The Allure of Struggle and Failure in Cooperative Board Games

Because modern video games are designed to be winnable, failure highlights the insufficient ability in the player–it produces discomfort but also motivation to close the challenge-skill gap. Scholars in game studies assume that fun is what players are after, and though losing isn’t fun, it is at least helpful in leading to the fun of eventual victory. This “paradox of failure” as Jesper Juul calls it appears to extend well beyond the sphere of gaming. Buried within this advice is a pair of assumptions–first, that achievement is the point of it all, and second, that failure’s only value lies in what it can teach us about how to win. But we challenge the universality of this apparent paradox, both within and beyond the world of games. Other cultures do not necessarily feel similarly. Just as failure cannot be understood through the lens of a single culture, we argue that an account of failure in gameplay is incomplete without considering how it feels to lose in diverse contexts. We aim to reconsider what might be uncovered by considering collaborative gaming experiences–we address this gap by uncovering the social and emotional space that failing together creates