Do I really have to lose before I can win?
Being OK with losing is a running battle for me (and a big theme of this blog). I don’t know if it’s because of my age. Or maybe it’s just my personality. Actually, I think it’s my personality.
I was never OK with losing even when I was a kid.
So I was more than a little intrigued when I saw an article at Gamasutra called “Losing for the Win: Defeat and Failure in Gaming” by game designer Ben Schneider.
Ben writes that at his first job designers “were strictly forbidden to create scenarios with anything even vaguely resembling defeat or loss in the story-lines.” Since then, Ben writes, things have changed. Lots of games incorporate setbacks into their stories, as per this scene from “Half Life 2”:
That guy getting his butt kicked is the player’s avatar. Ben writes that most players find this fellow’s “setback” (and it does look like quite a setback…) to be an acceptable part of the game. And, in fact, he writes, setbacks can actually make a game more powerful, since they work to “make the subsequent victory that much more glorious.”
It is really interesting stuff and probably much easier to digest for those of you with more gaming experience than I have.
And it got me to think once again about winning and losing.
I have two daughters: Nell is six and Grace is nine. And they have very different attitudes toward playing games.
Nell is almost always up for playing a game – Dominoes, Operation, Don’t Break the Ice – you name it and she’ll play it. She used to cry a lot when she’d lose at a game, but now she does a much better job of accepting that she won’t win every time. Nellie seems to really enjoy game play and the social interaction that comes with it.
Grace, on the other hand, is more like me. She doesn’t want to lose.
While the rest of the family is playing games, Grace is likely to be a bystander or to take on a non-competitive role (like “banker” or something). Grace is less expressive than her sister in some ways, but I’ve no doubt that she feels things just as deeply (and in this way, she’s like me, too). I think it really hurts her when she loses. And I think it really hurts her when she thinks she’s done something wrong. And that is a feeling that many, many of us share.
What’s the upshot of all this?
Well, whether we’re game designers or schoolteachers or parents, we need to remind kids that, as Ben wrote, the setbacks will indeed “make the subsequent victory that much more glorious.” And we need to remind them that sometimes a “victory” can be had not by winning, but merely by playing the game.