The hardest game is the one people finish

SLOP3733 · Week 6

By every rule, this should not have worked

A Souls game kills you constantly. It explains almost nothing. It takes about a hundred hours.

One boss can take you fifteen or twenty attempts before you get past it.

Nothing about that sounds like a game people finish.

Because the boss is hard, you die quickly

A minute or two in, you are dead.

So you find out you were wrong a minute or two after starting, and you can be back in front of it fifteen seconds later.

Nothing else in the game is doing that. The difficulty is.

Being hard is what makes the feedback fast

It is the cause, not an obstacle the game has to get past

So measure the loop

Two numbers you can time with a stopwatch

  • Time to failure — you start an attempt, and you find out it did not work.
  • Time to retry — from that moment until you can be trying again.

Everything has both. Reading a chapter has both. An assignment has both.

The three loops, drawn to scale

The harshest one has the shortest loop

And it is harsh and short for the same reason

Now what happens inside those two minutes

Two minutes is only long enough to remember one thing

Not five. You come out of that fight holding one observation, maybe two, because that is all a two-minute attempt leaves you room to keep.

It always sweeps after the second swing.

That is the one thing. It cost you two minutes, and you can check it immediately.

“If I fix just that one thing, do I get through?”

You are already clicking

You did not decide to keep going. You did not talk yourself into another attempt. You wanted to know the answer to that question, and the only way to find out is to walk back in.

Curiosity got you to attempt twenty. Nothing had to be overcome.

Twenty attempts, one thing learned each time

Compare that with a fighting game

A fighting game asks you to love it first. You go to training mode, you grind a combo against a dummy, you learn frame data — and you find out days later, in a real match, whether any of it was worth the hours.

That works, but only for people who already love the game enough to do unrewarded work.

A Souls game asks for something everybody has. Wanting to know what happens if you fix one thing.

Two things had to be true for that to work

You could name what killed you. The game showed you the sweep. If you cannot name the cause, there is no one thing to take into the next attempt.

The boss never changed. Between attempt 4 and attempt 20 the only thing that moved was you, so getting better was something you could feel.

Neither one is true when you study

You cannot say what went wrong in the last three hours. Nothing showed you the sweep.

And the material is not the same thing twice. Every time you come back to it you are reading something slightly different from what you remember.

So you get the punishment without any of the things that made it bearable.

This week you play

One boss. Twenty deaths. One written line each.

What to bring back

Twenty lines, one per death. Each line has to be a claim about the fight that could turn out to be wrong.

It always sweeps after the second swing is a claim. Attempt twenty-one either confirms it or it does not. I was bad at it is not a claim, because no attempt settles it either way.

Bring the log to the Lab in week 7. There is nothing to do in that Lab with an empty one.