Failure in Videogames: Similarities and Differences to Textile Craft

This paper applies Jesper Juul's account of failure in videogames to hand knitting, arguing that videogame play and textile craft share a paradox: both are frustrating yet pleasurable, and both draw practitioners toward repeated trial and error in pursuit of mastery. The analysis is structured around a case study of the puzzle-platform games Unravel (2016) and Unravel Two (2018), with the PC version of Unravel examined through autoethnographic observation of gameplay alongside three months of amateur knitting practice. The authors situate their argument within discussions of player labour, the autotelic drive to feel competent, and Ash's concept of bodily attunement, proposing that both knitter and player fine-tune finger and hand movements to develop somatic knowledge of their tools and materials.

The central findings concern how each activity structures failure. In knitting, errors typically appear as physical flaws, such as incorrect stitches or dropped loops, which are corrected by "frogging," unravelling the fabric back to the point of mistake. Knitters mitigate the risk of excessive unravelling by inserting lifelines, stable positions to return to. The authors argue that this recoverable, incremental failure parallels Unravel, where the yarn-based protagonist's unravelling and the game's rules make catastrophic failure unlikely. Both activities are shown to offer satisfaction through completion, whether casting off a garment, mastering a stitch, collecting secrets, or improving swinging technique.

The paper's scope is deliberately narrow, grounded in a single autoethnographic case rather than broad survey data, and it does not report quantitative sampling or multiple participant accounts. Its conclusion is that the labour and time investment required by both practices produce a "completionist" compulsion, in which pleasure derives from persistence through ambiguity and repetition rather than from immediate success.