The Art of Failure is a 2013 book by Jesper Juul
The premise looked interesting - after all, why do we play games we often lose, frustrate us, and make us feel incompetent at actions invented for a game? Yet if a game is too easy, we don't really like those games either. Is it emotional investment, the challenge, rubbing victory in our friends noses, etc.
This book started off promising. For instance, I do like RPGs, which is a genre you are pretty much guaranteed to win. However, it is disjointed, tossing ideas out left and right. When the author started quoting Plato, Neitzche and Coleridge, I quickly lost further interest.
I can't really review the book, since life is too short to read books with that attitude, but the conversation I thought it could begin - about the critical role of challenge and commonly failure - is so important to video games.
What do you think? Are your favorite gaming memories about overcoming challenge after many failures?