Week 11: Comedy, Rage, and the Aesthetics of Failure

Getting Over It, rage games, and the gap between how failure feels to the player and how it plays to an audience

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Bennett Foddy has said plainly that Getting Over It was built to be unpleasant. It found an enormous audience anyway, because the unpleasantness is hilarious to watch even when it is miserable to endure. Streaming turned that gap between player experience and audience experience into its own economy.

Outline#

• what a rage game optimizes for, if not the player’s enjoyment
• the player/audience split, and why some fail states are designed for the second party
• what a designer owes an audience that a walkthrough will eventually turn their game’s failure into