Theorist Jack Halberstam wrote a book called “The Queer Art of Failure” which disassociates failure with the negative connotations it has. And that society’s image of success is defined by gaining money and reproducing, having a family. That is to say “success” is very capitalist and heteronormative. And he points out that some of our greatest thinkers were dropouts from universities. And likewise, some of our greatest digital artists exist outside our cultural structures of video games: Outsider art. Failure, in a sense means to resist mastery. In a creative field, having a certain goal in mind, immediately stymies the process of discovery.
Sam Crisp
When I was in high school, a teacher said that everybody wanted to be successful. I said that I didn’t, and the whole class laughed, but I was not making a joke. I guess I don’t know exactly what I meant, but it is still something I believe in a very significant way. For me, it’s not a question of redefining success with goals alternative to making money, which is a pretty mildly subversive attitude that exists well within the system and is still sometimes used to perpetuate it, but rather I guess just choosing not to have a particular thing I am trying to accomplish, or especially not one which I can check off of a list and consider myself “done.”