Research Statement

Research Questions

Video games are a contradictory medium. Players often experience failure while playing a game, sometimes repeatedly. We do not usually enjoy failure. And yet, players clearly take great pleasure in the process of play. This practice research begins with the deceptively simple question: Why?

Context

There is a strong literature around failure in video games. Juul (2013) points out the paradox of video games: We often fail while playing, and we usually avoid failure, yet we specifically seek out games. He suggests argues that what games do is allow us to truly feel the negative experience of failure but also the hope that success and self-transformation is possible. Paul (2018, p. 2) similarly argues that “videogame design is predicated on an extreme focus on rewarding skill and effort,” instilling the ideology of meritocracy into both game texts and game culture. Both of these arguments suggest that failure in gameplay is enjoyable only insofar as it is eventually overcome by “beating” the game, each successive failure attesting to the game’s difficulty and thereby enhancing the ultimate joy of victory in a supreme demonstration of skill. Despite loving games, Paul urges game designers to design differently, as such games can ultimately reinforce damaging cultural narratives that erase structural inequality and bolster a toxic gamer culture.

On the other hand, Ruberg (2017, p.198) argues that “failure in video games can be pleasurable and powerful—a spectacular, masochistic mode of resistance that disassembles normative expectations in and out of the game world.” They explicitly draw on queer theorist Halberstam’s (2011) argument that people may sometimes want to fail as a way to explore being in the world differently or to protest society’s unjust metrics for success. Anable (2018, p. 103) also sees failure as more than simply painful or something to be overcome. She draws on art that takes video games as its medium to argue that games can help us envision our present society differently, as one in which failure is nothing to be ashamed of.

My piece contributes to this conversation by digging into the question of how to understand the affects of failure. Affect is the intense feelings and responses beneath, behind, or aside from our active logical cognition. (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) Further, I build on the literature’s suggestion that repetition is a crucial part of failure’s affect by documenting (only some!) of my many, many, many failures with both footage from the game and from a camera trained on my face. This approach of combining footage of myself playing the game along with captured footage from the game itself recalls the emerging media form of video game live-streaming. “Streamers” often broadcast themselves playing a game through a platform like Twitch, interacting more or less vigorously with a live audience. Streams can be broadly organized into three styles: elite demonstrations of skill, casual hanging out, and educational; these content styles have a stronger impact on viewer experience than does the genre or specific title being played. (Sjöblom et al, 2017) This suggests the centrality of failure in how we experience games, as these different stream types all relate differently to failure. Elite players, such as esports athletes, strive to avoid failure and display their merit; casual streamers will often seek to fail in amusing ways to entertain their audience; educational streamers help viewers learn how to avoid failure.

Methods

I use both autoethnographic filmmaking and textual analysis to deconstruct the playing experience, focusing particularly on failure and emotion. The autoethnographic method of pointing the camera at myself to document the play experience, and my responses thereto, puts my embodied affect and emotion literally front and center. I don’t seek to be representative of an “average game player”—as if such a being even exists. Rather, I provide my singular experience as a text for deconstruction. This autoethnographic mode uniquely highlights emotion and affect as well as the embodied experience of engaging with media. (Bødker and Chamberlain, 2016; Gale, 2020) Affect is key to the question of what failure in games means because the level of meaning we are interested in, ideological, is also divorced from our rational, logical brains (which might, for instance, suggest that we stop doing something we continue to fail at). It is a queer phenomenology that centers one (white) woman’s experience, through my visible body as the player.

I simultaneously recorded my gameplay from the screen itself, using a capture card, and myself as I played, using external cameras. This is visually similar to streaming, however instead of playing live, I then edited together the camera and gameplay-recorded footage along with quotations from critical texts. This mode allows for more time for reflection than broadcasting live does, and it also facilitates my having a conversation with the text itself, rather than with a live audience.

For the focus text, I chose a mainstream game: Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo, 2017) one of Nintendo’s flagship Mario titles. This situates my practice within general player experiences but also allowed me to experience failure by playing a very specific (and optional, in terms of game progression) stage that is renowned for its difficulty. Mario might seem a odd choice for this experiment in a world where games like Dark Souls (From Software, 2011) advertise themselves to older players as nigh-unwinnable death machines, but the historical roots of such gameplay are in Nintendo. The original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) library largely consisted of platformer-genre games that required extremely precise timing and reflexes to beat, providing gameplay hours and a sense of value through a style of difficulty like that still seen in the chosen stage of Super Mario Odyssey. This phenomenon of tricky jumps that almost demand repeated playthrough to master has led to the popular media trope dubbed “Nintendo Hard” (TV Tropes, 2024).

 This particular Mario title focused heavily on Mario’s attire, including a version of Princess Peach’s highly feminine wedding gown, veil, and jewelry that the mustachioed plumber could wear. Affect theory owes a large debt to queer theory. My choice to play through this difficult stage in the wedding dress outfit acknowledges this connection and implicitly references prominent queer theorists of failure and affect, such as Halberstam (2011) and Edelman (2004). Mario is similar to a drag queen but, importantly, not one who “succeeds” at the illusion of femininity—his mustache remains prominently on display even in the highly feminine bridal outfit.

I also edited several segments using textual analysis methods drawn from the burgeoning practice of videographic criticism within media studies. This practice highlights the unique insights that can come from working directly with the material under study, such as film sequences or, in this case, gameplay footage. (Grant, 2014, 2016) . Working with the footage in an editing program allowed me to realize things about it—for instance, that the game is itself designed to give players room to react emotionally to their failures. It plays animations and music for a full seven and a half seconds after a fatal hit, giving the player time to process and react rather than throwing them straight back into the action. I drew particularly on the forms of videographic epigraph, where textual quotations interact with the media under study, and multiscreen composition, in which multiple sources “talk” to each other to create sequences like the slow reveal of Halberstam’s point about Freudian pleasure in repetition. (Keathley, Mittell and Grant, 2019) The combination of autoethnography and textual analysis is particularly appropriate for a study of affect and failure in video games, as it brings the embodied nature of affect and failure into a visual and auditory conversation with the high theory of affect studies.

Outcomes and Impact

This project argues that even “ordinary” play of mainstream video games has something queer about it—particularly when it’s difficult. This does not mean queer in a representational sense but in an aesthetic and phenomenological one. As I repeatedly fail again and again, what we see is neither simply pleasure nor simply pain; it is a wide spectrum of emotions, each intense enough to register clearly in my face and body language. Some of my failures are expected, some surprising; some frustrating, some hilarious. Like Halberstam and Ruberg (2017), I feel that masochistic pleasure is central to how repeated failure in play evokes affect. It suggests a connection between BDSM play and mainstream video game play; both seek to create affect in the consenting player by taking them through a carefully constructed experience that pushes the limits they might adhere to in everyday life.

My piece could be seen as in conversation with Ariel Avissar’s (2024) video work “’This Is Not What I Normally Do’ An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities” where (among other things) he documents his re-creation of the game The Incredible Machine with film clips. We both fail again and again at our chosen endeavor, evoking frustration but also highlighting how “these activities, for all the time and effort they demand, the failures and dead-ends they may lead to, can be as fun as they are frustrating, as pleasurable as they are painful” (Avissar, 23). Constraints—be they given by Mario level designers or taken on voluntarily by the video essayist—are essential to this process, perhaps echoing the importance of restraints in BDSM play.This work has also influenced my continued practice in video game studies, particularly in the newer medium of live-streaming. I created a public-facing channel on the live-streaming platform Twitch and a fully-equipped on-campus lab from which to stream. When I stream, I strive to incorporate relevant academic work into my conversations with viewers and occasional monologues to camera, much as I did through editing in this video. This requires significant pre-stream preparation, however, and is at its best when the audience is similarly informed—making this a particularly useful practice for streaming in relation to teaching but possibly not streaming in general.

Bibliography

Anable, A. (2018) Playing with feelings: video games and affect. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Avissar, A. (forthcoming 2024) “’This Is Not What I Normally Do’: An Insignificant Step in the Downfall of the Humanities,” Academic Quarter.Bødker, M. and Chamberlain, A. (2016) ‘Affect Theory and Autoethnography in Ordinary Information Systems’, in Twenty-Fourth European Conference on Information Systems. ECIS, Istanbul, Turkey, pp. 2–17. Available at: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/795340.

Edelman, L. (2004) No future: queer theory and the death drive. Durham: Duke University Press (Series Q).

Gale, K. (2020) ‘The Anthropocene, Affect, and Autoethnography?’, Journal of Autoethnography, 1(3), pp. 304–308. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2020.1.3.304.

Grant, C. (2014) ‘The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thiking’, Aniki : Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento, 1(1), pp. 49–62. Available at: https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v1n1.59.

Grant, C. (2016) ‘The audiovisual essay as performative research’, NECSUS [Preprint]. Available at: https://necsus-ejms.org/the-audiovisual-essay-as-performative-research/.

Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G.J. (eds) (2010) The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Halberstam, J. (2011) The queer art of failure. Durham: Duke University Press.Juul, J. (2013) The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press.

Keathley, C., Mittell, J. and Grant, C. (2019) The videographic essay: criticism in sound & image. Second revised and expanded edition. Montreal: Caboose (Kino-agora, 9).

Paul, C.A. (2018) The toxic meritocracy of video games: why gaming culture is the worst. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ruberg, B. (2017) ‘Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games’, Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ruberg, B. (2017) ‘The Arts of Failure: Jack Halberstam in Conversation with Jesper Juul’, Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sjöblom, M., Törhönen, M., Hamari, J., and Macey, J. (2017) ‘Content structure is king: An empirical study on gratifications, game genres and content type on Twitch’ Computers in Human Behavior, 73, pp. 161-171. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.036.

Trammel, A. (2023) Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology. Boston: MIT Press.

TV Tropes. (June 1, 2024) “Nintendo Hard.” Wiki.

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Invite resubmission with major revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

Close’s submitted work ‘Play, Failure, Affect, Sadomasochism—and Mario Odyssey’ and research statement asks why game players enjoy playing when failure is an inevitable part of the process. The statement is well written the theoretical context provided by the author is sound, building in large on the contrasting conclusion of Paul and Anable on failure in gaming. Close claims to bring practice to the theories and bring evidence for or against their theories. However, in its current form, the statement fails to fully expand on the contribution and draw conclusions from its practice research approach.

The methodological approach of autoethnographic filmmaking and textual analysis to deconstruct the player’s experience have merit and is well executed. The film simultaneously records the author face and reactions while playing and capturing on-screen the gameplay, Mario Odyssey, itself. The film deconstructs the experience by highlighting specific emotional responses, such fear, happiness, and disgust.

As a standalone screenwork it shares similarities with gamer content typically found on platforms like YouTube, Discord and Twitch and the statement could do with commenting on this type of content in relation to the submitted work. Furthermore, the author could expand on how the submitted screenwork relates to or complements the public facing Twitch channel.

My recommendation is to shorten the ‘Research Question’ section to the research questions only and edit down the ‘Outcomes and Impact’ section, to leave room to further expand on the practice research and articulate the contribution it makes. 

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

Presenting an auto-ethnographic case study of the affective dimensions of failure in gameplay, this work seeks to intervene into the recent theorisations of failure in videogame studies and in queer theory. In both Juul’s (2013) paradox of failure in gaming, and Christopher A. Paul’s (2018) assessment of gaming’s toxic meritocracy, ‘the appeal of failure remains inextricably linked to eventual success’ (Ruberg 2017: 202). Close’s video work seems initially to enact this framing of failure: at one point when Close masters a difficult level, she throws her hands up and shouts ‘Fuck yes!’ in jubilation. Yet just as queer theorists such as Jack Halberstam have argued that failure can bring its own pleasures and value, Close uses form to argue for the pleasures of gameplay’s cyclical failure. At key moments, multiply-split-screen presentation cumulatively expresses the audiovisual textural richness of the avatar’s movement through the gameworld, and cumulatively documents the various forms of physiological arousal that movement elicits. Indeed, the key multi-screen shot of multiple Mario deaths is impossible to take in in its entirety, an invitation to the viewer to re-watch just as the player re-plays/re-fails. Formally Close’s piece has greatest sympathy with Aubrey Anable’s (2018) emphasis on failure as an affectively rich pleasure, one that can permit gamers to process or escape from real world failures in an unforgivingly neoliberal, capitalist era. Where Anable focuses primarily on independent, experimental and casual games, Close’s contribution is to bring this approach to bear on mainstream gaming, and to begin to do so through an auto-ethnographic approach that focuses on the embodied nature of gaming.

The work’s stated ambition to provide evidence for or against Paul and Anable’s theories places them in a rather reductive binary relation and does a disservice to the nuances of the piece itself. In addition, the stated aim to clarify ‘the purpose that failure serves in gameplay and the experience of players [which] will help us understand the larger social, political, and cultural consequences of video games’ spread as a medium’ reads as over-ambitious. The video piece in its current form does not clarify the purpose of failure in any definitive sense, nor address video games’ spreadability or its consequences. I would advise rewriting the written statement somewhat to reframe and clarify the video piece’s purpose, and use the ‘Outcomes’ section to say more about what the practice has achieved in terms of your own thinking vis a vis the extant literature.

The video piece could be improved by making elements of the audiovisual argument more explicit. The multi-screen presentation of Mario deaths with Halberstam’s words is striking but could consideration be given to assisting eye movement across the screen by, say, ordering the deaths in a circular movement? The concept of ‘Nintendo Hard’ would benefit from some explication within the work, as it will not be legible for those unfamiliar with this gaming categorisation (important to the work’s premise).

Works cited by reviewer in addition:

Bonnie Ruberg (2017), ‘Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games’, in Jennifer Malkowski and TreeAndrea M. Russworm, Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 197-211.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.