The Arts of Failure: Jack Halberstam in Conversation with Jesper Juul

Queer Game BONNIE RUBERG AND ADRIENNE SHAW, Editors Studies University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Chapter 6, “Playing Outside,” by Leigh Alexander, originally appeared in Te New Inquiry, http://thenewinquiry.com/, June 17, 2013; reproduced by permission from Te New Inquiry. Chapter 18, “Te Nightmare Is Over,” by Katherine Cross, originally appeared as “Te Nightmare Is Over: Tey’re Not Coming for Your Games,” at http:// www.polygon.com/, July 29, 2014; reproduced by permission from Polygon.com and Vox Media Inc. Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Tird Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper Te University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ruberg, Bonnie, editor. | Shaw, Adrienne, editor. Title: Queer game studies / [edited by] Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016036903 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0036-6 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0037-3 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Video games—Social aspects. | Electronic games—Social aspects. | Games—Social aspects. | Gender identity. | Gays. | Queer theory. Classification: LCC GV1469.17.S63 Q44 2017 (print) | DDC 794.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036903 Chapter 20 Te Arts of Failure Jack Halberstam in Conversation with Jesper Juul MODERATED BY BONNIE RUBERG “Te Arts of Failure” session took place in October 2013 as part of the inaugural Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon). Te QGCon organizers placed Halberstam and Juul in dialogue in order to explore the crossovers between their respective work theorizing failure— in both the context of games and the context of queer theory. Volume coeditor Bonnie Ruberg served as moderator. Te floor was also opened to audience questions in the latter half of the session. RUBERG: We are thrilled to have Jack Halberstam and Jesper Juul with us here. Jack is one of the most influential queer theorists working today. He is a professor at the University of Southern California and the author most recently of Te Queer Art of Failure and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Jesper is one of our most influential contemporary games studies thinkers. He’s currently a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, and author of books like Half-Real, Te Casual Revolution, and, most recently, Te Art of Failure. From the similarities between the titles of Jack and Jesper’s 201 202 MODERATED BY BONNIE RUBERG books on failure you can tell why we wanted to put these two scholars in dialogue. Despite the overlaps in their interests, Jack and Jesper have never previously spoken. Jesper’s book doesn’t mention Jack’s. Jack’s doesn’t mention video games. Yet it seemed natural to explore the ways the two texts speak to each other. I’ll start by giving both Jack and Jesper a few moments to introduce themselves. HALBERSTAM: My book, which followed some of the same argu- mentative strands that Jesper’s did, was interested in the logic of success and failure, and the way that logic constrains us to a very normative viewpoint, such that different social circum- stances produce different outcomes: success or failure. So my big claim is that someone might actually want to fail, because they’re so dissatisfied with a particular social context. Take the social context of capitalism, for example. If winning the game of capitalism means accumulating wealth, then it may well be that anticapitalists want to fail at that game in order to produce other ways of thinking about money, other ways of thinking about relationships through property, or posses- sion, or whatever it may be. But if you move to the realm of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, the queer becomes the failure logic. In a homophobic logic, the queer fails to be straight, literally. Te butch fails to be a woman. Te sissy boy fails to be a man. Te queer adult fails to get married and have children. Tey all fail in their socially prescribed role. Tere are two responses you can have to that. One is to try and play the game as it’s been written, to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t real- ize. I will now get married and have children, and then maybe you will accept me as a success on your terms.” Or you refuse the game. You say, “Actually, that outcome is not what I de- sire.” You rewrite the game, and in the process you accept what we call failure. So, that acceptance in failure, that investment in failure, that excitement about failure, is the queer art of failure. JUUL: My book has lots of similarities and lots of differences from Jack’s. It really came from the personal experience of being a Te Arts of Failure 203 sore loser at video games. I was playing all these games, and I’d be unhappy when I played them. I felt like I was return- ing to games that made me unhappy, and I wondered why that was. At the same time, there’s also a cultural movement around failure, a kind of self- help book attitude that says, “Actually, failing is great. Investment companies should fail fast,” and all that stuff. I think that’s very superficial, because failure also does hurt most of the time. I tried to look at this in a historical, aesthetical way and to look at what’s called the paradox of tragedy: why we watch tragic cinema, or read tragic novels, or go to horror cinema even though it makes us un- comfortable or deeply unhappy. I looked at various historical answers to that question, but none of them quite resolved or answered it. So I tried to ask whether failure in games was in some fundamental way different from failure in nongame contexts. One of the examples I had is “gamification”: the idea that you can use game structures to, say, educate students or run a company. My conclusion on this is that you can actually look at the 2008 financial crisis and say that, in a way, it was caused by making companies too much like games. You had these clear incentive structures, and if someone just approved a lot of loans, they would get huge bonuses. Ten, of course, lots of companies collapsed. You can see that one of the prob- lems is having something important that uses a gamelike structure— whereas, if you play an actual game, you have the option of denying that it’s important to you. You can always say, “It’s a stupid game.” Games, in a way, make these kinds of arguments within themselves. Te problem is, if you try to apply this approach elsewhere, you can’t say, “I think this performance ratio or this score on my report card is stupid,” because you would be fired or you would fail. So it’s not true that there’s no safe space within games. Te idea of the safe space is actually pretty important, because it gives us the opportunity to deny that we care about failure. To me, that’s the art of failure in video games: the opportunity for denial, even if we lie to ourselves or to other people. 204 MODERATED BY BONNIE RUBERG RUBERG: I wonder if we can triangulate your respective positions on “the art of failure.” Jesper is talking about failure in games. Jack is talking about failure in life. What happens when we bring these ideas together? Do we create a queer art of failing at video games? HALBERSTAM: Tere are a lot of moments in Jesper’s Art of Failure that are implicitly queer. It’s a really great book for schema- tizing all the ways you might experience failure in games, and then you can extrapolate from there into other contexts. One category Jesper uses in the introduction is ahedonism. Ahedonism is the idea that humans aren’t only oriented around pleasure. Tis idea that you want to play to win, and that only winning will do, is not simply wrong about games, it’s wrong about the human. Tat feels to me to be a very queer insight. We could also call this a certain type of negativity, which is part of who we are. JUUL: One similarity between the two books is a certain reluctance to only do a relabeling, to say, “Actually what we thought was failure was success, so just flip it around.” What’s interesting when you ask this question of games, for example if you’re playing single- player games, is that people do strange things a lot of the time. Tey don’t necessarily play for the goal, or they goof around in various ways. Ten the question is: What would queer playing entail? Would it mean having a game that allows you to do non- goal- oriented things? But are you sup- posed to follow the game’s logic or reject it? It’s a hard question, because games have so many variations on the theme of failure.

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