I really enjoyed our professor's analysis during class on the differences between failure and mistakes because I had never thought about those two words as distinct and separate from each other in such a way. Silly mistakes can cost you time, effort, money, and the success you possibly could have achieved. Failure is special in that it means you took the time to do something completely and thoroughly and it still turned out to be a spectacular flop. I never really agreed with the concept of failure being equated to learning opportunities because I was placing little mistakes in the same category as failures and expecting them to act the same. Mistakes are not little failures; they are mistakes, and mistakes should be avoided. Failures are opportunities to redirect and to overcome and should not be a fear that prevents action. This is not to say that mistakes and failure do not have their close ties.
When these ideas are considered in terms of games, the stakes are arguably very low no matter what video game is being played and no matter the way in which you are playing it. However, I would argue that failure in games can be just as impactful as failure in many other aspects of life. The videogame that first comes to my mind when I think of failure is the hardcore version of Minecraft in which you only have one possible life. Failure in this game has about as large of a consequence as possible when it comes to videogames and can cause the player to feel a lot of sadness and regret outside of the game. This is probably due to the fact that the player understands that their death and "wasted" time and ultimate failure of the game was caused by a mistake they made. They feel stupid for making the fatal error and they wish they could undo what they did. This is an example of how a mistake (that should still be avoided if at all possible) is able to lead to a failure that possibly prevented that person from making that same terrible mistake in the future if they so choose to give the hardcore version another shot. They can use their failure to gain further success in the future.
In the games we played this week, there were many ways in which a person can and does fail, and in some ways, can succeed. In the game QWOP, the player pushes the Q,W,O, and P buttons on the keyboard in order to move a racer along a track by controlling the racer's thighs and calves. It is a very difficult game that will almost certainly result in failure to cross the finish line for the player. However, this failure is a learning process as we know, that allows us to improve our strategy in order to complete the game. In this case, it can hardly be considered a mistake to push the incorrect buttons since we do not have the proper knowledge or experience to beat the game. The only way to really make a mistake in this game is if you have a grasp of what buttons need to be pushed at a certain time yet you still do not push them at this appropriate time. Otherwise, any failures accomplished throughout this game is simply an opportunity to try again. This is a common occurrence in videogames because we can only be expected to know what we have learned and we can only expect to learn by trying and retrying.
Another type of failure can be seen in the game "Queers in Love at the End of the World" in which the player is only able to spend 10 seconds playing the game and making choices. There are a few ways to look at failure in this game because there is both the failure to experience the entirety of the game due to the short amount of time available to read as well as to make all the choices presented to you. This can be overcome by remembering what you have previously read in the attempts of the game you made before so that you can skip reading the parts you have seen before until you have been able to read every screen available. Now the complicated part of this is that the game doesn't make it clear what failure is. It is perhaps a failure to not experience reading every page of the game, or it is possible that it is a failure to skip the attempt to read every page, or maybe the failure is playing the game more than once because it takes away from the meaning that was supposed to be gained by only playing for the last 10 seconds of the world. Due to the fact that failure in this game is so ambiguous, there is no way to make a mistake because a mistake can only be made when there was a different known solution. The failure in this game is both the learning process itself as well as the potential success that can be achieved.
The nature of failure is not as clear-cut as mistakes are in the way I'm choosing to define them. This is because failure manifests itself in any number of ways and has the ability to change a person's goals and definition of success at any given moment. Failure is not the mistakes we make, but the potential to learn from them and grow from them, and mistakes are not entirely avoidable, but people can learn to avoid them through the failure they cause, and we also maintain the incredible ability to fail without ever having made a mistake. Instead, all we did was learn what didn't work so that we aren't doomed to repeat these failures or make any more mistakes because of these discovered failures.
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