Losing and wanting one more

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

We've all lost a match and said "one more". And we've all lost a match and closed the game. It was almost never about how hard it was.

The researcher Jesper Juul devoted an entire book to this oddity: we spend our lives avoiding failure and then pay for it in the form of video games. His explanation is that a well-made defeat doesn't tell us we're useless. It tells us there's something we don't know yet, and lets us look it in the face.

That's the difference. Some defeats answer the question what just happened? and some leave it hanging. If you lose and understand exactly the moment it went wrong, your mind drifts to the next match on its own. If you lose without knowing why — because someone caught you in ten seconds with something you never saw, because you'd had worse gear from the start — you learn nothing. You walk away feeling you've wasted your time.

That's why "difficulty" is a confusing word. A hard game that explains its deaths hooks you; an easy one that kills you for no apparent reason wears you out. What keeps an afternoon going isn't winning a lot, it's losing in a way you can understand.

The proof is that short word that types itself after a defeat: again.