Motivational Speakers, Golden Tickets, and the Experience of Failure
When I was in high school, we used to have school assemblies. Most of the time they were predictable — updates on scheduling, the occasional anti-drug lecture — but every once in a while they would bring in a motivational speaker. From narratives of overcoming illness to chronicles of great adventures, these motivational speakers brought tales meant to inspire. As different as they all were, all of the stories had one thing in common: failure. Not only that, but they framed failure as an opportunity for learning, for greater growth.
Of all media, games are the ones that can take best advantage of this opportunity. Sure, movies and books make use of failure. Katniss fails to protect Rue in The Hunger Games; It’s a Wonderful Life’s whole premise is failure. Even visual art can include themes of failure, with “Erased de Kooning Drawing” — by Robert Rauschenberg — using failure as a means to explore the idea of destruction as creation (https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.298/). Cool shit. With that said, nothing compares to games — the way games can masterfully use failure as an emotional and rhetorical tool to convey meaning. Unlike other mediums, games ask the audience — or, in this case, the players — to be active participants. They require us to fully inhabit failure rather than passively witnessing it, creating personal investment that other media simply cannot replicate. Cooler shit.
But why is such a personal investment necessary? Humans have empathy, is that not enough? I can empathize with Charlie when he doesn’t get a golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory. Why do I, myself, need to find my own disappointing chocolate bar?
Wow, good question! I’m so glad you brought that up!
According to Thomas Nagel in “What Is It Like To Be a Bat,” “Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited […] We will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view,” (https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/nagel_bat.pdf). In other words, Nagel kinda roasts us. He notes that our imagination is “limited” — specifically because it is inspired by our own experiences.
Harsh — but kinda based.
In that sense, Nagel explains that one can never truly access another being’s subjective experience. Subjective experience is fundamentally tied to a first-person perspective; it is not something that can be fully translated into an external description, no matter how accurate or detailed that description might be. With this in mind, I will — to my own dismay — never fully understand what it is like to be my dog. Similarly, just by watching the movie, I will never truly understand the disappointment Charlie felt when opening that chocolate bar. That said, while I may not ever have the exact same subjective experience, opening my own normal chocolate bar — experiencing that failure myself — will still get me a whole lot closer.
A full understanding of such experiences of failure functions incredibly well as a rhetorical device in part because of the level of detail and how directly the experience is communicated to the player. According to Charles Hill’s “comprehensive continuum of vividness” — a kind of ladder that ranks different forms of communication by their ability to create a vivid impression — “actual experience” sits at the top. Ranked below it are moving images with sound; static photographs; realistic paintings; line drawings; narrative, descriptive accounts; abstract, impersonal analyses; and, finally, statistics (https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4392/chapter/187827/Procedural-Rhetoric). In essence, the closer a medium comes to lived experience, the more vivid and emotionally impactful it tends to be. While a game’s procedural experience can never rival actual lived experience, it arguably earns the second spot on Hill’s continuum by incorporating moving images with sound — its predecessors. Thus, with these properties, procedural experiences — and, by extension, experiences of failure — are especially effective to the persuasive effects that Hill associates with vividness. Rather than merely describing failure, games allow players to enact and experience it firsthand, giving rhetorical messages a degree of force and memorability that more abstract forms of communication often lack. As Confucius said, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” I mean really how can you argue with Confucius — he’s literally often recognized as China’s “first great educator,” (https://brill.com/edcollchap/book/9789004519473/BP000012.xml). I don’t make the rules.
Failure In Games
“Okay, okay. I get it, Samantha — failure is important to experience, not just watch. But In what ways can failure impact meaning? How does failure, specifically, help convey a message?”
Wow! You’re full of great questions today! Keep them coming!
Failure in games is not a single, uniform experience, nor do games “use” failure in one consistent way. Instead, different kinds of failure shape how players interpret their actions and outcomes in distinct ways — go figure. With this in mind, I’d like to review just a few ways in which different types of failures can push players towards extracting meaningful understandings of the game. Namely, I’d like to note three, non-mutually exclusive (non-mutually exclusive!!) types: forced failure, chosen failure, and repetitive failure.
1. Imposed Failure
Imposed failure can serve a variety of functions within games, one of which is to reveal the limits of player agency. Unlike ordinary failure, which usually comes from incorrect choices or insufficient skill, imposed failure is embedded in the structure of the game itself. It is not something we avoid through better play — it is something we encounter as part of the design. It’s like if the classic, “it’s not you, it’s me,” were true frfr.
For example, in Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald, imposed failure helps to emphasize one of the game’s most central themes: the illusion of control. We are initially placed in what appears to be an interactive role — helping to run the backstage systems of the game: releasing the tiger, cueing the rain, managing timing, etc. Very meta. However, fairly quickly, it becomes difficult to feel like anything we do is fully “working.” The narrator — the “gamemaster,” in a sense — frequently points out that things are being done too slowly, even when instructions are followed correctly. At times, he literally gives players incorrect passcodes such that they’re forced to fail. At one point, the narrator pleads for the ringing phone to be picked up, while the game only allows it to be hung up. Then he gets mad. (Still a lovely game though, definitely play it, for real.)
This imposed failure — as frustrating as it is — is essential to the game’s rhetoric because it makes the player feel the breakdown of control rather than simply being told about it. Essentially, they rage bait us.
In contrast to this meta-game structure, Papers, Please turns outwards, commenting on larger, real-world themes. In Papers, Please, imposed failure emphasizes the rigidity of an authoritarian system. Players act as immigration officers, earning money by correctly accepting or rejecting applicants. Any mistakes — whether intentional or accidental — result in fines, but players also earn money per person processed, incentivizing speed over deliberation. In my case, I went broke almost immediately. My son got sick, my wife cold — I couldn’t get through candidates fast enough, let alone make any purposeful “mistakes” based on moral judgement. I could barely pay the rent. In the end, I lost my job and my whole family died — I failed. Although Papers, Please does not have necessarily fully imposed failure, the game’s structure — with such a small salary and such large expenses — makes sustained success extremely difficult. Under these conditions, “success” becomes virtually impossible, at least the first time around — especially when players act according to moral choices that incur citations. This helps to reveal the limits of moral agency within such authoritarian settings. Unlike Dr. Langeskov, where failure emerges from a breakdown of control, Papers, Please produces failure through an excess of control — rules so fixed and conditions so constrained that no outcome remains fully stable or “correct.”
In both cases, imposed failure creates a distinctive experience. It creates blame, assigning responsibility to players — even though the outcomes cannot truly be changed. In principle, imposed success could function in a similar way — systems could guarantee positive outcomes regardless of input. However, success resolves cleanly. It lacks the same force because it lacks that lingering weight that is harder to dismiss — a sharper frustration, a more persistent kind of pathos. To put it simply, it’s a lot nicer to be credited for the sunny weather than blamed for the cloudy skies.
2. Chosen Failure
In contrast to imposed failure, some games derive meaning not by limiting player agency but by making agency flexible enough that success is put in the hands of the players. In these cases, failure is no longer simply something that happens to the player, but something the player can help define.
This concept isn’t just limited to games — it’s present in books, movies, and real life. It’s an odd example, but it reminds me a bit of Simon Biles in the 2021 Olympics, withdrawing from the competition in order to prioritize her mental health. In that moment, Biles redefined her idea of “success” and “failure.” In that moment, Biles effectively redefined what “success” and “failure” meant. “Failure” was no longer losing or not competing; instead, it was continuing to perform under conditions that endangered her mental and physical well-being. By stepping away, she reframed withdrawal itself as an assertion of control rather than a loss, using the decision to clarify what she valued most.
In games, chosen failure creates a shift from a fixed outcome to a site of interpretation, where what counts as “losing” depends on how the player chooses to prioritize competing goals within the system. In other words, failure can function as a powerful rhetorical device not only by constraining action, but by exposing the values embedded in those choices, encouraging players to reflect on the games’ claims about sacrifice, resistance, and acceptance.
For me, Bastion is a prime example of chosen failure. The game follows a player’s journey in restoring the colonizing powers of a land. Throughout the game, players progress through levels and simultaneously learn about the history of colonization of the Ura people — who were oppressed and marginalized, often through the very same systems the player is now helping to rebuild. Sound familiar?
At the end of the game, players are able to choose “Restoration”—the proposed goal throughout the entire game—or “Evacuation,” which offers players (and their new in-game friends) the chance to leave the land behind. By choosing evacuation, players move forward with remembrance and a sense of closure, while avoiding the repetition of past violence. In this way, Bastion presents failure as a choice, and, in doing so, asks the players to reflect on their values. More broadly, the game carries a cautionary stance toward colonial nostalgia and its romanticization. In that final moment of decision, players are confronted with that critique directly.
A similar dynamic appears in Papers, Please. While eventual failure is nearly inevitable, failure can also be deliberately chosen in smaller, more contained rounds (“days”). When players take on the role of an immigration officer, they must balance strict state regulations with the immediate needs of their family, who depend on their wages for survival. (Remember? My son got sick, my wife got cold, life was really hard.) While the game’s dynamics beg players to simply follow rules, we also get tempted by intense moral dilemmas: mothers who lack a passport but want to visit their son, pimps who somehow have all the necessary documents to enter, etc. However, choosing purely by morals — letting in that mother, rejecting that pimp — often results in penalties that reduce the player’s income, threatening their family’s well-being. In this way, Papers, Please frames failure as an ethical decision: the player may knowingly accept economic loss in order to uphold personal values (which, I will admit, is much easier to do in a game than in real life). Still, they must continually renegotiate our definitions of success under pressure. This mechanic reinforces the game’s critique of bureaucratic systems by forcing players to experience how moral choices are systematically punished. Players must confront the tension between survival and integrity, mirroring the game’s broader political argument.
Chosen failure shifts the burden of meaning-making onto the player, asking them to define their own version of success in a given system. Failure becomes an action of intention. In this sense, the player is no longer simply reacting to a system, but actively interpreting it.
3. Temporal and Repetitional Failure
In addition to imposed and chosen forms of failure, games can also construct meaning through failure that unfolds over time — repeated failure. In these cases, failure is not a single moment of breakdown or a deliberate player choice, but something that accumulates through sustained pressure, pacing, or delay. Rather than redefining control, success, or agency at a single point, these games shape the players’ experience over time itself.
In Papers, Please (it’s just such a good example I actually can’t stop talking about it), failure (although often imposed) also appears as gradual escalation. As aforementioned, each repeated “day” may include many instances of failure. The rules of the border checkpoint become increasingly complex, while external pressures — political instability, new regulations, financial strain — pile up faster than players can handle, creating a (very intense, at least in my case) sense of frustration and exhaustion. The experience of being slowly overwhelmed helps to support the central message, building, over time, a slow sense of the loss of agency. By supporting the inevitable imposed failure with small, temporal instances, Papers, Please appeals to pathos in a slow, sustained way, monopolizing the player’s entire experience.
A similar — but more subtle — version of this temporal structure appears in games like A Short Hike. Although not typically framed around failure, A Short Hike actually uses failure as a method to resist direct optimization. While reaching the summit is technically the goal, the game repeatedly disrupts this progress. Firstly, the journey to the peak necessitates at least seven “golden feathers,” which players can buy or earn through exploration (to find treasure), helping neighbors, or even fishing (and subsequently selling those fish). Furthermore, the terrain is unmapped. It’s easy (VERY EASY) to get lost — and it’s purposefully built this way. By forcing players to repeatedly “fail” at navigating and reaching the summit, the game slows players, supporting one of its primary messages: meaning is not located in efficient progress toward a goal, but in the act of exploration itself.
Finally, Bokura: Planet also makes great use of repeated failure. Throughout the game, two players progress through a series of “levels,” where — more often than not — they perceive different versions of the environment. As such, to “solve” the levels, players must communicate, describing what they see and interpreting their partner’s descriptions. However, inevitably, because players are acting on incomplete information, they often fail, necessitating them to restart the level and come up with improved descriptions, instructions, or strategies. These failures recur, especially as the game introduces new, unfamiliar elements.
In this way, Bokura: Planet encourages players to reflect on the limits of understanding across minds — one of its central themes as it explores subjectivity and experience (and aliens!). Throughout the game, even successful progress comes from an approximation; cooperation can reduce — but never fully eliminate — the gap between perspectives. Through its structure, repeated failure becomes a way of underlining the inherently private and exclusive nature of subjective experience.
Whether through escalation, enforced slowness, or prolonged difficulty, these games use sustained failure as a medium for shaping meaning over time. Failure becomes something that is not just encountered, but endured, shaping the overall experience and received message.
Why Not Success?
Across imposed, chosen, and temporal forms, failure produces meaning through participation — and, more uniquely — through negative experience. In imposed failure, meaning emerges from the tension between perceived control and true lack of agency. In chosen failure, meaning arises when players are given the freedom to redefine success itself, encouraging them to truly reflect on the game. In temporal or repetitive failure, meaning accumulates over time, as players are shaped by pacing, escalation, and sustained difficulty.
As mentioned earlier, what distinguishes failure from other kinds of experience, however, is its resistance to resolution.
Seriously, failure hits different.
On the one hand, success tends to collapse interpretation: it confirms the system, affirms the player’s actions and interpretations, and provides a clean endpoint that can be easily accepted and moved past. I mean, I don’t look over a test I got 100% on.
Failure, by contrast, lingers. It introduces friction, discomfort, and ambiguity — conditions that demand interpretation and reflection rather than closure. Because it cannot be neatly resolved, failure compels players to grapple with the system itself, questioning its values, constraints, and assumptions. In this way, failure is uniquely necessary.
Furthermore, failure has a unique effect on identity. The human in us all hates losing — often even more than we love winning. We take it hard. Real hard. We replay it in our heads. One mistake becomes a flaw. One failure becomes a story we tell ourselves about who we are. Failure rarely remains an isolated event; it has a way of becoming part of a larger story about who we are.
In this way, across imposed, chosen, and temporal forms, failure does not simply shape interpretation of the game—it shapes a player’s sense of self within it. In doing so, it exposes tendencies that might otherwise remain abstract: impatience, risk-aversion, empathy, stubbornness, or a willingness to adapt. For example, in Papers, Please, players may begin by attempting to maintain a sense of morality, only to find themselves gradually becoming complicit under pressure. This shift emerges through repeated encounters with failure—missed payments, sick family members, rejected applicants—but ultimately functions as a mirror. The game does not simply warn players about the dangers of complicity; it reveals how easily ordinary people can become complicit themselves. As a result, the meaning produced through failure is not only rhetorical or systemic, but personal — it allows players to see themselves differently through the act of play.
Real-World Failure
As we all know, however, life is hard. Really hard.
Real-world failure is often final. There are no do-overs — no “retry buttons” — as much as some of us wish there were.
In games, however, failure is contained within a system designed to be revisited: it can be repeated, analyzed, and re-attempted. A player can restart a level, reload a save, or try a different approach. Failure may carry consequences, but those consequences are almost always reversible.
This containment is precisely what makes failure in games rhetorically powerful. Because failure is somewhat “impermanent”, players are emboldened to engage with it more directly, without fear. Games grant us the ability to stay with failure long enough to extract meaning from it — to examine it rather than run away. In a world that can feel so scary — a world where every action can feel heavy and permanent — games offer controlled environments in which the feeling of consequence is safe to be explored.
