Runs

Twelve weeks of losing, on purpose: what happens in each run, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.

A course about failure gets to look like one. Below is the whole semester as a run: twelve nodes, each a week of runs, tagged by what kind of week it is. Opening one marks it cleared.

  1. Week 1

    Why Failure Feels Bad (and Why We Keep Playing)

    Theory

    The opening run — Juul's paradox of failure, and the question the whole semester keeps circling back to

  2. Week 2

    The Taxonomy of Losing

    Theory

    Sorting failure into a real hierarchy — time, progress, resource, and death — and testing it against games nobody in the room can agree on

  3. Week 3

    Lives, Continues, and the Arcade Economy

    Case study

    Where "three lives" came from, and what happens to difficulty design once losing stops costing quarters

  4. Week 4

    Checkpoints and the Architecture of Mercy

    Case study

    Punishing versus generous save design, tried live — same hazard, two respawn policies, very different feeling

  5. Week 5

    Permadeath and the Weight of Consequence

    Case study

    Roguelikes, consequence that persists, and why some players want the respawn taken away entirely

  6. Week 6

    Death as Narrative Engine

    Case study

    Hades and the games that stopped treating failure as an interruption to the story and started making it the story

  7. Week 7

    Difficulty as Communication

    Theory

    Flow theory against "resilient flow" — what a Soulslike is actually telling you when it kills you

  8. Week 8

    The Ethics of Assistance

    Case study

    Celeste's Assist Mode, argued properly — accessibility, difficulty, and who gets to decide what counts as "really" beating a game

  9. Week 9

    Speedrunning and the Death That Isn't

    Case study

    Where failure stops being a setback and becomes a data point — resets, personal bests, and grief nobody feels

  10. Week 10

    Losing Together

    Case study

    Multiplayer tilt, griefing, and why blame gets distributed so unevenly after a shared loss

  11. Week 11

    Comedy, Rage, and the Aesthetics of Failure

    Case study

    Getting Over It, rage games, and streamer culture — failure designed to be funny to watch even when it isn't fun to do

  12. Week 12

    Feel — Juice, Feedback, and Designing the Moment of Loss

    Capstone

    The capstone run — the same failure event, felt two different ways, and the final project critique

Every week of runs the way a run through the course looks from the outside — all twelve already have content, so a grey node just means you haven't opened that week yet. Nodes you have opened stay marked as cleared, and the next one lights up as "Continue here".