Learn to Love Failure Through Video Games

Play to Fail

One important benefit of playing video games is learning to strengthen your relationship with failure.

If you fail or die in a game, you can just start over from your last save game or checkpoint. Or depending on the game you’ll just respawn for another go. Real life isn’t so forgiving.

In a video game, you make a decision, take an action, and see what happens. You can usually see the result of your decisions shortly after making them. You try a different approach the next go around and judge the result and so on. Your brain is always working, testing, adapting, and analyzing.

Relationship With Failure

Being allowed to fail in a video game encourages you to take risks and experiment with different solutions to a problem. Failure becomes something that you expect and not something to be avoided. You learn to welcome failure because you can always try again until you get it right.

This behavior and aspect of video games has translated into how I perceive and relate to failure in real life.

This is also something that should be practiced in our real world of education. The freedom to fail without consequences or punishment is essential for effective learning.

The only consequence of failure should be that we are able to learn something from it.

Transferring These Lessons to the Real World

But yet, we are still programmed to fear failure and avoid it at all costs. Possibilities and creative solutions are never realized because of the limitations we place on learning and the punitive measures taken when one “fails” at meeting pre-conceived and sometimes arbitrary notions of success.

Play some games. Embrace the cycle of fail, adjust, and learn. Repeat this process until a success is achieved, then continue on to the next cycle of learning.