Crash Bandicoot taught me how to Fail, before I learnt to lead

I learned to fail before I learnt to lead. Not in a boardroom nor a business school.

On a sofa in the nineties, dying repeatedly on the same jump in Crash Bandicoot. Getting stuck in the opening test in Driver. Walking too slowly through the fear and tension of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, half wanting to continue and half wanting to switch the console off.

Those games were not gentle.

You failed. You restarted. You took the wrong turn. You mistimed the jump. You ran out of ammo. You panicked when you needed to stay calm.

And then you tried again.

No encouragement. No partial credit for effort. Just the problem waiting for you to understand it better.

Somewhere in that repetition, something shifted.

Failure stopped feeling like a judgement and started feeling like information.

This jump needs half a second more timing.

I did not know it at the time, but I was practising something researchers have since written about more seriously: that games can build motivation, persistence and resilience because they make failure part of the learning loop rather than the end of it.

The screen that said you died was not the end.

It was the beginning of the next attempt.

Now I am a parent, and I think about this differently.

The conversations around screen time are familiar. How much is too much? What are the real effects? Where do you draw the line?

I get it.

I am not relaxed about everything on a screen. Social media in particular often feels designed to teach reaction without recovery.

But challenging games are different.

The good ones ask something of you. They require focus, timing, memory, patience, frustration tolerance and the willingness to try again when you have just failed.

That is not nothing.

When I watch my son play, I do not only see screen time. I sometimes see a child learning that difficulty is not a signal to stop. It is a signal to study the problem differently.

That lesson travels.

The arena changes but loop stays the same.

Attempt ↠ Fail ↠ Study the failure ↠ Adjust ↠ Attempt again.

Most things worth doing work like that. You just have to be willing to treat failure as information rather than a verdict.

“It’s only a point.” - Roger Federer