Week 1 Session: The frustration-curve log

Playing a punishing case and a cheating case back to back, and logging where each one earns or loses the player's trust

22 February 2027

Before the session#

Play (or watch, timestamped) one attempt-and-death cycle against two cases: something widely agreed to be punishing-but-fair (Sekiro’s Lady Butterfly is the default; substitute your own if you have a better one), and something you’d call cheap — a fight or obstacle where the failure felt arbitrary rather than earned.

In the session#

We build a shared log on the board: for each case, the moment of death, and the very next thing the game showed the player. Fair cases tend to produce a specific, nameable lesson (“the second hit lands half a second after the first — I watched for one and ate two”). Cheap cases tend to produce a shrug. That gap is the actual data this week collects.

Afterwards#

Keep your log. Every later week’s workshop asks you to design something that produces the fair-case shrug-free reaction rather than the cheap-case shrug, and this is the first time you’ll have named, in your own words, what the difference actually feels like from the player’s seat.