When we were discussing moments of failure we’ve personally experienced in video games one thing I was thinking of is how failure sort of works to amplify the emotions you feel towards the game and make your victories in the game feel that much sweeter. For me, I was thinking back to League of Legends which was mentioned during class, and my own experiences with failure in the game and how the prevalence of failure in a game seemingly makes those times when you win/succeed feel all the more emotionally heightened. For me, the best victories I’ve felt in league have been ones where I or my team have failed near the beginning but we manage to bring the game back despite an early disadvantage or those wins I get following a string of losses. In a game, like league chances are you are going to lose a lot and people who are really into the game and have sunk many hours into playing the game lose regularly it’s just part of playing a team based competitive game sometimes you lose sometimes you win. One thing I find interesting about games like league in particular is that a large part of the player base will tell you “I hate this game” when you ask them about it yet have sunk hundreds of hours into queuing ranked alone and going on 6+ game loss streaks. I’ve seen many people just keep playing after each loss even when that might be detrimental to their mental and it sometimes begs the question why keep playing when you’re failing? For me, I think this constant stream of failures sort of blurs together and each subsequent failure can start to lose meaning, but if you end up winning a game following those failures the dopamine hit you get from that win might feel more amplified after all those failures. Thus, the mentality of ending on a win after a string of losses and wanting to keep playing until a win. Another example of this is achieving a rank you never could have achieved before in past seasons or after many games. Yes, it feels good to finally achieve a goal you were working towards, but I think there should be some credit given to the failures along the way that sort of makes an achievement like that feel more satisfying. We surely wouldn’t react as strongly to wins if there did not feel like there were stakes or if it did not feel like we had to work hard for it and I think failure in video games is important in creating that emotional rollercoaster.
Failure and Heightening Emotions
