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

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

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3 May 2027

Bennett Foddy built Getting Over It to be genuinely unpleasant to play and it became one of the most-watched games of its era, because losing at it is funny to everyone except the person losing. Streamer culture has since built an entire economy on other people’s fail states.

Before the session#

Watch a short clip of someone failing spectacularly at a rage game and pay attention to what the game does at the exact moment of failure to make that clip watchable.

In the session#

We separate the player’s experience of a fail state from the audience’s, and ask what a designer owes to each — directly relevant if your final project will ever be watched, not just played.

Afterwards#

Final projects are the entire subject of week 12.