In class, we briefly discussed the ways video games affected gamers through their developmental phase and thus on into adulthood. On one hand, failure may make gamers content with not succeeding, or used to replay mechanics when confronted with obstacles, but on the other hand, perhaps they desensitize us to the consequences (and fear?) of failure.
This week, my girlfriend (who has played a total of like two video games ever) ended up playing QWOP with me, and so I started thinking a lot more about this topic. Interestingly enough, she actually ended up spending a significantly longer amount of time on the game than I did. While I played a few rounds and watched some Youtube videos, she was determined to figure the game out and reach the end and ended up playing for ~30 minutes or so.
So why did this happen? Psychologists claim that a lack of exposure to stress leads to a diminished capacity to handle stressors in the future. In a similar way, I thought that perhaps a lack of exposure to failure in video games resulted in my girlfriend’s greater desire to beat the game (compared to me) – perhaps she wasn’t at used to failing in video games and thus couldn’t accept failure as easily. I thought that QWOP, while fun, didn’t propose the challenge that I wanted to take on, and that there were many more interesting (and harder) video games that I could be playing.
Interestingly enough, in psychology there is also a distinction between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ when it comes to addiction. The incentive-sensitization model of addiction explains that as time goes on, while ‘wanting’ increases rather linearly (or at least much more drastically), ‘liking’ on the other hand remains relatively stable, if not decreases. Thus, we can apply a similar model to video games – failure increases gamers’ ‘wanting’ to play the game, but not necessarily their ‘liking’. And thus, perhaps after a childhood of exposure to this addictive cycle, I’m more capable of cutting off the ‘wanting’ mechanic than my girlfriend (and thus this is independent of my ‘liking’ of games).
Have you ever played a game, failed miserably at it, gotten annoyed, and instead of accepting the failure, refused to stop playing, getting more and more frustrated until you either win or throw the game out a window? You’re right in that here “wanting” and “liking” the game are completely separate. However, “wanting” completely overwhelms “liking” until it becomes “needing” to win the game. Stress at an early age helps you cope with stress later in life as long as the childhood stress wasn’t too overwhelming to begin with, and lets you figure out ways to cope. Relatedly, I’m not sure if it’s exposure to failure that let you stop playing the game, but rather how you cope with failure,…
You bring up a very interesting point and one that I had actually not thought of before. It never occurred to me how the perception of failure in video games may change depending on the individual's exposure to said failures. For this class, I played QWOP for maybe 3 minutes before I was over it and moved on. I then thought to myself, why was that so popular? Then I looked back to when I first played QWOP years ago and remembered how I would spend so much time just sitting in front of the screen trying to get this character to run properly, continuously trying to beat my own high score. This difference in my "want" to play and…
I think you are right about the possibility for people who do not play a lot of games to get fixated on beating certain simplistic games like QWOP. I remember the first time I discovered this game back in middle school, I wanted so badly to figure out how to do well that I spent a whole afternoon playing the game. I eventually came up with some sort of strategy to move (though I never made it that far.) When I played it for class, after all of the games we played this quarter, I found myself far less incentivized to continue to play this game that at one point captured my attention for hours. I believe much of this…
I too find this argument to be rather compelling, and rather than critique any aspect of it, I simply want to explore a further case. For as video games become more advanced, lifelike, difficult, and engaging, I wonder if there will ever come a day when failure in games translates to real world implications. Not necessarily to the extent where Enders Game made a video game simulation for real war preparation, but already you hear stories of restaurants that give discounts if you are a certain rank in League of Legends, or have a certain level in Pokemon Go. While these are strictly positive, I can imagine a world where people are judged for their failures as well in games.…
This argument is rather solid, and I think it comes from a base of how videogames developed over time. Back when QWOP was first becoming popular, beating the game gave people a sort of merit, proving they were up to the challenge. Now, however, fewer people care about QWOP, as games have gotten far more advanced. For someone that doesn't game, the simplistic nature of QWOP can easily be seen as great and beatable. However, for more veteran gamers, this game seems too simplistic without reward of completion, now that merit is out of the picture.