are designed to encourage this behavior. Games lull us into what are called “compulsion loops”. Compulsion loops, as defined by Gamasutra is:
A habitual, designed chain of activities that will be repeated to gain a neurochemical reward: a feeling of pleasure and/or a relief from pain.
After we have been taught by the game what kind of activities gain rewards and which gain punishments, we invest ourselves in these loops.
By studying this standard loop, and remaining mindful of it as we play, we can contemplate the importance of the different parts. If the monsters are too weak, if the rewards are too plentiful, or if the items are too cheap, we are able to progress far too quickly to enjoy flexing our resiliency muscles. Games with these imbalances are less enjoyable because we are not challenging ourselves to learn or practice skills we intuitively want to strengthen through gaming.
The compulsion loops that best train our mental resilience are the loops that make each of these parts more difficult to accomplish.
Games are, of course, made to reward our efforts with either achievements or story progression. Yet, the games that have fewer rewards that are more difficulty obtained or kept test our patience – and stimulate our resilience – in ways other reward-heavy games don’t. One of the best examples for the kind of resilience-stimulating, “reward-less” games might be Dark Souls.
The Souls series has received a lot of mixed reviews because of how difficult its enemies are and how stingy it is with rewards. The community surrounding the Souls, and Soulslike games (an ever-expanding genre), are close-knit and built on a mutual understanding that the games are difficult and are loved for how difficult they are.
In Souls, we cannot progress until we get stronger and we cannot get stronger until we kill enemies. These enemies are difficult and often leave very little for us to loot and if we die twice without collecting our fallen loot, we lose any reward they had offered. This feels punishing and reward-less, however, we keep playing until we get strong enough to progress. We are building our mental resilience.
Souls creater, Hidetaka Miyazaki, described how hard his games were to VG24/7:
“Well, there were of course several moments where I had to stop things and take a step back and consider the difficulty,” he says with a smile. “But it’s not necessarily that I say ‘oh, this is too difficult,’ but instead the term I usually use is ‘unreasonable.’ So, that’s the term I tend to use when I have these conversations with the development team.”
Miyazaki draws a distinct line between what is simply very difficult and what is unreasonable. This perspective is essential to the resilient person. Someone with a strong sense of resilience knows that extremely difficult tasks are not unreasonable. If the difficult task has a possible solution it does not need to be made easier for the sake of enjoyment. The resilient person understands that conquering a difficult task is intrinsically enjoyable and chases the opportunity to challenge themselves, and fail several times, for the chance at victory.
The enjoyment we feel from failing until we finally win is the mental reward we give ourselves for practicing resilience.
We enjoy these difficult, but not “unreasonable”, games because they give us the opportunity to practice satisfying skills – like resilience.
Another and perhaps lesser known (though increasingly more popular) example of a resilience-toughening game would be Jonathon Blow’s The Witness.
It is a free-roaming collection of line puzzles. You wander an island full of line puzzles with no tutorial. You will fail at the puzzles many times trying to figure them out, but there is no punishment. And although many of the puzzles unlock new areas, with more complicated puzzles, there are little to no built-in rewards for your efforts either.
Your final reward, after hundreds of puzzles and dozens of hours, (Spoiler) is simply to complete the game. Even then, the game is not actually complete and you are invited to replay it for more content. (/Spoiler)
It is a mysterious game which requires herculean patience and resilience in order to complete. The player usually stays committed to completing the game. In a way, it trains mental resilience more efficiently than any game I have seen. The puzzles start off easy, enticing you to continue, and by the time you are nearing the end you are less rewarded by your success over them, but by then you are entranced by the compulsion loop and super-humanly resilient to the increasing banality of the puzzles.
Games As Mental Resilience Therapy
These games don’t give the player much direction and their compulsion loops are difficult to pass through. Because of this they can be very frustrating. The monsters/puzzles are difficult to beat, the rewards are scarce, and the chances to upgrade are either expensive or non-existent.
However, whether the game developers intended or not, these games have become quote popular and attract large communities who have actually enjoyed the difficult experiences. These games teach us how to fail well. To fail well we must forget our shame of failure, learn from our mistakes, and get back up and try again.
These games may not make us feel good with lots of satisfying rewards, pretty sounds, or congratulatory confetti but they offer us the opportunity to use important mental and emotional skills that we want to exercise. Games are designed to satisfy our minds by pushing us the practice important skills that we intuitively want to practice. Resilience is one of the most important skills in life. In real life we fail every day, in large and small ways. These failures are painful and discourage us quite easily. Games, however, are safe environments where failure and mistakes are possible, but do not haunt us longer than a few minutes. With games we get to sharpen our mental skills of resilience: dedication, repetitive independent problem-solving, and our ability to cope with constant failure or misfortune.
Each of these, if we mindfully strengthen them (through gaming) and mindfully apply what we have learned to our personal lives, can greatly benefit our professional lives and personal relationships. The key, of course, is to remain mindful. It is very difficult to learn something by accident, we all learn best when we know what we are learning when we are given a chance to learn it.