The art of losing
Note from May, 2017: well obviously I should be integrating Jesper Juul and Jack Halberstam into this post and talking about how failure in games is unavoidable, seductive, and queer, but I hadn't read those things back in March, so we're just gonna leave it for now)
One Art
ELIZABETH BISHOP
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Gaming means losing, but often it seems like losing has lost its stake. It’s no longer the case that a loss means begging another quarter off your beleaguered parents. Given the time, you can play again and again. As a scriptive thing, the game wants to be played, it wants you to love and attend to it, be attracted enough to the failure that you learn to correct it but not too good that it gets boring. Losing, in itself, isn’t hard to do. Or at least it’s unavoidable. Which perhaps begins to look like mastery through its repetition.
As a soft thing in a dark world, though, losing feels like an existential blow, a kind of (logically ridiculous) numbed dread I’m not sure how to describe. This is not, I’m pretty sure, how gamers tend to react when they lose. I know it’s not, actually, because I know plenty of gamers. Losing is a minor disappointment and an opportunity to learn. It's really admirable. If they quit, even in frustration, the loss stays in the magic circle, a challenge separable from the difficulties of work or relationships. I’m often left feeling like I missed a crucial childhood step, like I never learned how to lose in the right way. Games I lost (soccer, sports in general) I didn’t care too much about. Things I lost that I *did* care about (auditions, school admissions, physics tests) weren’t games, and so could be acceptably mourned and then battled. I certainly lost hard at plenty of things, but I felt empowered enough by the seriousness of the activity to justify fighting back. I wound up with a very hard earned A in physics, and I don't know why I can't usually get motivated to do that with a particularly hard game. I feel like I handled games as a kid the way 80’s movies talked about school, like it was uncool to try. With a game, you're literally asking to be battered again and again. With work, it somehow for me goes into a steely zone of "well I didn't start this fight but I'm sure as hell going to finish it."
Bishop's poem protests too much. The art of losing is quite hard to master, and she knows it. She plays on the multiple meanings of "hard" and "mastery." It isn't hard to lose (because it's certainly easy not to win), but it's hard to lose in the sense that it's miserable. And mastery implies you aren't losing anymore; if you can't win, Bishop cheers bitterly, you can at least get great at losing. As an uncertain gamer, I'm seeing another way into this poem. Losing like Bishop writes is not a good way to game. You can't hold on to the bitterness. Losing shouldn't having the bite in a game that it does in the poem, and in the world. Losing can't matter to you all that much, but for me, it still looks like disaster.
