There is, though, also this other kind of power fantasy. A fantasy of failure, which, like the fantasy of success, has many sub-species. Some of these are just success dressed up in another name: We want to fail forward, to find another path into new, more interesting content. Or we want our failure to mean something in the long run, as in Rogue Legacy, where individual failures still add up into long term improvement. We argue on forums about game balance because, listen, we don’t mind losing to our rivals—in fact, there’s something romantic about that—but we want to lose fairly.
And lord, I wrote that three years ago. The world around us feels less stable than ever. Which maybe explains why I am so sincerely loving the ways in which games let me fail safely today, especially those that explore failure in novel and powerful ways like Getting Over It, Into the Breach, and They Are Billions.As we speak, I'm getting ready to play more Sea of Thieves with friends. I cannot wait for everything to go totally wrong.Do you have a "favorite" moment of failure in games? Or do you just wanna talk about failure in general? Swing by today's open thread on the forums and add your voice!But there is, more quietly (and, I think, more fundamentally) a fantasy of actual failure that attracts us to games. Wanting to safely fail is not such an absurd desire to have: It’s also part of why many of us want strong relationships with friends or family, or better health care coverage, or a stable, secure income. When we have those safety nets in place we can take risks and be creative, and we can live through loss when it eventually comes. But many of us do not have those things, or if we do, might still feel like we can’t ever let ourselves fail. And so: Games. Play.