Rethinking Failure: Applying Gordon Calleja's Model of Player Involvement to NieR: Automata

Magdalena Kozyra's paper proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding failure in video games, arguing that the topic has been underexplored in game studies. Existing scholarship, the author contends, has concentrated on flow theory and on framing failure as a learning experience, with few attempts to treat it as a complex phenomenon connected to game genres, player communities, or narrative design. The paper seeks to fill this gap by combining Gordon Calleja's Model of Player Involvement with Jack Halberstam's queer theory, which reframes failure as an alternative mode of succeeding, knowing, and playing.

The methodology is a case study of NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames, 2017). Calleja's six dimensions of involvement (kinesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective, and ludic) serve as the analytical lens, with the author examining how failure emerges within each one. The game was chosen because it uses failure thematically in its story about self-aware androids, adapts mechanics for narrative purposes such as visualizing bodily damage in the interface and altering endings, and includes networked features in which players encounter traces of others' deaths. Examples include kinesthetic failure during a virus download, spatial failure while lost in the game world that reveals hidden story fragments, and shared failure through abandoned avatar corpses that warn of danger.

The central conclusion is that failure in the game serves narrative and ludic functions beyond teaching or motivating the player. The game sometimes requires both player and avatar to fail in order to advance the plot, and failure frequently yields positive outcomes such as discovering hidden objects, forming connections with other players, or unlocking additional content. The paper thus argues that the game can be read as a work built around failure at both narrative and ludic levels, and that Calleja's model can show failure functioning in multiple, previously overlooked ways.