The Fail State

When I was a child, I didn’t want to play video games. Well, I did, but I didn’t want to lose. What does it mean to a child who takes things too literally when a game tells them they died? And so I watched my sisters play. I watched for hours and hours as they mastered levels until I felt comfortable that I could do what they were doing. After all, if I knew where the enemies were, I could avoid them more easily. The mechanics would work themselves out.

My daughter has anxiety. Her anxiety has been so acute for so long that I felt personally insulted by Inside Out 2 suggesting that Anxiety was an emotion that came with puberty. But she wants to play games. The difference between my childhood and hers is that she doesn’t have to wait her turn. Where Super Mario World never let Player 1 and Player 2 play on the same screen, Super Mario Wonder practically encourages it.

Super Mario Wonder even goes out of its way to encourage newer players by introducing characters such as Nabbit who don’t take damage. However, it’s still possible to lose. Miss a jump? That’s too bad. Want to get that big purple coin? You need more skills than a beginner, and staring longingly at the thing out of reach isn’t very fun. Needless to say, after the first few times playing with a high anxiety child, Mario was out.

The key was the ability to fail. Call it a symptom of the newer generation or my failure to sufficiently teach my children about losing, but gaming with the potential for loss made things too stressful. And they never wanted to sit on the sidelines like I did until they could mentally master a game without even playing it. And that’s how Donut County became the greatest game ever made.

Donut County is a game in which you play as a raccoon. The raccoon’s name is BK, and he runs a donut shop with the help of a human named Mira. The problem is that when someone orders a donut for delivery, BK opens up a hole in the ground and swallows everything around them. The gameplay revolves around piloting the holes to eat everything in a given level. The more the hole eats, the more it grows, until it’s big enough to swallow entire houses. 

Levels are fairly simple, and the game is elevated by the cut scene dialogue between levels (I give every character voices to keep my daughter entertained, though I don’t know that she’s as entertained by a northern midwest accent as I am). But what makes it approachable is that you can’t lose. You can’t fail. If you mess up shooting a firework at the right spot, you have infinitely more chances. Making mistakes is even built into the level design. The first time you don’t know what you’re doing and swallow a puddle of water, you have to learn that the drinky bird drinks the water. It’s not particularly challenging, but for a kid with anxiety, it’s a great way into games.

We’ve started playing other games without fail states, like Untitled Goose Game or A Short Hike, but Donut County will always be special. It was the first game I found that she wanted to play that wouldn’t cause bad feelings. When I grew up, watching my sisters play Mario was how I learned to approach games comfortably. For my daughter, it’s playing games without a fail state.