I found Ruberg’s “Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games” to be a super fascinating article, piecing together of theories of failure and queerness. Citing Juul, Ruberg posits that “we might call video games as an art form ‘the art of failure’” (202). Failure is inherent to the gaming experience, but we love games; we love the feeling of ultimately overcoming the many failures we experience during games.
What I found most poignant, however, is Juul’s claim that failure in videogames is not meaningless. Rather, “in some sense video game failure really does hurt” (202). This sentence gave me a flashback to the excruciating pain I felt as my two forefingers rapidly pressed the G and H keys during Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment. But Juul, of course, does not necessarily mean physical pain. He means that video game failure evokes feelings of “humiliation and inadequacy” (202). So, in a sense, games keep us humble.
On the contrary, Halberstam argues that queerness “leads to the association of failure with nonconformity” (203). So, in this sense, queerness is an embrace of failure.
Ruberg uses many examples of games with either inevitable failure, or games that are just plain difficult. In this discussion of failure, I started thinking back to Braid. A lot of the issues our class (and many other players) have with braid center around Jonathan Blow’s personal character and the themes of toxic masculinity Braid perpetuates. Considering this new argument comparing failure in videogames to queerness and general nonconformity, I think it might be interesting to return to a game like Braid where you literally cannot fail even if you tried. There is always a second chance. Something about this feels deeply… straight in that straightness implies normalcy, safety… certainly not an embrace of failure.