dying a lot makes you think
This morning, I woke up with the urge to play a shmup. My eyes glazed over at the thought of committing the time needed to sharpen my skills again in Astebreed, just to finally get that Normal 1CC I’ve been working toward intermittently for the past two-ish years.
I was looking for something with a little less commitment that I could attempt repeatedly in short bursts. The “how far can I get on a single credit” challenge on Mushihimesama’s Ultra difficulty fit that need perfectly. For sake of clarity I won't call it a "1CC" since my objective wasn't to clear the game--which is impossible at my current skill level--but just to get as far as I could.
In the midst of an endless stream of lost lives, I started to become contemplative. What exactly draws me to high-difficulty experiences like rhythm games and danmaku?
When I was younger, I didn’t entirely avoid the genres, but I treated them with a passing yet wistful curiosity, wishing I could make progress in games that seemed to have an impossibly steep difficulty curve right from the get-go.
Skip ahead to today, and high-skill-ceiling rhythm games and shmups now make up a much larger portion of my gaming repertoire. The intimidation and fear I once felt have lessened--though, to be frank, they’re not entirely gone.
it's probably the razor... or is it?
So what changed? What happened over the years that made me more open to getting my ass beat into the concrete?
I chronicled part of that transformation in my piece on rhythm gaming (which you can read here), but the full picture is bigger. The simple, Occam’s Razor explanation is that after years of throwing myself at the wall across rhythm games, fighting games, shmups, and similar types of games, I finally made enough noticeable improvement to convince myself I was making progress--that my time wasn’t being wasted.
See, to me, nothing feels worse than booting up a game, pouring in however many hours of effort to get better, and then shutting it off without any tangible sense of improvement. You just lose those hours forever to the abyss. The only thing you’ve done is time-travel forward, and feel worse for the privilege.
In reality, I think the real reason I’ve grown to enjoy these games goes deeper, but there’s some truth in that simple explanation: once I started to see unambiguous improvement, that was enough to encourage me to keep at it.
My actual skill in these games continues to improve slowly but steadily. Maybe part of it is mindset: learning to view progress more positively, even when it doesn’t compare to the incredible videos I see online of top players pulling off 1CCs, perfect full combos, or clutch rounds in a fighter.
Maybe some of it is my growing addiction to score attack and the self-improvement grind, finding joy in climbing the leaderboard against my own scores, or unlocking achievements after months or years of effort. Those kinds of milestones serve as objective proof that I’ve reached a skill level I hadn’t before.
no matter what, I enjoy the grindan gaem
Whatever the reasons, I’m happy I can find joy in the process. Otherwise, I’d probably keep gravitating exclusively toward games where progress is tracked through clear numbers--grindy JRPGs or incremental games where every single hour contributes to some measurable value. At least in those, I could always say, “well, even if I’m not playing at a high skill level, my time spent in this game isn’t wasted.”
I still love number-go-up grinds, and probably always will, but I'm glad that for whatever combination of reasons I'm much more open to the other side of the coin, where the upgrades don't happen inside of the screen, but on the other side of it.