If you're a gamer, you fail.

It doesn't matter what games you play. It doesn't matter how good you think you are. It doesn't matter how much you commit. In fact, the longer you play, the more you fail. I've considered your plight for a while now, and in all honesty, I'm fairly impressed by the extent, variety, and regularity of your failures.

And you were doing so well.

Maybe it's the sniper you never see who pops your little head open, or a grunt who mows you down face-to-face. Could be you ignored one grenade indicator too many, or misjudged a jump, or chose the wrong Pokemon. You sauntered into a booby trap, mismanaged resources, lost the race, ran out of time, didn't dodge, didn't block, fell into the bottomless chasm, and let the towering alien killing machine sneak up on you.

Fighting games even spell it out: "YOU LOSE!" Over and over and over.

Oh yeah, you fail. A lot. So much so, you probably don't even think about it anymore, but you should. Because what happens after you fail is pretty damn cool.

See, failure used to be how games made money. Arcade machines were designed to give you a quick hit of fun, then knock you down. In return, you kept feeding them quarters to continue an experience. "Winning" didn't usually figure into the equation.

Now it does, and you get things like Limbo and Super Meat Boy where constant, gruesome death is just part of the learning curve. Those games kill you with a frequency bordering on sadism, but that hardly stops people from playing them through to completion. Quite the reverse. Those games deliberately use failure to teach you how not to fail.

That's important, because odds are every single time you fail, you instinctively jump right back in and try again. And you keep trying until you succeed.

That's not a good sign.

I find that level of perseverance amazing. Oh, you get throw-your-controller, rage-quitting moments, but then we pick the controller back up and dive back in. I've put games down and walked away from the frustration myself two or three times, which barely rates against the hundreds of games I've played. Gamers refuse to accept failure as the final answer.

Most games don't even bother asking if you want to continue after a death anymore -- they just assume it and reload from the last save. They're right, too. When I die in a game, I charge right back in to fix what broke me, but good. I unleash on that sucker, forewarned and forearmed.

Just look at our lexicon. We don't win games anymore...we beat them. They do their best to stomp us down, and we return the favor with compound interest. That sweet victory feels sweeter for the insurmountable obstacles we overcame, for showing the final boss who's really the boss. Hey, that's why we game: Few things beat the rush of a hard-earned victory. When the victory doesn't feel earned, we even crank up the difficulty until it meets our punishing requirements.

Bring it, bitch!

Of course, our failures aren't exactly lasting. You're instantly resurrected, usually without any of the consequences normally associated with sudden, violent death.

Well, these are games and maybe they should err on the side of actually being fun to play, but sometimes I do wish for a harder lesson. Just a little something that points out you failed for a reason, and perhaps you should think about what you're doing instead of just beating your head against a brick wall until the brick crumbles. Certainly, Demon's Souls ruthlessly punishes careless or complacent gameplay by docking your resources when you die. It's entirely possible to recover what you lost...unless you're careless or complacent on the way. Demon's Souls might be the toughest game of 2010 specifically because it won't let you cop out.

That said, nobody drops $60 on a title they simply can't finish. Failure must give way to the possibility of success. We need that something to strive for, and we need to fail along the way. Failure tells us we aren't just pushing buttons. We're not just putzing around. We have a goal to achieve, an enemy to defeat, and neither will be easy.

The worthwhile things in life never are.