Like a lot of people (although mainly men) who were born in the late 80s, I grew up playing videogames. I played my first games on a BBC Micro that my mum brought home from work, then on a PC, and then on an N64 and Playstation 2 before going to university, and just playing the odd thing on my laptop. We also played cards as a family, and my grandfather taught me to play chess. Some Warhammer also went on between my friends and me. Games were a big part of my youth.

This post is about one thing I learnt from all those games. I learnt to lose. When I started to play boardgames socially, and with people who had not had as much experience with games as I had had as a child, I noticed that they behaved differently to me. They were shocked when I played agressively, hurting their chances at winning in order to improve my own; and when they lost, they lost hard, feeling upset and hurt. I did not. Truth be told, I lost a little less, but when I did lose, it was normal just to say ‘good game’ and maybe think about what the key moments in the match had been: I was happy to dwell on the loss.

Playing games teaches you to win games, but it also teaches you to lose them. If you think about it, it seems likely that many people will lose more games than they win: either because they’re playing in a group, or because they seek out – or the videogame provides – more challeging opponents. And that is not to mention things like physical and mental decay: ultimately, we all lose in the end.

That got a little dark. This is wrong, because, actually, losing is often more interesting than winning: it is easy to learn from a loss, and hard to learn from a win. The opponent who beat you is often happy to tell you how they did it, and many a loss is also attributable to some mistake that you might be able to correct in future games. Analysing a match you’ve just won is harder: the return is not as obvious (could I have won more?) and the whole process can come across as gloating.

Sometimes, the hardest lesson to learn from losing, though, is that there was no way you could have won. The cards did not fall in such a way as to allow it, your opponent had too many advantages over you, and so on. You can still, of course, think about how you might have lost a little less, but the loss itself was inevitable.

The challenge then becomes how to handle the loss.