Jesper Juul, in The Art of Failure (2013), offers one of the most lucid and uncomfortable explanations for this behavior: failure is not a flaw in game design. It is the point.
Two kinds of failure
Juul opens his analysis by drawing a crucial distinction that any thoughtful player will immediately recognize:
"two types of failure: 1) real failure occurs when a player invests time into playing a game and fails; 2) fictional failure is what befalls the character(s) in the fictional game world." (JUUL, 2013, p. 25)
The example he gives is about Red Dead Redemption (*spoiler alert*). To advance the story, you must die with John Marston. There is no other way. The character's death is narratively mandatory; it is a fictional failure scripted into the architecture of the game. But the player's experience of that moment is something else entirely: real time invested, real emotional weight, and a loss that is simultaneously required and felt.
This double layer (the fictional and the real running in parallel) is what separates games from most other media. When you watch a film and the protagonist dies, you grieve. When you play a game and your character dies, you also grieve, but you also feel responsible. You were there. You were in control. The controller was in your hands.
Why we want to fail (at least a little)
This is where Juul's argument gets genuinely counterintuitive. He identifies two coexisting desires at work in the player:
Why we want to fail (at least a little)
This is where Juul's argument gets genuinely counterintuitive. He identifies two coexisting desires at work in the player:
"In games: 1) Immediate desire – desire to avoid failure; 2) Aesthetic desire – desire for an experience that includes partial failure." (JUUL, 2013, p. 43)
These two desires are in direct tension, and that tension is productive. You want to win — every instinct pushes toward success. But a game in which you never fail is not a game; it is an animation. The resistance of failure is what gives victory its meaning. More than that: partial failure, the stumble before the climb, is aesthetically desirable. It structures the experience. It creates the narrative arc that makes the eventual success feel earned.
Juul pushes this further on page 45, offering a deceptively simple formulation that reframes the entire philosophy of play:
"Games are a perspective on failure and learning as enjoyment, or satisfaction." (JUUL, 2013, p. 45)
Games are not about succeeding. They are about the experience of learning to succeed — and that learning is, in itself, the pleasure. This has profound implications for how we think about difficulty, accessibility, and the design of failure states. A game that punishes without teaching fails its own purpose. A game that challenges while guiding turns failure into a feedback loop, and that loop is fun.
The emotional contract
There is another dimension to all of this that Juul does not let us ignore: emotion. We are not passive processors when we play. We are invested — sometimes uncomfortably so.
"We are emotionally affected by games, and we are aware of this before we start playing." (JUUL, 2013, p. 56)
This is remarkable if you sit with it. Before we press start, we already know that we will feel something. We anticipate frustration, excitement, satisfaction, even grief. We consent to being emotionally implicated. Games are, in this sense, a form of voluntary emotional exposure — and the management of that exposure, how much failure a player can absorb before the experience sours, is one of the deepest challenges in game design.
Responsibility and the fictional world
The most philosophically rich passage Juul offers on the subject comes near the end of the book, in a reflection on fictional tragedy:
"The problem with fictional tragedy also showed that it is failure that makes us feel responsible for the events in the fictional world." (JUUL, 2013, p. 117)
And then, almost as a counterpoint:
"Hamlet dies but it is not our fault." (JUUL, 2013, p. 118)
The contrast is sharp and clarifying. In theater, in film, in literature — we witness. We may be moved, we may be changed, but we are not culpable. Hamlet's death happens to him. In a game, your character's death happens because of you. The failure is yours, even when it is fictional. The agency that makes games uniquely engaging is the same agency that makes their failures uniquely personal.
This is why the death of John Marston lands differently than the death of any movie hero. You did not just watch it. You lived it, failed at it, and then had to choose to press continue.
What this means for design
Juul's framework has direct implications for anyone thinking seriously about game design. The management of failure — its frequency, its cost, its legibility, its emotional register — is not incidental to the game. It is the game. A well-designed failure state teaches, resets, and motivates. A poorly designed one exhausts, obscures, and alienates.
The games we remember most vividly are often those that failed us most meaningfully. The boss that took forty attempts. The level we thought was impossible. The narrative moment that demanded we lose before we could continue. These are not bugs in the experience. They are the experience.
Jesper Juul's The Art of Failure is a short book with a long argument, and that argument is this: to understand games, you must understand failure not as a negative outcome to be avoided, but as the generative force that makes play meaningful.
We load the game. We know we are going to fail. We press start anyway.
That is not masochism. That is game design.
#GoGamers
Reference:
JUUL, Jesper. The Art of Failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2013.
