There is no escape

There's not much room to breathe between the binary of victory and loss. Can gaming win us a healthier attitude to failure? Words by Katie Goh and illustration by Zara Wilkins.

The first death is quick. “I don’t know the controls!” I shriek as two bloated orange thumbs clobber me into oblivion with their clubs.

THERE IS NO ESCAPE floats on screen in blood-red letters. I – or rather my avatar, a muscular emo jock named Zagreus – return to the start of the game.

“What? That’s it?” I twist around and ask my brother who has been watching me mash my fingers into the keyboard. “You just return to the start. Every time you die?”

“Yup,” he replies with a smug smirk.

“Every time.” The fifth time I die – by stepping in lava and not realising that stepping in lava will slowly erode your life bar – I flick the headphones off and throw my hands into the air.

“I give up.” I leave my brother’s room. 5 minutes later, I’m back. “Wait, I want another go.”

Over the next few days, I ragequit and return to this game repeatedly. I lose and Zagreus dies. I lose and Zagreus is sent back to his father’s lair. I lose and Zagreus emerges out of the crimson River Styx, shaking the blood from his hair. Start again. The game in question is Hades, a “roguelike” – a subgenre of dungeon crawler in which death means death, or, at least, death means a return to the starting line. In Hades, you play as the defiant son of the eponymous god of the underworld. On his angsty, daddy-issues quest to leave his home behind, Zagreus must battle his way past his father’s henchmen. Losing is not just an inevitability in the gameplay; it’s an inherent necessity to move the story forward.

Zagreus may be constantly restarting his journey out of the underworld, but each death and each restart marks a new objective learned, a new story uncovered, a new weapon wielded. At first Hades’ narrative seems straight forward enough: kill the bosses, get to the surface, finish the game. My frustration at constant death soon morphs into self-satisfaction as I grow accustomed to the underworld. I speed run through the game’s early dungeons, casting deadly bolts from my hands, slashing through entire hordes of hellish monsters.

I, as Zagreus, twist and spin through the underworld with the omniscient knowledge of a god who has beaten death, who has been here before, who has fought these battles before – and then I find fresh ground, new villains and immediately die. Start again.

Gaming has a reputation for neatly differentiating winners and losers. Only three of the ten best-selling games of the 00s can be considered open-world games (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto: IV and Nintendogs), whereas the top five bestsellers are either sports simulations or side-scroller adventures in which winning is the only objective. It’s no coincidence that the popularity of games with clearcut win-lose outcomes comes right bang in the middle of an era of meritocracy, a political, economic and societal moment in which governments, on both the right and left of the political spectrum, perpetuate the myth of equal opportunity.

The last three decades of liberal democratic capitalism has placed all of us in an anxious rat race to rise to the top: to get the best education, the best job, the best marriage, the best children, even, if you’re a transhumanist, the best death. In recent history, the injustice of meritocracy has been weaponised by the right-wing and the obscenely wealthy.

“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be sick and tired of winning,” announced Donald Trump, who ran a presidential campaign on the promise of making winners out of society’s most resentful losers: white, rual, working-class men. In the UK, Brexit promised a similar inversion of winners and losers, with immigration and EDI policies blamed for the country’s poverty, poor living conditions and dire job market.

Six years, a global pandemic and an economic crash later, these pledges from the 1%, of endless winning after decades of endless losing, ring even more hollow. As I play Hades, and unlearn my resentment at continuous losing, I expect a chronological crawl through the gameplay, up and out into the sunlight, but Hades’ narrative constantly gets away from me. Side rooms conjure side narratives and soon I lose all sense of where I am in the story. I unite the lost souls of Tartarus.

I mend a severed relationship with my stepmother, Nyx. I pick at the threads of a dysfunctional family story that is slowly unravelling with each of my deaths. The more I technically lose at Hades, the more invested I become in the game’s story and characters. An infrequent gamer, I have never been particularly drawn to games in which winning is the main objective. The few ones that I have played obsessively have been open world ones – World of Warcraft, Animal Crossing, Breath of the Wild – games that, yes, you can technically win (the highest level of armour, the biggest house, reaching the end credits), but also ones that you can lose yourself in.

Step off the path in these games, leave the main narrative, and you’ll find infinite storytelling possibilities. I have spent many summers with the curtains closed, devoting myself to this inventive side-quest gaming, working in tandem with the gamemakers to build my own worlds out of their bricks. It’s perhaps a cliché, but in these games the journey is the win.

The more I play Hades, the more lost I get and the more the hierarchy of winning and losing begins to crumble. When I get to what I believe is the end of hell and the end of Hades, the game spawns yet another narrative and I, of course, die another death. Surrendering to failure feels antithetical to every impulse that has been hammered into me as a young millennial in this age of capitalist meritocracy – and yet, playing this simple roguelike game, with its Sisyphus-esque narrative, has taught me that there’s a wealth of pleasure to be found in learning to die, in learning to be a loser.

There is no escape was published in our 2022 edition, The Failure Issue.