Soy Un Perdedor
Posting the Ls, just like Dungeons & Dragons' Chris Pine would want
I have some fairly wild opinions about Jon Stewart’s role as a political and cultural figure (did he empower a generation of slacktivists who think that dunking on your opponent’s hypocrisy is the same thing as being politically engaged? Who can say!), but there’s no denying that he gave me the perfect framing by which to understand and appreciate my favorite musician. During a ceremony honoring Bruce Springsteen at the Kennedy Center in 2009, Stewart had this to say about the Boss:
“When I listen to the music of Bruce Springsteen, I’m not a loser. I’m a hero in an epic poem about losers.”
This feels absolutely right, and I couldn’t ask for a more clear, punchy way to explain to people why Bruce’s music resonates with me as much as it does. The first time I really fell in love with Bruce, it was from soaking in the emotional reaches of one of his live albums on a drive home after a breakup in the early aughts. I decided he was my favorite artist right around the above ceremony in 2009, when my first business (a lil comic book store I opened with some friends after college) was failing. I had already been using Bruce to make myself feel better when I felt low, and here was the host of The Daily Show not only telling me that he had done the same but helping me realize that Springsteen’s music made me feel somehow triumphant in my loss. I thought about how, in dramatizing day-to-day, human struggles in epic tones, Springsteen recognized that the very act of trying to be a person is heroic, and even (or maybe even especially) if you don’t get what you want, to have tried lets you stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Odysseus and Aeneas.1
Jon Stewart’s observation about Bruce Springsteen has stayed with me for 15 years, becoming foundational not just for the way I view my favorite musician but the way I think about how we relate to the world. It especially resonates with me because, to be honest, almost all of the time, I feel like a loser.
Generally, people react pretty poorly when you refer to yourself as a loser. Based on the knee-jerk “don’t say that about yourself, buddy!” or “you’re doing great!” it feels taboo, like you said you hate puppies or something (nb: don’t you dare say you hate puppies here or I’ll call the mods). I understand why this is, of course; for starters, nobody wants to see their friends down on themselves; one’s natural instinct is to gas up their pals. There’s also, I think, an impulse to remove any uncomfortability in conversation, which someone detailing their loss might introduce.
What I’d like to argue for here is the removal of any negative value judgment from the term “loser” (sorry, ‘90s valley girls). To me, to be a loser is simply to have lost, and to have lost is a fact of one’s biography, not a judgment on one’s character.
But even losses simply stated as fact, I think, can make people uncomfortable; with social media, especially, folks tend to focus on curating only the winning parts of themselves to share. It feels nicer for all parties involved, right, to project this idealized, all-W version of ourselves? The “we” that flies smoothly, without adversity?
Clearly, this is not an impulse I share.
This newsletter is (ostensibly, anyway) about games, and I think it’s helpful to consider loss in that context.
Typically, in a tabletop board or card game, to lose means that a game has reached its conclusion, and the loser has not won. Sure, one may hit setbacks in the course of play, but a person would probably only say “I lost” at the end of a game in which they did not find victory.
Video games approach loss a little differently. Sometimes, of course, your characters’ failure is written into the script, as a cutscene or otherwise unavoidable plot development; I don’t think we can count this as genuine failure, though, as the failure doesn’t belong to the player but the game. Typically, when a player genuinely loses in a single-player video game, they get the dreaded game over screen, and then they’re invited to tackle the exact same scenario over and over again until it doesn’t impede progress. Certainly folks can (and probably should) employ different tactics on future attempts, or at least incorporate the knowledge they learned from failure, but still, this doesn’t really model loss in a realistic way — you simply get do-overs until you figure stuff out. Sounds nice.
In my last post I mentioned that I recently starting reading a book on the philosophy of play, James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Here’s what Prof. Carse has to say about loss in a finite game, like the kinds I’m describing above:
A finite game must always be won with a terminal move, a final act within the boundaries of the game that establishes the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal move results, in other words, in the death of the opposing player as player. The winner kills the opponent. The loser is dead in the sense of being incapable of further play.
With the bleak thought of the loser dying on our minds, let’s move on.
I feel like, on the micro level of day-to-day stuff, I do pretty well (being honest, this is probably at least somewhat due to the privilege of my being decently middle class). It’s the macro level of big life items where I think I’ve struggled. Career trajectory, family, relationships — these are where I feel my Ls sit. I imagine a lot of people probably feel similarly; I do think maybe some of my struggles are colored a little more starkly by circumstances, but everyone has their traumas and tragedies.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk about relationships in particular a bit more, with another reference to my last post. E, that post’s central figure, liked to say something that’s relevant to my reflections here: that intimacy and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin.
In a relationship — the context in which that wisdom came up for us — this is pretty clear. When romancing, you lead with intimacy, and vulnerability naturally arises, a potentially scary biproduct of growing close to someone. One of the big challenges of a relationship, I feel, is to get good with this vulnerability and trust that, if hurt arises from it, you’ll be strong enough to handle it (hey, there’s at least one Springsteen song for that!).
But I’ve been thinking about the inverse of the above scenario, too. I think that that’s what sharing your losses is — it’s leading with vulnerability, and hoping that maybe something like intimacy arises. Not a romantic intimacy, necessarily2, but the general intimacy of human connection.
My hope is that, by sharing things like what I wrote in my last post, I encourage those listening to think of me as a genuine person who sometimes has valuable things to say; maybe as a consequence, those folks will want to stick around and hear more, and a real bond will form. This is the entire ethos of the storytelling shows I’ve sheperded for the last 12 years — that when you share something true and difficult about yourself, you open the door for some real shared humanity with your audience. That ethos has worked magic for me — I credit those storytelling shows with sculpting me into a person who is able to hold real love in his life. Vulnerability led, intimacy followed, an ouroboros of feels.
You may have noticed there was a type of tabletop game I didn’t cover in my above discussion of losing.
A couple weeks ago, I rewatched last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I really like this film, and one of my favorite things about it is that it centers its story around a group of characters who are explicitly losers. Every person in the main party has had a hard go of it3, and at the end of the film’s second act, they’re all ready to give up for good. In desperation, Chris Pine’s bard Edgin delivers a rallying speech that includes the following mega-quotable bit: “We must never stop failing, because the minute we do, we’ve failed.”
I don’t know if I ever really thought about Dungeons & Dragons (or tabletop RPGs in general) as games about dealing with failure before, but after I saw the film, that notion stuck with me. Unlike the board, card, and video games described above, in TTRPGs, genuine, spontaneous failure just becomes another part of players’ narrative. Just like in the movie, you can spend entire sessions building up a master plan to win the day in a campaign that completely fails — and, as long as you survive, you can take the experience of that failure and try again in a completely different way without any kind of “game over” reset. The game continues, your failure gets wrapped into it, and on your party goes until they prove themselves the heroes they know deep down that they can be.
Let’s bring back Carse’s words above: in a finite game, the loser-as-player dies. That must mean that, if you don’t die, you get to keep playing, even through a loss. And, thanks to the progression system built into most TTRPGs, you might get to be a little stronger, wiser, smarter, or more well-equipped the next time you try.
This is a pretty special thing about tabletop roleplaying, and I think it’s also a pretty good way to think about how we carry on in our day-to-day. It happens to be the reason why I think we shouldn’t downplay our personal Ls but instead own them — sometimes, if you’re me, loudly.
One more bit of vulnerability before the end — I haven’t yet finished Finite and Infinite Games. E and I didn’t get to conclude our read-through together, and the thought of trying to finish on my own has hurt a lot. But, while writing this piece, I found a digital text of the book and searched it for instances of the word “lose,” to see how Carse talked about that concept. In doing so, I came upon this wild sentence from a part of the book I’ve not yet reached, and I thought it made for a perfect conclusion:
"Unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win."
Here’s the Springsteen, the Morrison, the humanistic spirit I’ve been discussing laid out bare. Feeling that we’re losers is what gives us the drive to carry on and win.
So here’s to posting the Ls.
For any fans of comics out there, this feels like exactly the same philosophy Grant Morrison imbues into their work; it’s no surprise that Grant is my favorite fiction author.
That said, my DMs are open, lol. Can you even DM on here? I think you can, now.
The brilliance of Regé-Jean Page’s character, the paladin Xenk, is that he’s so good, so pure, and so unsettled by everyone else that of course he can’t be in the main party. I like to think of this character as your friend who’s way too cool for tabletop RPGs, joined your group for one session out of pity, made everyone else at the table feel like a mega dork, and politely declined ever coming back. That’s a real thing, right?
I admire your vulnerability and bravery, Eric. Personally, I often find it helpful to approach life like a Lemmy tattoo: "Born to Lose, Live to Win"