Week 1: Why Failure Feels Bad (and Why We Keep Playing)
The opening lecture — the paradox of failure, and why a whole course can be built out of the worst moment in every game
Jesper Juul’s The Art of Failure opens with a question that sounds like a joke and isn’t: why would anyone pay money to feel bad on purpose, repeatedly, for entertainment? Every other medium that makes you feel bad — a sad film, a tragic novel — does it to you. A game does it because of you. You did the thing that made you lose. That’s the paradox this course spends twelve weeks taking seriously.
Outline#
- the paradox of failure, and why it resists the obvious answers
- what “Fail States” as a course actually studies: not bad games, but the design of losing in good ones
- how the semester is shaped — theory, then history, then a run of case studies, ending on a capstone where you design a fail state yourself
- what to bring to week 1’s session
Teaching team
- Marisol Quayeconvenor