Why Games Need Losers
Freud, Failure and the Death Drive
I just lost the game.
In most domains of life, failure signals a breakdown. If too many students fail a class, we question the curriculum. If most employees underperform, we question leadership. Systems are built to produce success.
Games are different. Games are built to produce losers.
That sounds strange when you slow down long enough to notice it. The activity we take up for fun reliably ensures that most of us will fail. Why would we willingly enter structures designed to defeat most of us? Perhaps that is not a flaw in their design but part of their purpose.
In recent essays on cooperative games, I explored the difference between losing to an opponent and losing to the game itself. The sting of a bad die roll is not the same as feeling outmaneuvered or realizing you miscalculated, but both are losses. Games give us the experience of losing without being swallowed by it. In that sense, they are carefully designed loss generators.
And yet, despite all the losing, we keep returning. After a loss, I often feel a surge of energy—frustration mixed with insistence that I will get it “this time.” The loss itself becomes fuel. We reset the board. We shuffle the cards. We try again.
Playing to lose: Why We Repeat Failure
Casinos and slot machines are built around this dynamic. Entire industries depend on the fact that people will continue paying to lose. The fantasy that the next spin could change everything is powerful. But that fantasy often functions less as a rational belief and more as a story that allows repetition to continue.
Psychoanalytic theory offers a way to name this phenomenon. There is a distinction between what feels pleasurable and what we feel compelled to repeat. Sometimes we return to something not because it feels good, but because it remains unresolved. There is unfinished tension.
Freud called this pull the death drive. It is not a wish to perish, but a drive toward repetition beyond rational calculation. It loops around something rather than resolving it. Desire reaches toward what is missing; drive circles around that missing point. Desire imagines satisfaction. Drive enjoys the movement of circling itself.
Games stage this looping safely. Like putting on boxing gloves and headgear so you can be hit without serious injury, they create a contained space in which repetition can unfold without real-world devastation. Losing a game is painful enough to matter, but safe enough to repeat.
Not all repetition, however, is the same. In earlier essays I distinguished between masking pleasure and earned pleasure. Masking pleasure smooths over lack. It dulls tension and keeps the loop running without interruption. Earned pleasure, by contrast, exposes limits. It requires risk, vulnerability, and the willingness to remain present to frustration or failure. Games can operate in either mode. They can become compulsive cycles that numb awareness, or they can become spaces where we feel the sting of loss and stay in relation. The difference is not whether we lose, but how we inhabit the losing.
Warning: The next paragraph contains a mind virus. Read at your own risk.
The Anatomy of a Mind Virus: How "The Game" Strips Down Structure
This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated by the mind virus simply called The Game. If you have not heard of it, there is no going back once you do.
The rules are simple. If you think about or remember The Game, you lose. Once you lose, you must announce it. Everyone who hears it loses too.
You cannot win. It is a game of perpetual losing. Awareness is defeat. The game never ends. All you can do is lose it, sometimes less often and sometimes more. I have gone months without losing only to lose multiple times in a single day. Writing this essay has not helped.
The Game strips loss down to structure. It is detached from skill or achievement, just pure rules. Losing is inevitable and contagious. We lose not because we miscalculated or were outplayed, but because we are inside the system. The structure guarantees failure.
In most games, something similar is happening, even if it is less obvious. For a game to function, most players must lose. A winner only makes sense against the backdrop of loss. The system requires differentiation. It requires an outcome that separates one from many.
Even cooperative games depend on this logic. Designers calibrate difficulty so that players lose often enough to keep tension alive. If everyone won easily every time, the game would flatten. The possibility of failure is not incidental; it is essential.
Loss is not accidental to the structure. It is built into it.
The Logic of Failure: Beyond the Win State
Desire itself is structured by lack. There is always something not yet secured, something just beyond reach. Even when we achieve what we were chasing, satisfaction rarely lasts. The board resets. The cards are shuffled. We play again.
Winners experience only a pause. Losers experience continuation. Both remain within the loop.
Games make this visible. They allow us to rehearse lack without mistaking it for annihilation. They let us lose, and lose again, without collapsing into despair.
Perhaps that is why we return to them. Not because we expect to conquer, but because losing does not end us. Games help us repeat without destruction, encounter lack without shame, and allow drive to circulate within a shared symbolic space. Playing well does not mean always winning. It means learning to remain in the movement of desire and drive without collapsing into compulsion.
The real test of a game is not whether we win, but whether we can lose and still want to keep playing.
📚 Works Cited & Suggested Reading
Carse, James P. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. New York: Free Press, 1986.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961.
Green II, Gary F. Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance Beyond the Moral Limits of Race in Sport. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025.
Hoard, Paul. “On Pleasure and Games.” The Other Journal, July 2024. https://theotherjournal.com/2024/07/on-pleasure-and-games/.
Hoard, Paul R., and Billie Hoard. Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life. Cascade Books, 2025.
Hoard, Paul, and Paul Steinke. “Board Games as Liturgy: The Thin Space of Play.” Christ & Cascadia, 2023.
Lantz, Frank. The Beauty of Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.
Fullerton, Tracy, and Matthew Farber. The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025.
Nguyen, C. Thi. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Pfaller, Robert. On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners. Verso, 2014
Rowson, Jonathan. The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Wikipedia contributors. “The Game (mind game).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed February 20, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game).
Zimmerman, Eric. The Rules We Break: Lessons from the World of Games. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2022.