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Pippin Barr wants you to feel the pain for a longer Duration

The game maker Pippin Barr once wrote a fantastic article for us on his experience playing Painstation, a modification of the classic game Pong, which whips you, burns you, and/or shocks you when you miss. That should give you an idea of the type of games he makes. That’s the type of game Durations is, at least so far, sans the physical pain.  The point is his games are unfairly, brutally hard, seeming to relish in your inevitable disappointment. I’m not sure whether this is satire or trolling, but I can’t help but to give them a whirl. Durations is…

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An NYU professor explains why failing at videogames makes us unhappy

Like an athlete sobbing after a championship loss, Jesper Juul hates failing in videogames. “Why do we play videogames even though they make us unhappy?” he asks in his new book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Videogames. Comparing game failure to tragic literature, theatre, and cinema, Juul looks at why failing in videogames is so personal and why it’s okay to get angry when we do. In an interview with Kill Screen last year, Juul describes how breaking the cycle of failure is difficult, “I actually wasn’t learning the sort of stuff I was supposed to be…