Digital Natives: Teens, Tweens, & Digital Media: Not Just Playing Games: The Benefits of Failure and the Power of a Supportive Community

Randall Fujimoto recently delivered an insightful commencement address about games and failure. But as a recent Kickstarter campaign suggests, supportive environments in which gamers can fail safely are not the default for girls and women.

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Filed by Christine Cupaiuolo

Last month, Randall Fujimoto, an educational game and instructional designer, delivered a commencement address to graduates of the master’s in instructional design and technology program at California State University, Fullerton.

After starting with some statistics about the popularity of gaming, he shifted the talk to a topic that might seem ironic on a day of celebrating student accomplishments: failure. It worked perfectly.

Gamers can’t help but fail at least occasionally—and sometimes frequently, especially when they’re playing a game for the first time. But unlike school or other parts of life where failure is considered a negative, gamers know it’s a necessary part of the process. You mess up, you learn from your mistakes, you get better.

Here’s an excerpt from Fujimoto’s address:

How many of you here have played Angry Birds? Remember the very first time you tried the game? You probably sent the first bird way past the structure. Then, on your second shot, you probably fell way short. Then, finally on your third one, you probably hit the target but didn’t get all the pigs – and so you lost. You failed.

But then, a cool thing happened. The game said “You Lose” and the pigs grumbled at you, but then you got to try again. And again. And again. Until, you finally figured out how to get all those grumbling pigs. Then, you happily moved on to the next level. And then the next level. And then the next level.

And then, later on, after two hours had gone by and you suddenly realize that you were supposed to have run a couple of errands and read an article for your lit review, you find yourself happily at Angry Birds, Level 21 despite the fact that you just spent over one and a half hours failing at something over and over.

So, here’s the thing – in a game, it’s OK to fail. Games are a safe environment in which to fail, over and over, and it’s perfectly OK. Each time you fail, you keep learning a little bit more about what not to do.

In fact, there is no such thing as failure. You can think of every failure as really just a partial success. Even your complete and utter disasters are not really failures because you know exactly what not to do the next time.

Sometimes, games make failing even fun. In some action games, when you fall off the ledge and die, there’s this big, spectacular “You Lose” animation – sort of like when the Coyote misses the Road Runner and falls off the cliff in a grand cloud of smoke.

You see, by providing a safe environment where it’s perfectly OK to fail, games are rewarding perseverance and effort, and so that’s why you see yourself spending two hours playing Angry Birds – and it’s a big reason why games are so popular. Also, this safe environment where it’s OK to fail makes games a non-threatening way in which we can learn.

This simple yet powerful statement has been making waves in education. On one level, it’s upending the notion that kids should focus on traditional academic success (see: standardized tests) and not risk making and growing from mistakes. And in some corners—such as at Quest to Learn in New York City and Chicago Quest—it’s changing the very idea of how a school is structured. Game designers such as Jane McGonigal even want to steer this commitment to improvement toward solving real world problems.

While failure is a key to success and growth in gaming (and life), it only works as motivation if the player (person) is working within a supportive community, where it’s okay to make mistakes and where growth is nurtured. Fujimoto notes as much when he says, “Games also foster empathy from all the social support you get from other gamers, whether it’s in an online multiplayer game or from a sibling that’s watching you play.”

Unfortunately, women who play and learn in gaming and (and in STEM fields) often have to fight against stereotypes and skepticism that make them feel that failure is expected of them, and that any success they might achieve in traditionally male arenas and subject areas is seen as token and exceptional.

This lack of support is compounded by the representations of themselves that women see in gaming culture. To explore female character stereotypes throughout the history of the gaming industry(damsel in distress, the sexy sidekick, etc.), Anita Sarkeesian, a pop culture critic who produces video commentaries from a feminist/fangirl perspective at FeministFrequency.com, set out to produce a five-video series entitled Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.

Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign with a modest $6,000 goal. (Disclosure: I’m a supporter). When it was funded within 24 hours, she added “stretch goals,” promising more videos for more money raised. Each video would be between 10 and 20 minutes long and available online for free. Support continued to grow.

Then Sarkeesian became the target of a massive hate campaign. “Would be better if she filmed this in the kitchen” is among the mildest of misogynistic comments directed at Sarkeesian personally. A sampling of the overwhelming number of violent threats and vile comments left on YouTube has been screen captured here.

“I have been running a web series on YouTube for a few years now that both deals with questions of sexism in the media and also has ‘feminist’ in the title, so I’m certainly no stranger to some level of harassment,” Sarkeesian told Wired. “I knew that delving into videogames might provoke a bit of a misogynist backlash … [but] this level of organized and sustained harassment, vitriol, threats of violence and sexual assault in response to a project that hasn’t even been made yet is very telling.”

Indeed. But what also became telling is the level of support Sarkeesian received. By the close of the Kickstarter campaign on June 15—and following the publication of dozens of news stories and blog posts about her project and the tidal wave of hate it engendered—Sarkeesian had raised $158,922 from 6,967 backers.

Wow.

In her final update on Kickstarter, Sarkeesian wrote:

Over the past three years I’ve been dedicated to making Feminist Frequency videos whenever I could but its still essentially been a passionate side project between freelance jobs. This is such an exciting moment because my team and I can now commit full time to Feminist Frequency and to producing this collection of engaging, in depth and critical videos that will contribute to the ongoing conversation about women’s representations in video games.

What we do know for sure is that the issue of harassment both in the gaming community and on the internet in general has sadly become intertwined with this Kickstarter campaign so we’re definitely going to include a substantial additional component to this project that will directly address the epidemic of misogynist, racist and homophobic online harassment.

If we want to encourage more girls to not only play games but to design them and to pursue computer programming and other STEM fields that are still primarily the domain of men, we need to remember that girls not only need supportive communities in which to learn—and to fail—but they also need everyone involved to understand that even when we are playing games, however meaningful, these are not just games, and the environment is not, by default, a safe one.

To put it another way: We can’t use games to change the world until we change the game.