Eternal Dilettantism

Brother, have you heard the good word? Silksong is a hard video game and people have thoughts about it. (To be fair, we've now done several podcasts in a row talking about Silksong for an hour and it's likely we're not quite near done.)

Still, navigating time is part of getting older.

The term "respecting your time" becomes more complicated when mortality comes into play, not to mention the additional stressors that come with age.

What do you want to spend time doing?

Patrick: There has been a lot of so-called “difficulty discourse” in the past few weeks because of Hollow Knight: Silksong, a version of the same song and dance that seems to happen every time a new FromSoftware game is released. I find myself sympathetic to many of the arguments about ways Silksong is both meaningfully “unfair” because it’s trying to elicit a specific physical and emotional reaction from the player and secretly whippering “well, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

I’m someone who has, for years, harped on and on about “respecting my time” as being a core tenant for the video games I want to, uh, spend time with. But sometimes I have trouble reconciling that with my desire to regularly spend time with games like Dark Souls, Silksong, and others that are explicitly built around the concept of extracting unending patience from you. 

And yet I can bang my head against a single boss in Silksong for two hours and change, but when I come out the other side, nothing about that feels like a waste of time. In fact, Silksong is one of those games where I’m dreading looking at my watch while I’m in the middle of a fight because I just know that I should be wrapping up and headed to bed But two things are true: 

1. If I keep trying the fight and fail to beat it, I’ll go to bed upset
2. If I keep trying the fight and succeed, I’ll feel great but not be at all ready for bed

Much of the satisfaction I derive from Silksong, Souls, and its ilk, though, are because of a confidence that I can do it. It’s not a waste of time if it feels like an investment. I know with enough time, patience, and luck, the right combination of factors will result in personal victory.

So when I say that I take issue with games “wasting my time,” I think ultimately that comes down less to the amount of time on the clock than it does feeling like the conclusion is worth it. Two hours in the same arena with the same boss is not “progress” in the same way that turning in a quest to get some experience points that might level you up, but one often feels way better!

Also, maybe it’s selfish to admit this, but it feels fucking cool to accomplish something you know that other people gave up on. I do not judge people who use mods. I wish Silksong had more modifiers and difficulty options. But I am not also going to pretend like I don’t get a tiny bit of smug satisfaction out of beating the shit out of a gross but and knowing that other people didn’t!

I don’t know. I am not, personally, an “easy mode” person. Not for any particular reason, more that the games I tend to play these days slot up nicely with what I enjoy and am good at. Which isn’t to say I’m not challenged (Silksong is hard!) but I better know the challenges that I enjoy.

You play pretty different games than me. How do you navigate “difficulty” in games these days?

Rob: For the most part, I think your ability to deal with difficulty in video games is a function of how much time you have to spend on them and games like them. People that play tons of Metroidvanias are going to have a much higher floor when they encounter a new one. There are people who just have a knack for understanding and excelling at games, but for the most part people get good at the stuff they specialize in. For some games, this is more a matter of conceptual familiarity, for others its mechanical, and for a lot of games it’s some combination of both. Someone playing Civilization on Deity doesn’t need to achieve pro-StarCraft levels of speed with their mouse and keyboard, but they need to know the game’s systems intimately. You have to play a fair bit of Civ to get there. Some people are going to just come in the door just having a knack at video games, I think you’re one of those when it comes to anything even remotely platformer-related, I think Cado intuits a lot about a game’s logic in a very short time frame of watching or playing it. But even if you don’t have any special affinities, you can deal with just about any game’s challenges if you can spend the time to focus on it.

I fall off a lot of video games because if I stop playing them for any length of time, I start forgetting how they work or what I was doing. It can be as simple as forgetting basic combos in an action game, but a lot of games I play require a lot of practice just to figure out how to make anything happen in them at all. Gary Grigsby’s War in the East 2 has a 400-page manual that drills down into the game’s frankly absurd levels of simulational detail, and just making a single unit move and attack another unit in a different hexagon is a surprisingly involved process compared to what you find in superficially similar games. You can ignore a lot of systems or leave them to be automatically managed but there’s really no way you can turn that game into something as straightforward as Panzer General. Once I spent a few months away from War in the East, playing it again required practically starting over from the beginning of the manual. That’s a different kind of difficulty than a Soulslike, but both are asking for a lot of persistence and patience.