“Failure” is often used as a dirty word by gamers, but this is one of the ways in which gamer culture often gets things wrong. If you fail and try again, that’s essentially practice for success.

Previously on Game Restart: [recapping intensifies]

I’m not going to suggest that video games were better in the olden days. They absolutely were not; anyone who thinks that they were is probably legally blind or has closed their mind to reality not damaged by Space War for the Atari VCS. At a certain point, video games didn’t exist. And then once they existed, they were objectively terrible for the most part. Being novel was their only saving grace.