PAX Australia: The History of Losing
Channel: Rym DeCoster
Date: 2014-12-05

I presented "Losing" at PAX Australia 2014.  This is an excerpt from that lecture covering, essentially, single player videogames.  From Super Meat Boy to Silver Surfer to The Stanley Parable to Gone Home, I consider Narratives of Victory, and Narratives of Failure.

There are two additional sections after this: multiplayer competitive games (orthogames) and Role Playing Games.

Losing
Saturday 2:00pm
Fruitbat Theatre

Winning is good, and losing is bad. We strive to win, and this is the basis for most of the games we play. Challenges are binary: we either overcome them, advancing the story, or fail, and must try again. But, what if we were to toss this conventional wisdom aside? Do we really only have fun when we win? Have you ever had that moment in a game where epic and total failure was the most memorable part? What kinds of games would arise if we strove to make losing, instead of winning, the point?

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