Fall and Winter are typically the season for this, but I’ve noticed more people than usual have taken up interest in what amount to gyms. These very, very expensive gyms, which market themselves as almost exceptional in how they can help you regain yourself. All the while these “miracle body regimes” are advertised everywhere. Suspicious industry much?
Some neighbors of mine were headed there. I remember this because they were about to get into their vehicle, and I asked “the location is right around the corner, you don’t want to walk and maybe save transport money” and they responded “no, we’re old, we can’t do that” before they rode there and gained entry so they can run on the machine, and returned having used their whole wallet due to the journey/destination. Though not as memorable as the fact they came back with a brand of potato chips with the same name as the place they went to. Nothing like feeding into what you’re there to fix.
How about you though?
Videogames that intentionally break their difficulty curve with the intention of seeming elite and prestigious. I’ve suspected for a long time that games like Darksouls and Kingdom Come deliberately try to manipulate their players into getting caught in sunk cost falacies, trying to get people to blame themselves for any failure of game balancing.
Over time they’ve fostered communties which are so toxic that they will lash out at anyone trying to criticize the game. This then frees the developer from all fault and casts any grievance as the players lack of understanding, skill, or hardware. Eventually, any mistake the devs make becomes seen as an artistic choice and will be defended tooth and nail by the players.
I did zen training involving koans. At an abstract level, koans are a practice of trying repeatedly in the face of thousands of failures, without getting impatient. It’s the mental equivalent of Lucy’s punch-through-the-sign training in Kill Bill.
Try try try ten thousand years nonstop. That’s the mindset it takes to make progress with koans, and in the process break some of the mind’s longest-held assumptions.
Ever since I spent some years doing that, I love extremely hard video games. I don’t mind trying dozens or hundreds of times before I pass a level.
I’ve written a whole spiel in response to your comment before I realized you were talking about the difficulty curve, aka new player experience, not the difficulty of the game as a whole.
And yeah, that tracks; the new player experience in both those games you’ve mentioned (along with many other Souls-like games) is kinda bad. Sometimes, some hand-holding at the start is nice.