Failure Should Be a Stepping Stone

I really enjoy playing video games (although these days I’m generally more interested in game design than game play). I enjoy the challenge of progressing through a game and getting to see my progress and my skills noticeably improve. I enjoy the sense of accomplishment from completing levels, especially those I’ve struggled with. And while I’ve had numerous moments (including today) where I’ve wanted to chuck my controller / laptop / Nintendo DS / etc out a window, inevitably, after I cool down I’ll return and try the level again.

It’s that last step that has always intrigued me about games. Why is it, or what is it about them, that brings us back time and time again? Even those who are “sore losers” usually come around and will want to play the game again.

When I was in grad school I took an Educational Psychology course. One of the papers I read was by James Paul Gee and was focused on how video games treat failure. I can’t remember what specific paper it was of his anymore (he’s written numerous papers and books on the topic), but it was one of those papers that has stuck with me in all the years since.

The way we experience failure in video games is so different than how we normally encounter it in life. This is a topic I’ve continually thought about over the years since I read that first paper. And I think it really boils down to one key component: Failure in games is presented as a stepping stone to success.

What do I mean by that? When you fail in a game, it’s not the end. Even when you’ve run out of lives and so you get the actual “game over” screen, it’s still not the end. You can start over. More than that, you are encouraged to start over or try again.

Failure in a game is a reset point. It’s a signal that the solution you tried isn’t quite right and that you need to tweak it. And it is almost always accompanied with very clear knowledge as to why you failed (you ran into a bad guy, fell down a hole, got a question wrong, etc). While games rarely tell you how to solve a level or what the right answer is when you fail, what they do give you, is a clue or a hint towards the solution. Information that you can use on your next attempt in order to have a better chance at success.

Some games actually use failure as part of the main game mechanic and it’s also common to see failure used as a way to teach you how to play. It’s never presented that way, of course. Instead, you start a new game and you’re plopped into the first level. You tentatively move your character forward and eventually you walk into something, say a plant, and die. You start over, do the same thing and die again. The third time you play, when you see the plant you remember “that killed me last time” and this time you jump over it. You continue forward until you encounter something else new, and again die. Lather, rinse, repeat, and over time you master each new game mechanic. In some games, they have you failing so often, the process becomes almost comedic (I highly recommend VVVVVV — also available on iOS — as an example of this).

This process, or the cycle of fail, learn, try again, is so different from the way we generally approach failure in schools. In schools, failure often only occurs at the end of the process. You write the final test and fail. You hand in your essay and fail. And once you’ve failed, there is rarely a way to learn from it, improve, and to try again, as the class is moving forward onto the next unit.

Sure, you can hopefully learn from your failure and try to do better on the next task, but unlike the classmate who aced the previous one, you’re starting with an extra obstacle — not only do you need to learn the new content, but you still need to master the old. This would be like a game saying “sure, you failed, but here’s the next (harder) level anyway.” Games don’t do that, because they know that skills take time to develop and that you improve them by mastering each step along the way, not by being pushed into the next level before you’re ready.

Failure in schools would be a lot more meaningful (and a lot less stressful) if it was seen as a stepping stone towards mastery. You failed the unit test? Okay, let’s figure out what you don’t know and work on obtaining that knowledge and then take the test again. And let’s do that repeatedly until you’ve actually mastered the content, and then we’ll move on.

I get that saying that is much easier than actually implementing it in a classroom. There’s a lot of other factors at work (starting with the fact that you’ve got 20 plus students at all different skill levels). But this is a place where EdTech has the potential to really shine, by allowing students to move at their own pace and to require mastery along the way.

That’s not to say that EdTech is perfect or the be all / end all solution here. All too often when I look at gamified EdTech products I notice that they instead swing the opposite way and try their hardest to avoid failure at all costs. Too many EdTech games would rather give kids endless opportunities to answer a question then to tell the kid that they’re wrong and have them start over. In these apps, kids can complete the entire game and have never learned a single thing.

I have a lot of other thoughts around failure, including how to tell if an app is using failure but still faking the mastery component (yeah, it happens), but I’ll leave those for a future blog post and instead leave you with a challenge. The next time you try out a new app take a look to see how it addresses failure. Or if you are designing an assignment for your classroom, take a step back and think about how you can build failure right into the process, such that the process of completing it builds in the requirement of mastery.