作者：Mike Langlois

对于很多人来说，玩游戏是他们生活中非常重要的一部分内容，而失败更是游戏中必不可少的一环。最近，我一直在思考自主性与失败之间的联系。不论是儿童，青少年还是成人在玩电子游戏时都会遭遇各种失败。实际上，根据Nicole Lazzaro的观点，我们在玩电子游戏的过程中有80%的时间都是在面对失败。而在我们生活中还存在哪些活动能够用于说明这种失败？

教育，至少传统模式的教育正是以一种百分制模式将学生区分为三六九等。如果你在测试中获得70%的得分，你便算通过了测试；而如果你只获得69%的分数，你就需要重新进行测试，否则你便不能获得学分。这一系统完全违背了教育家以及治疗专家所认知的学习；如此看来这只是一种试验，发现错误，纠正错误，再继续循环反复的过程。

而这也正好回答了我一直好奇的一个问题：为什么我们愿意面对电子游戏中80%的失败率，却不愿意接受“现实生活”零星的失败风险。一个答案是，上述所提到的百分比分数模式说明教育已经为我们预先设置了失败与成功的标准，将任何低于70%分数的行为都定位为失败表现。而这种失败则常常伴随着羞耻，浪费时间，徒劳以及绝望等感受。

除此之外，电子游戏中的失败还有另外一点值得我们注意的内容，也就是自主性。在2009年的一项研究中，Jesper Juul（游戏邦注：哥本哈根IT大学电子游戏博士，著名游戏研究者）发现人们更喜欢那种能够对自己的失败负责的游戏。玩家不喜欢将自己在游戏中的失败归咎为运气差，而是会思考自己的何种行动导致了这种失败。也就是他们希望由自主性引导着自己在游戏中的行动，而非运气。反之，比起被害情绪，他们更希望乐观地面对游戏中的失败。

Incoboto(from gamasutra)

我一直在iPad上玩一款名为《Incoboto》的游戏，而这款游戏总是提供给我一定的空间去思考其中的失败。玩家需要在游戏中不断为可爱版太阳神赫利俄斯积攒星星碎片。而我在游戏中也多次遭遇“受困”的局面，并且需要花费更多时间去寻找正确的解决方法。我在游戏中深刻感受到了主观的游戏体验，尽管我会遇到各种挑战，但是最终也都能够克服这些不必要的障碍。面对这种受困的情境，我便会感受到受迫害的心情，但是也因此开始形成对这种情境负责的想法。其实游戏并不“公平”，不仅太过困难，而且也存在一个“漏洞”导致球体不能“准确”着陆。

但是推动着我继续游戏的原因是游戏中华丽的图像以及有趣的游戏玩法，以及我对游戏的某种信心。好吧，我承认我也曾经作弊过，我会到游戏论坛上观看泄漏了游戏结局的预告片。这时候你可能会说，我放弃了克服游戏中不必要困难的自觉性了。并且更加重要的是，我还舍弃了自主性。这是一种奇特的平衡做法，就像我作弊并不是为了寻找解决方法，而是让我自己能够在尝试着解决问题时感到安心。但是尽管我在此使用了数字媒体技能，但是在某种意义上我仍然算放弃了自主性。

人们对于自己在电子游戏中体验到的情感与失败的反应并不相同。如果我并未意识到这一点，我便会对下述的《Incoboto》评价感到沮丧：

“这是一款结合了平台游戏与益智游戏特征的优秀游戏，并且拥有平稳的学习/难度曲线以及非常有趣的游戏体验。”

接下来我将开始比较电子游戏与教育中的失败体验。

我们国家的教育正在努力克服着本身存在的设计缺陷。儿童和青少年虽然也需要对自己的行为负责，但是他们却未拥有等价的自主性。这就创造了一种受迫害情绪。就像是，我们无视他们超过一半的准确率，而是直接宣布他们不及格；这种教育创造出一种产业化的僵性课程，而非设定一些有意义的个人目标。而即便我们为一些人设置IEP目标（游戏邦注：也就是个别化教育计划），那也是因为我们将其划分为有学习障碍之人。

我们需要想办法改变学校中的失败体验。因为依据我们的观点，电子游戏并未与现实分离开来。笛卡尔（世界著名的科学家、哲学家和数学家）的心理/身体二元论已经遭到了反驳，而且我们现在说的是关于“现实”生活中的情况。现实是，掌握了如何应对挑战与失败将会创造出一种乐观感，并从神经和情感上完善我们在今后的学习能力。如果我们认为自己能解决问题，我们便会坚持寻根究底。所以我们需要养成一种学习自主性。而关于“具有特殊需要的儿童”这一规定正是剥夺了这些儿童的自主性。

但是这是否就意味着所有人在学习或其它工作中都需要拥有相同的表现？当然不是。我的意思是我们需要扮演一名优秀监护人的角色，引导着我们的孩子好好适应学习环境，让他们更乐观地接受各种失败。实际上，每个儿童都需要属于自己的特定教育计划，如此我们才能摆脱呆板的硬式教育。

作为一名治疗学家和教育家，在过去20年间我一直致力于学校系统的研究并周旋于各种家长之间，并且不论是对于我自己还是病人来说，我都在努力做好这一点。诊断语言以及学习障碍应该是我用得最好的一种语言，有时候我也难免在无意中与家长和这种教育体系一样，将这种表现速记成“我的孩子不能___”。如果我们能够提供给学生具有更多自主性的环境，我们便能够注意到更多不同类型的成功的出现。

前天晚上我登录了Minecraft服务器——教育家和治疗学家为了儿童而创建的平台。当我进入时我看到一些儿童正在讨论着某些内容，但是过了一会后这种和睦的讨论却演变成一连串的人身攻击战。像“我讨厌你！”之类的话语充斥着整个屏幕。有些儿童快速离开了聊天室，并再次返回注销了帐号。有些年轻版主在一味地煽动冲突，也有些人在认真地寻找人们情感受打击的根源。从治疗学角度来看，他们的这种表现是因为遭遇了惨痛的失败，糟糕的社交技能，不善于表达并且太过于冲动而造成。如此看来，不让自己卷进这种情感变化中并积极协调他们，推动他们实践自主性等行为真的需要非常强大的意志。

如果他们足够成熟，便会继续闲聊着，并且在几分钟后意识到发生了什么事。但是在这里却不会出现这种成人式的美满结局，即受害方接受了道歉并得到补偿，并告诉第二方停止唆使虚假的防御行为，最后鼓励第三方开始做些事情使大家忘记矛盾。

我认为，当游戏环境中不再带有歧视失败的想法并且人们愿意坚持自主性去解决各种问题时，便有可能出现这种成人版本的美满结局。没有任何成年人强迫他们这么做，可以说他们完全是自愿的。尽管他们会犹豫着开始和停止聊天，但是他们都能够从中感受到社交情感。

这便是我为何会认为要“让失败的感觉更好”的一个原因，电子游戏必须能够创造这种体验。如果我们能够认同失败是学习与工作中一大重要组成部分，我们就不会去歧视它；如果我们不会歧视失败也就意味着我们能够进一步推动自主性和乐观心态的养成。掌握自主性并保持乐观能够帮助你成为一名更加优秀的学习者，更棒的合作者以及更加杰出的工作者。我想这是游戏领域应该加以重视的一大内容。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Failing Better

by Mike Langlois

Play is a vital part of being a person, and failure is a vital part of play.  One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the connection between autonomy and failure.  When children, adolescents and adults for that matter play video games, they fail a lot.  In fact, according to Nicole Lazzaro, 80% of the time we are playing video games we are failing.  What other activities in our daily lives can we say that about?

Education, on the other hand, at least the traditional model, grades us on a 100% model very differently.  If you get 70% of a test or a class material “correct” you get to pass it.  If you get 69% it needs to be done over again, or you don’t get any credit at all.  This system actually flies in the face of what educators and therapists know about learning, that it is a matter of trial, error, course correction, trial, error, course correction… and so on.

This in some ways answers a question I have often wondered about:  Why are we willing to be failing 80% of the time in video games, and so reluctant to risk failure in “real life” even a fraction of the time?  One answer the percentages above point to is that education often stacks the deck against us, effectively rendering any mastery of content below 70% as a failure.  This failure has attached to it, shame, sense of time wasted, futility, and hopelessness.

But there is another aspect of failing in video games that I think we need to pay attention to, and that is the role of autonomy.  In a 2009 study, Jesper Juul found that people prefer to play games where they feel responsible for failing.  The majority of those surveyed didn’t want to attribute it to bad luck, but something the did or didn’t do.  They wanted a sense of autonomy in their game play, not luck.  Conversely, they didn’t want to feel victimhood either, but rather optimism.

I have been playing a game on the iPad called Incoboto which has given me pause to reflect on fun failure.  (An aside for gamers who have also played this and Dark Souls, have you considered Incoboto as a cutified version of Dark Souls, trying to link the fire and bring light to a darkened solitary world?  Just saying..)  The game has a series of puzzles which one needs to solve in order to collect star pieces to feed to the kawaii sun Helios following your character around.  There have been a few places where I got “stuck,” and spent in my opinion too much time having to throw something exactly the right way.  This highlighted for me the subjective experience I had for the majority of gameplay, that I was being challenged but would eventually be able to overcome the unneccessary obstacle.  On those occasions I called getting stuck, I began to experience feelings of victimization and externalize responsibility.  The game was not “being fair,” it was too hard, there was a “bug” in it making the ball not land “right.”

What helped me persevere was both compelling graphics and gameplay, but also a sense of faith in the game.  Ok, sometimes I cheated too, by looking up spoilers on the game forum.  In those moments, you could say that I was giving up the voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle of the game.  But, and this is what’s important, I was also ceding my sense of autonomy.  It’s a weird balancing act, in one case I didn’t look at the cheat to find the solution as much as to get reassurance that what I was trying was the solution.  But even though I was exercising my digital literacy here, I was also giving up for the moment my sense of autonomy, and agency.

Failure, and tolerance of failure is a subject thing, which is why Lazzaro’s presentations illustrate zones, not points, of fiero, frustration, relief, and bored.  Everyone has variations in how they experience emotions, and failure in video games.  And if I didn’t keep that in mind, I might feel very disheartened when I read this review of Incoboto:

“Great mix of platformer and puzzle game, very smooth learning/difficulty curve, and quite a nice gameplay experience too”

Now I am not going to get into a discussion on norms and trends and the importance of betas, because my point here is to compare and contrast the experiences of failure in video games and education.

Education in our country is trying to overcome some serious design flaws of its own.  Children and adolescents are given tremendous responsibility for their performance without a commensurate amount of autonomy.  This creates a culture of victimhood.  Rather than noticing they got more than half of something right, we flunk them.  Rather than setting meaningful individual goals, we create industrialized curriculum.  And if we do give someone an individualized set of goals in the form of an IEP, we label them as learning disabled first to justify it!

We need to improve the quality and experience of failure in schools.  Because video games don’t occur in a separate reality from the point of view of our minds.  That mind/body split of Descartes has been debunked for ages, and yet we’re still talking about “real” life.  The reality is that mastering challenges and fun failure creates a feeling of optimism, which neurologically and emotionally improves our ability to learn in the future.  If we think we are capable of solving a problem, we will keep at it.  Therefore, we need to foster a sense of autonomy in learning.  The minute we start talking about “my special needs child,” we are taking away their autonomy.

Am I saying we should expect everyone to perform the same at school or other work?  Not at all, I am saying we should be better curators of children in learning environments, and let them have less stigma around failure.  In a real sense, every child should have an individualized education plan, because we are moving (hopefully) out of an industrial model of education.

As a therapist and educator who has worked in and with school systems and parents for nearly two decades, I have struggled with this frequently, both within myself and with my patients.  The language of diagnoses and learning disabilities is a language I speak all too well, and I have unintentionally colluded at times with parents and systems who use it as shorthand for, “my kid can’t ___.”  Maybe if failure was more tolerable and fun in school we wouldn’t be so quick to adopt these identities, and maybe if we curated environments that allowed for more autonomy we would notice different varieties of success as well.

The other night I was on a Minecraft server I participate in, founded by educators and edutechs for their children.  Several of the kids were on and chatting when I logged in, and shortly thereafter this huge flame war erupted.  Capital sentences of “I HATE YOU” flew across the screen.  Kids stormed out of the chat room, returned, then logged off again.  Some of the young moderators were instigating further conflict, while others were earnestly trying to figure out why people’s feelings had been hurt in the first place.  From the therapeutic point of view, they were failing miserably, exhibiting poor social skills, dysregulated affect, and poor impulse control.  It took a herculean act of will not to jump in and actively curate this group and allow them to exercise their autonomy.

They kept at the chatting, and over the next several minutes they began to collaborate on understanding what had happened.  This did not have the grown up version of a happy ending where the aggrieved parties apologized and made up, so much as the group told one party that they appreciated the apology and weren’t ready to accept it then (my translation) told a second party to stop instigating in the guise of defending someone, and encouraged the third to come and build something to take his/her mind off of it.

In my mind, the fact that this took place in a game environment where failure is destigmatized and autonomy is presumed made it easier for people to keep at the challenge until it had been resolved “enough.”  There was no adult who was forcing them to stay on and work at this, they were voluntarily engaged.  There were several halting starts and stops of chat.  But social emotional learning was occurring.

This in my opinion is an example of “failing better,” and I think this is a skill that not only can be translated from video game experience, but desperately needs to.  The more we except failure as an essential part of learning and work, the less stigmatizing it will be.  The less we stigmatize failure, the more we encourage autonomy and optimism.  Autonomy and optimism make you a better learner, a better collaborator, and a better worker.  Personally I think the world could use a lot more of that.（source：GAMASUTRA）