 Death is inevitable, especially in games. From the very start of our medium we died, whether at the hands of another in space war, or by decree of an obstacle in Mario, many games can't even be one, we just stave off the inevitable until we can no longer defy the grim reaper. This rhetoric is even embedded in the greatest selling games of all time, whether it be the puzzle phenomenon Tetris or the survival mechanics at the heart of Minecraft. Our only task is to survive. Art designers have recognized a simplistic rhetoric of games and have even crafted a fiction around it. Missile Command uses its inevitability to tell a story of nuclear catastrophe, and Dark Souls incorporates death into its fiction in its harsh foreboding world. The glorious thing about the Magic Circle of Play is that we can reincarnate, we can respawn to try once more. Death isn't the end, it's just feedback, a minor obstacle on our way to victory, and that victory is made more sweet by the hardship we have endured. As Ernest Becker argued, our life is governed by the denial of death, it is a challenge presented to us by the cosmos. Challenge can be seen as death's accomplice, and is similarly built into games. From the abject difficulty of early arcade games, to the resurgence of challenge we see in souls likes, roguelikes, and fighting games, difficulty has been encoded as the primary language of play, and we positively revel in it. We deny death by embracing challenge. In his book, The Art of Failure, Jasper Yule argues that video games are the art of failure. When we play a game that challenges us, time itself is suspended as we enter a flow state, enhancing our immersion and compulsion to play. In fact, we expect it to be difficult, it is why we play games to begin with, and failure plays a huge part in communicating this. However, Yule argues that challenge in games is instrumental not just in making games fun, but also towards bettering ourselves. We bring our anxieties and adequacies and failures into the magic circle of play, and because the consequences are not as drastic, we use games to expunge these anxieties and become our better selves. Yule argues that the desire for challenge mirrors our desire to watch tragic fiction. We do it because it can provide catharsis. In ancient Greece, people would gather to bear witness to the tragic fate of Oedipus as he came to ruin, and in watching this, could feel grateful for what they had. In games, we play out the role of Oedipus not just vicariously, but actively. Not just for catharsis, but also triumph. There is much literature and psychology that supports this poetic claim. Developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky have argued that learning happens in a constructive, playful fashion, and at the edge of our zone of proximal development, our abilities. This extends into work by people like Peter Gray, who argues in his book Free to Learn that challenges how we learn, it is built into our neurobiology. Play is about development under this rhetoric. It is about subjecting one to hardship in a safe environment, free of consequences, and giving us the freedom to learn and overcome. This even extends to the themes of a game. In his book Children and Play in the Holocaust, George Eisen argues that children in concentration camps incorporated the harsh themes around them to make sense of the tragedy of circumstance. Game designers understand this intuitively. Theories like Flow and the Zone of Proximal Development explain why we steadily escalate difficulty, and books like James Geese, what games have to teach us about learning, show us why games are so capable of communicating information. We also see many more games that confront dark themes, whether it be the inevitability of a child dying of terminal illness in that dragon cancer, or the harsh reality of a civilian in war in this war of mine. This allows us to generate a categorization scheme for different types of difficulty, drawn on both mechanical and thematic lines. Mechanical difficulty can be cognitive or dexterous. Cognitive difficulty includes things like puzzle games, which test us on divergent thinking, to real-time strategy games, which test us on systems optimization. There is also the skill of strategy as well, that exists in all multiplayer games. Dexterity-based skills includes the execution requirement for a fighting game, or the lightning quick reflexes one needs to play a competitive shooter. When we turn to the thematic realm, difficulty and challenge becomes a little more tricky. There are themes that can be difficult for us to face, like how the game train gets us to confront our complicity in perpetuating genocide. And then there are themes that are difficult, in that they are dense, like the multifaceted approach to truth that a game like The Witness pursues. One game that brilliantly reconciles the mechanical and thematic aspects of the art of failure is Dark Souls. Dark Souls is an exceptionally difficult game that forces players to adapt and overcome. Set in a world of decay, death and misery, you set out on the proverbial hero's journey to link the flame of the Kingdom of Lordran by felling demons. However, everything is not as it seems, as your journey increasingly takes a tragic turn. The game is challenging in the conventional sense, but also challenges us to reevaluate things like purpose, free will and the nature of humanity. The game is difficult but fair, triumphant but somber, haunting but strangely beautiful. It is the embodiment of the art of failure. Yule's argument is that failure is good because it is integral towards success, but this seems to characterize failure as good only instrumentally. What if there is a deeper layer to failure, one where failure is valued for what it is, not what it can drive us towards? In their talk, The Arts of Failure, Jesper Yule and Jack Haberstam compare their respective books, The Art of Failure and the Queer Art of Failure, and how they might converge and diverge. In contrast to Yule's position, Haberstam states, Some people might want to fail because they are dissatisfied with the social context. In essence, Jack argues that historically marginalized people show us how failure can be good in itself because the terms of success that our society dictates are not desirable. Society tells people to get married and work yourself to the bone doing something you hate. But why should we accept this? By being historically marginalized, queer people are privy to this reconstitution of failure, a failure that is subversive and transformative. How do we conceptualize this in the context of games, though? One is to understand the aesthetics of masochism, or of enjoying failure in itself. There is a genre called masochore games that devise games that are not just hard but are positively painful to play. Yet, we still play them, and moreover, we actually enjoy watching others suffer through this. However, we know it is safe. The moment consent has been broken, no one is having fun. Bonnie Rueberg extends this argument and posits that games can help us break free of the systems that mediate our reality. One way to do this is to fail towards a system. For example, in Burnout's Crash mode, we are asked to deliberately cause destruction and mayhem, even though this is conventionally viewed as failure. The game takes a fail state in the real world and turns it into a victory in the magic circle, getting us to revel in the symphony of destruction we cause. However, we aren't just restricted to failing towards a system, but can also fail away from it, revealing how the system may have been unjust to begin with. In the game September 12th, you are putting charge of a missile system to take down insurgents in a nondescript Middle Eastern country. However, you realize that acting in this system only leads to collateral damage. The right answer here is not to play at all, it is to fail at even playing the game. Another game that does this is Papers, Please, a game where you are torn between your desire to feed your family or do what is right in helping others. By highlighting how easy it is to fail in one way or the other, the game highlights the perversity of the regime you exist under. This was also explored in Chris Crawford's game, Balance of the Planet. In it, he wanted to show how there is no easy path to solving the problems of environmental stewardship. And so the complexity of the system makes it seem impossible to win. By reveling in their respective failures, these games get us to question things like the legitimacy of the military industrial complex, the repression of totalitarianism, and the systems that contribute to our ecosystems decline. Games are a powerful force to get us to question the systems that pervade our reality, and failure is the tool they have to highlight this. Suffering makes success matter. This is what Bennett Foddy claimed in his talk, No Pain, No Game. He starts by giving us the example of the Olympics, and how the idea of success, heroism, challenge, and hardship are all intertwined. Responsible for the devilishly hard game's quap and getting over it, Bennett argues that the aesthetics of failure is not just intrinsic to games, but can also be classified under different rhetorics. One rhetoric of failure is frustration, where whatever desire you have right now seems just out of grasp. If you have ever been stuck in a puzzle game, you know what this feeling is like. However, when that flash of insight finally dawns on you, it's a moment of eureka, enlightenment beckons. Another rhetoric is anti-ergonomic. This is where the designer deliberately makes it difficult to control something, to challenge your dexterity. His game, Quap, makes a challenge out of the simple act of motion, but in doing so, creates a game that can be somewhat meditative. Frank Lance even argues that Quap can get us to be hyper-aware of our own bodies, setting us into a metacognitive awareness of ourselves, just by being difficult to control. Other rhetorics include confusion, seen in games where you have no idea where to go or what is happening, but this can actually activate curiosity, like the Lovecraftian world of Bloodborne. Nazia is a strange one, but this can be seen in our horror games, create worlds and enemies that disgust us to heighten our sense of fear. It's interesting how privy Bennett is to these subtleties of failure, and in his game getting over it, he seemingly united them all. You play a man in a pot, who uses a stick to propel himself up a mound of junk. It is anti-ergonomic, simple movement itself is difficult. Hours of progress can be washed away if you tumble and fall, creating a real sense of utility and frustration. And well, the placeholder assets in junk can be quite nauseating from an aesthetic perspective. This is also amplified by the lack of clear direction for what to do, and where to go, as well as the quirky witticisms Bennett utters in your ear as you climb, imbuing your assent with humiliation. However, as Halberstam argues, the whole of an experience can be more than the sum of its parts, and the experience of playing the game can be quite rewarding. You come to appreciate the quotes by philosophers of the past Bennett pontificates about, reframing the Sisyphian struggle you are going through as a meditative exercise. In his GDC top, putting your name on your game, Bennett even argues that these contrivances, in addition to adding his name, actually made the game more intimate, an authentic expression of creativity from him to those who are playing. In their acceptance speech for best indie game of the year, the developers of Celeste said this. So, there is one thing I want to say though, if Celeste has helped you come to terms with mental illness, I just want to say that you deserve credit for that. That change came from inside of you, and you're capable of a lot more. Thank you. It's interesting how a game requiring intense mechanical precision has helped many cope with anxiety and depression, but maybe that is precisely the reason. In his book, Anti-Fragile, Nassim Talib argues that human beings fall in the titular category, Anti-Fragile, a category of things that actually get stronger when faced with hardship. Telling the story of a young woman named Madeline, who endeavors to climb a mountain, Celeste takes this rhetoric of failure, of self-healing, and crafts of fiction around it. The difficulty of the game becomes a staging ground for Maddie to find herself, and for the players as well. Despite being quite difficult, the game also has a robust assist mode that allows players to customize the difficulty as they see fit. What's interesting here is that, one, it suggests it is okay to ask for help when you need it, but two, it makes difficulty management voluntary, consensual, and player-directed. The difference between real-world difficulty and the art of failure will always be one of consent, of voluntary submission to hardship and the ability to withdraw at any time. This idea of seeking help with others was also explored in Dark Souls, where players could summon others into their world to engage in jolly cooperation. As Hiddataka Miyazaki explained in an interview, this mechanic was inspired by him witnessing people help each other push a car in heavy snowfall. Miyazaki is one of the most prominent artists of failure, reviving difficulty for a new generation with his games. One recent game that borrowed some of his multiplayer sensibilities is Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima's latest work. The game tasks you with walking through a post-apocalyptic United States. The game seemingly invokes the rhetoric of frustration we talked about earlier, as the simple act of traversing through space is made difficult. This has perplexed many people and reviewers, who claim the game is by conventional standards, boring and disengaging. Regardless of your thoughts on it, this was Kojima's intent. The frustration of movement is made more tolerable by the resources and constructions other people leave in the landscape, making you feel appreciative for others and their exploits in a harsh, desolate world. Failure can be used to recontextualize connection, both with yourself and others. Death Stranding's protagonist, Sam, lives on his own. He is stranded between the living and the dead. In some sense, he's failed against the system. But then again, what does this even mean in a post-apocalyptic setting? In the art of failure, Yule argues that games can find it very hard to tell tragic stories, because it requires the player actively want to precipitate the downfall of their character. One way to do this is subverting the player's expectation, like how Shadow of the Colossus doesn't tell the player how their seemingly noble quest will end in doom. Another way is to reframe failure to make a thematic point. Spec Ops the Line is a critique of modern military shooters and the military industrial complex. It does this by showing us the failure of its protagonist. He fails at saving Dubai. He fails at helping its people. In fact, he actively causes its destruction. The brilliance here is that the game creates this failure by having Walker and by extension us actively participate in this by doing what we normally do in games, kill. We come into the game expecting a conventional shooter and we leave having walked through the heart of darkness committing genocide. By framing what we normally take as success in games, murder, as constituting failure in the fiction of the game, Spec Ops gets us to re-examine the legitimacy of the games we play and the violence they're in. Walker's tragedy is our tragedy. We have failed at pushing the medium forward. The way death is portrayed in games tells us about the culture that produced those works. We have games that glorify death. They revel in the violence one can generate like the game Mad World. However, fetishization always gives way to trivialization as we gun down hundreds of foes without thinking twice. Fortunately, we also have less vulgar depictions of death's embrace. In Dark Souls, death depletes our will. It hollows us out into a meandering husk. We are trapped in a never ending cycle of life and death but by reveling in challenge, by confronting it, we can overcome our corporeal purgatory. What remains of Edith Finch and Limbo have a slightly contrasting take. Giant Sparrow's game tells us to recognize that death is inevitable and Limbo suggests what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil or well, in Limbo. In Death Stranding, though, death is a catastrophe. A single dead body unleashes a cataclysmic force. It's a physical metaphor for the value of life and what is lost when it is gone. But Stranding, in its most perverse form, happens in life. We all know death will come but purpose is created in the interim. All these games recognize death as inevitable. They appreciate that we are fickle beings, always on the precipice. There is something strangely cyclical about games. They are a medium about reincarnation and the pursuit of nirvana. Mercea Eliade claimed we can act out cycles to ascend to Godhood. Buddhist claim we can seek enlightenment to transcend it and Nietzsche said that this is bound to eternally recur. But by resisting death, by embracing the challenge that is living life, we may find some solace. Games aestheticize this process. They create an art out of the cycle of failure. The art of failure is about challenge and triumph, subversion and recontextualization, accommodation and tragedy. It expresses itself in many different rhetorics and can be repurposed to examine themes, ideas and most importantly, ourselves. Jule and Halberstam agreed that they were getting at the same idea in the end, that games provide a unique avenue for us to examine, aestheticize and overcome failure, no matter what form it expresses itself in. In some sense, our experience of ourselves as sentient beings starts with the recognition of suffering, an idea that is extended from east to west. The Stoics tell us to resist the tides of suffering, aesthetics tell us to be indifferent to it, but games, they tell us to revel in it and transform it. When we say play is the art of failure, this applies in two senses, one in the sense that it might be the purest intrinsic purpose to play, but also in that we play with failure, we convert it to our own purposes and in doing so overcome it.