Party games have a special place in gaming. They stand apart from the challenging strategic fare that experienced gamers are drawn to. In a way, they are distant cousins to children’s games, yet clearly aimed at an older audience. Most of all, though, they draw in players who can imagine spending time trying out a party game, but not a demanding hour-long competition of varied tactics and strategies.

Party games, and games that are reminiscent of them, allow us to laugh at our own incompetence. A game like Galaxy Trucker, for example, is shaped by its hectic pace at first. We have to solve a challenging task as time runs out. Afterwards we watch all our efforts get selectively destroyed by wildly random effects. Among experienced gamers this can lead to laughter and enjoyment or frustration and resentment.

In these games we are repeatedly confronted with all the things we don’t excel in. Whether because we’re bad at drawing, but have to use a small handful of lines to communicate a word or idea. Or because the seconds are ticking away as we fail to find the right words and clumsily try to explain this thing.. you know that thing… Monica has a bunch of them… why can’t you figure this out? Could I be any more obvious?

They are games that make us laugh. But it’s not the kind of mocking and derisive laughter, we use to look down on people who can’t do something that’s “so simple”. It’s sympathetic laughter, it’s “I-Know-Exactly-What-You’re-Going-Through” laughter and that elevates play into an act of solidarity. We recognize ourselves in the failures of another and by doing so find something that unites us. The things that overwhelm our fellow players are the same things we will be struggling with, when it’s our turn. We understand each other’s failure not as creating a social hierarchy of player skill. It is instead an equalizer among the imperfect and consequently likeable people we’re sharing a table with.

This embrace of failure is not only deeply human. For many it is also a way of liberating ourselves from a sense of performance pressure that has naturally emerged in many gaming groups. But why is that? Is gaming so populated with the overtly privileged that we pressure ourselves to excel and succeed, for fun and entertainment? Or do we use the games we play with our friends simply to reproduce cultural dynamics, that we see elsewhere? If all parts of our lives are defined by having to show how we are better educated, smarter and more charismatic than others… are we not able to stop ourselves from doing it in a game, too?

The cheap and easy answer – rooted in survivorship bias – is of course, that people who like to play games do so, because they enjoy the pressure of competing to be the best. To play means to achieve something, to excel in it and to prove yourself in competition with your equals.

This gives – as the young people say – big yikes energy. In particular the idea that performance pressure is something inherent to a game, and the thing that makes it a game to begin with. Party games and comparable designs find far too much traction with people, considering how their design principles run completely counter to this idea. In fact, it is because these games so rarely emphasise pressure to succeed, that they become more appealing to a wide range of players.

I think new players are often mischaracterised as being intimidated by the amount of rules modern designs come with. The culprit is far more often the fear that a rules-heavy game will demand a lot of its players. Not only will they have to learn and internalise all the rules. They will also have to competently apply and continuously consider all of them when making decisions. These games set up a high expectation of competency and skill that is frankly off-putting to people who aren’t familiar with them. In addition to that, these games also suggest a certain group dynamic, when the ever-present threat of failure no longer unites players, but separates the gaming elite from the playing plebs.

Many gamers are willing to accept this emergent social hierarchy, if it makes them a part of a social group and lets them spend time with people they like. But accepting this idea of performance pressure is not the same as enjoying it. People learn to adapt to uncomfortable situations their whole life, as long as they get certain benefits in return.

It’s the assumption of this performance principle as the default state of games, which is a problem. It’s true for experienced gamers, whose enthusiasm for the many benefits of playing together often ignore this not insignificant hurdle. But it’s also true for designers, developers and publishers who only see failure as a game’s highest emotional punishment, but not as a source for shared play and enjoyment. Failure is only ever the threat of being mocked and ridiculed for not being good enough.

I believe that these approaches have impoverished gaming. Instead of games helping us to learn how to deal with setbacks constructively or even playfully, we simply harden to them. If you scrape your knees bloody often enough, it doesn’t bother you all that much when your face hits pavement every once in a while. We learn how to lose, by numbing ourselves to it or simply when we “git gud”. If you’ve learned to play well enough, you no longer have to handle losses. Not doing either, quickly runs the risk of ending up with a strong tendency for analysis paralysis.

Ultimately, this is what performance pressure in games teaches us. Failure is an embarrassment we can only avoid, by declaring victory meaningless or by being just too skilled to lose. Performance pressure also paves the way for centring loss aversion in our decision-making process. Which in turn leads to the realisation, that the only rational answer is to simply not play instead of running the risk of losing.

A realisation that has birthed a great number of committed non-gamers. Because as long as we cling to the narrow and calcified view of games as a stage to display our expertise, failure becomes a punishment that must be avoided at all costs. It becomes the bogeyman that chases us around and forces our hand to make certain decisions. It remains, for most people at least, a reason not to play with others.

But games could help us experience so much more humour and solidarity, if we see failure as part of the game and also a potential source for the reason we keep coming back to the table: to have fun.

The key to getting there is, as with many things, only to a small extent found in the games themselves. The joy of failure doesn’t follow from the game’s rules, theme or components. It emerges from how we treat each other at the table. It’s a function of what we, especially as experienced gamers, show each other what really matters to us in a game.