work / fear of fear of losing

Been playing a couple games lately, have generally done well. Whined breifly about a game of Mall Madness, of all things, but took control of it from there.

I keep wanting to design these dexterity based games, or asymetrical games. I keep wanting to play dexterity games and asymetrical games. I think its that I want to play, but I want to be able to say to myself that I'm not failing if I lose, that it doesn't matter, or that it wasn't really supposed to be necessarily fair anyway. Its not the fear of losing, its the fear of fearing losing. Awful.

I just can't seem to tackle a mental challenge (unless its extremely creative), without it turning into work, without taking it as a failure if I don't do well. I don't know how to get around that.

I think a lot of it is the fact I'm basically doing it for a living. Doing research, writing papers, its this cutthroat, intense exercise in wrangling ideas and pinning them down. Its often not fun, the stakes are high, and confidence that you're doing well is a large part of keeping with it. That attitude finds its way into game playing sometimes.

Its a bad thing.

I feel like I'm getting to the point of being a whole lot less crabby in games, but I still need to fundamentally change the way I think about them. I need to get really jarred out of my thinking somehow. Its insane to me how difficult this has proven to be, when it seems like it would be really easy.