“how much enjoyment, impatience, desire; how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment of the day! and yet things will soon be so silent… everyone wants to be the first in this future–and yet death and deathly silence are the only things certain…” 

- nietzsche, the gay science

the first video game i ever played was minecraft. a hot july afternoon eight years ago, my friend and i kneeled on the floor of his living room, knees digging into the grain of the carpet, and stared in awe at the flatscreen tv balanced haphazardly on a dusty glass-and-mahogany cabinet. i was terrible at the game, and by the end of the afternoon, my friend’s x-box controller was sticky with cold sweat. 

it was not a particularly high-stakes situation; the world we were playing on was set to easy, late afternoon light was streaming in through the windows, and our parents were clattering around in the kitchen, gossiping about something or another. but i was so tense, you would think we were playing a horror game instead. i was so terrified of imminent death that i would flinch every other minute at some nonexistent perceived threat. nevermind the zombies and creepers–i refused to get within a chunk of any darkness, placed torches on every available block, and crouched whenever i came close to so much as a one-block drop.

although i didn’t die that day, i also had No Fun. the few times i played minecraft at my friend’s house afterward, i stuck to creative worlds, too afraid to approach even the peaceful mobs. 

at first, i thought that my fear of death stemmed from the knowledge that i sucked at combat. i was never allowed to play video games–not until i could afford to buy the games myself. my parents maintained that, as a student, i should be focused on my education, and when i had free time, i should amuse myself with books and nature. looking back, i’m thankful for this–but that’s not the point of this post, soooooooo moving on. anyway, i freaking sucked at fighting. the first time i worked up the courage to rush out of my makeshift little cave base to attack an advancing skeleton, i was so terrified i simply mashed random buttons that didn’t do much more than swing my sword in the wrong direction until i was mercilessly shot dead. i avoid first person shooters like the plague and decline my younger brother’s requests to duel in whatever game has caught his fancy. even in games with extremely rudimentary combat, like webfishing, which i frequent, the boxing glove is by far the least used item in my inventory. 

while helping a friend edit his paper, i learned about the term “self-efficacy.” essentially, it’s similar to the idea of self-esteem, except the confidence is task-specific. for example, i have high self-efficacy when it comes to research–i trust that no matter how unfamiliar i am with a topic, with enough time and effort, i can develop a complex and full understanding of it. on the other hand, i have comparatively lower self-efficacy when it comes to public speaking: i can stress about a presentation for days and i become a stuttering, shaking mess when speaking in a formal setting in front of more than ten people.

in researching for this post, i stumbled upon a book published by jesper juul called the art of failure. while the book focused more heavily on why failure encouraged users to keep playing rather than the opposite, i thought it would be worth checking out; perhaps it could provide insight as to where my mindset differed from the norm.

in his book, juul defined something called the “paradox of failure”–that is, while humans generally avoid failure, we still seek games out, even though we often fail while playing them. this scenario could be attributed to the human urge to seek aristotle’s catharsis: by experiencing pity and fear in a fictional scenario alongside the protagonist of the game, negative emotions are purged, resulting in a calmer, more relaxed state overall. 

i completely disagree. i’m so tense while playing video games that sometimes, i give myself a stress headache from freaking out so much. and, although i rarely play video games myself, i do frequent certain gaming communities online, and i can say with confidence that the users there are rarely calm or relaxed. 

juul did raise another point, though: games promise us that “we can repair a personal inadequacy,” often “an inadequacy that they produce in us in the first place.” this got me interested–could the reason i hated dying so much in games be because my inability to survive in a fictional world creates a sense of inadequacy? it’s true that i have always seen death as failure; after all, success is, in the sense of the word, surviving, and dying could not be more of the opposite. thus, with every death, the sentiment that i am simply not good enough at the game piles up, re-enforcing my already low self esteem when it comes to video game skill, courtesy of my parents. indeed, juul went on to say that “if we praise a game for teaching important skills… we must accept that failing in it will imply a personal lack of the same important skills.” 

my research could have easily stopped here. of course this was why i–and so many others–was so afraid of death in video games: i simply do not want to feel inadequate. i do not want to feel as though i am lacking the skills that i need to survive. but there was a major foil: i don’t feel this way about anything other than video games.

i have never been someone preoccupied with winning. i remember, at one of the first swim meets i ever attended, at the wee age of eight, i purposefully got second place because the girl next to me had confided in me before the race that if she won, her mom would buy her a slice of cake. there was nothing in it for me: not if i won and not if i didn’t; so, in what i thought was a gracious move at the time, i slowed down just before the wall and let her take the number one spot. now, of course, i don’t think i’d do the same in that situation: it is far better to allow someone to win for themselves than to lose out of pity, but i like to think that i’ve maintained my more carefree attitude about competitions. 

not winning in a competition is, in the sense of the word, an inadequacy. finishing last in a race, for many, demonstrates a comparative lack of athleticism or skill… and despite that, i have rarely ever taken a loss in sports as hard as i have in video games. in fact, i move on much faster in sports; always looking ahead, trying to see how i can improve. 

video games are another story. i have set a video game down for months on end, simply because i can’t bring myself to click the respawn button. i am flooded with an overwhelming sense of shame every time i die–a sense that i rarely feel after a bad swim event or after a terrible grade on a test. so why? what separates video games from everything else? 

juul identifies three causes for failure–the person (skill and disposition), entity (characteristics of the obstacle itself), and circumstances (transient causes like luck, chance, or the requirement of extraordinary effort). playing the blame game is easy in real life: i can happily attribute a suboptimal grade on a test to entity (guys the test was soooooo hard) or circumstances (i got like zero sleep last night ☹️) before a personal flaw. in video games, however, i recognize most of my failures as a product of my personal inadequacy, and that’s something i can’t brush under the rug, or blame on something else. in a scenario where there is no one to blame other than myself, my already present self-criticism is amplified into an oppressive mindset of self-hatred. 

with no one else to blame, i end up viewing every single death as an overwhelming failure of my own making. it builds up, weighing down on me in an emotional toll that i eventually can’t handle any more. i guess that’s when i usually quit the game. juul puts it nicely–“by refusing the emotional gamble of the game… [i am] acting in a self-defeating way; by refusing to exert effort in order to progress the game, [i] shield [myself] from possible future failures.” 

in a period of such refusal, i stumbled upon about oliver’s channel in my youtube recommended. at the time, he was a smaller creator, with only about a thousand subscribers–i caught one of the first uploads of his minecraft series. he was doing what i had attempted eight years ago: playing minecraft completely blind. a quick scroll through his page revealed that he played most–if not all–games blind as well; that is, playing without consulting any guides or asking others for help. 

i could never. or, at least, i had never. i could prattle on about how the reason for this was that i’m a broke high school student, and that my gameplan when purchasing a game was to see if it was worth it or not first by watching through a playthrough. but the real reason is that even if a game is free (or, ashamedly, pirated and repurchased later), i feel exceptionally stupid any time i spend longer than ten minutes on a fight or puzzle; stupid enough that i feel the overwhelming urge to search up how to complete it so that i can prove to some imaginary onlooker that no, really, i am capable of solving this puzzle quickly, i just need a little nudge in the right direction. in a way, this is my fear of death–or failure–all over again; i’m so fixated on playing a game the “right” way that i end up experiencing it all wrong. 

to be frank, there is no denying that oliver is far better at games than i am. it’s clear that he has a lot more experience than i when it comes to not only playing games, but experiencing them as well. there’s also no denying that he has an insight to certain things that i lack (such as figuring out redstone, which i, to this day, still do not understand).

but there is a certain thing about the way that he approaches video games that completely changed my outlook on death. despite everything, he is an ordinary guy who can fail and succeed. watching him discover certain things for himself, whether through profound insight or brute force, was, for lack of a better word, inspiring. when he dies, he rolls with the punches, learning from his mistakes, recovering his items (if he can), and simply moving on. he rarely quits because of a failure; rather, he lets himself learn from his mistakes and chooses to give himself the opportunity to succeed. returning to juul’s quote from earlier, by shunning the self-defeating mannerisms that i’ve grown accustomed to, oliver creates room for himself to fail more–and succeed more, too. not only does this allow him to keep on enjoying the game, he also improves his skillset (self-efficacy) through positive reinforcement too, resulting in fewer deaths and failures. 

i had never given myself the opportunity to start over following a death, and it follows that i had never given myself the opportunity to succeed. after deeming a world a failure, i never revisited it, forever condemning it to the ever-growing pile of worlds–or even games–that i had failed and could no longer bear to experience. it’s no wonder that i suck at video games so much; i quit before i even had the chance to improve. 

watching oliver keep a single world for so long, take risks without fearing death, and eventually succeed and beat the game made me realize that my approach to gaming was, quite frankly, a little silly. 

why was i so afraid of dying–of failing? who was i trying to impress? what was i trying to be prove, by giving up the experience of playing just so i could do the “right” thing? i’d missed out on so much: conflicts, battles, plot twists, game mechanics… all because i’d been afraid to let myself down. but really, what was the point of playing games if i didn’t fail? 

the next game i bought, i resolved to play blind. i knew outer wilds would be difficult–and that daunted me–but i also knew that there was little combat and comparatively fewer skill-based elements that would daunt me. even with all the puzzles, i refused to let myself search for an online guide, no matter how much i wanted to, and allowed myself to experience the game slowly and for myself. 

// from here on out, spoilers for outer wilds! it is a beautiful game best played blind. come back later or continue on at your own risk. //

in a game where dying is inevitable, i wasn’t so afraid of trying new things, of being a little more daring. there’s something beautiful about that, i think–of accepting the inevitable and living with it. as nietzsche eloquently puts it, i, in-game, at least, developed a sense of amor fati, or the love of fate. accepting the inevitability of death allowed me to see it as something other than failure, and, in that vein, gave me permission to love playing and “living.” i was more daring, more of a “yes-sayer!” rather than shying away from difficulty and opposition, i found it in me to face it head on–so what if i died in the process? i was going to die anyway. 

this is, of course, not to say that i played the game with reckless abandon, and definitely not to say that i played it seeking death. my new philosophy was not one of pessimistic detachment–i was not resigning to death, simply accepting it. i think there’s a clear difference in voluntary and involuntary deaths or failures. as camus puts it, “living, naturally, is never easy. dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively… the uselessness of suffering.” the circumstances of this quote are different from what i’m applying it to–camus states this as a reference to suicide. however, i still think it’s applicable–my suffering in games was a product of my constantly fighting the concept of failure and death. but by accepting and understanding that failure and death are inevitable when playing a new game, i can let go of my fear of it, and enjoy the game as it was meant to be played. camus states later that, “if the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy… crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.” no longer was i hiding behind the respawn button; by accepting my failures, i was on the road to improvement. i was no longer trying to die, but i did not cling to the notion of survival either. 

i did still tried my best to keep my hearthian alive, whether that be by extensively ensuring i had all my equipment on before i left my ship, or by trying my damndest to pick the smoothest spot to land, or some otherwise completely redundant safety measure. but, even when i did die due to some stupid mistake (i died to cacti more times that i’d like to admit,) i let myself move on and continue playing. after all, i could always try again. 

not dying is still the point of games–the conventional ones, at least. playing in a contrarian manner gets old quick; it’s too easy to try to die. but i had to learn how to let myself live. 

in living, it’s okay to die. 

it’s okay to try again.

new year’s resolutions are such a scam. 

it feels like every year that i give up too soon culminates in the underlying sense of apathy that threatens to break through the temporary vigor that comes with a facade of a fresh start. (wow what a pretentious sentence. i should start writing writing threads on twitter.) 

“this year, i’ll change.” how many times in my life have i thought that? not just on january first, either; how many times has it been a day, a week, a month later, when i catch myself rotting in my room, staring at the dust motes suspended before the ceiling, with yet another unfinished project lying forgotten beneath the slats of my bed? dust patterned into greyish flattened carpet, i peek through the cracks of my comforter at the clothes on the floor and think, “starting now. the years before didn’t count.”

i could attribute this to so many things, each falling into the previous. everything causes (or correlates to, i suppose) something, or so it seems, because it often feels like my inability to follow through on any of my resolutions is less of a simple failure and more of a consequence of every little thing i’ve ever done wrong in my entire life. but the greatest reason for my terrible resolution-keeping skills is, probably, my refusal to accept that there isn’t some magical thing about the new year that will make my resolution come true. a resolution means that i have to work for my goals, like everybody else. 

something about new years has always given me the impression that what i wish for on the eve will magically come true come morning so long as i wish hard enough. so if i squeeze my eyes shut and will tears into the corner of my eyes, maybe whichever old man is watching me from the heavens above will pity my state enough to make my dreams come true. 

and when i wake up, inevitably, and nothing has changed, inevitably, do i have a right to feel disappointed? or maybe the only rights i have are in dragging myself out of bed and starting another mundanely guilt filled day. If only i'd spent the last day working on myself rather than wishing i didn’t have to work on myself. if only, if only, if only– the day afters are filled with if onlys. 

christmas is my favorite time of year– the holiday cheer, the jolly spirit in the air… alright, alright, i’ll admit it, i’m exaggerating a little. coming from a chinese family, christmas was never as big a deal as it might have been, but it’s still my favorite time of year. seeing the lights glowing in the too-dark evenings when i’m driving back home from yet another late practices, stepping into a warm house from the frigid outside air, and sipping hot ginger tea as i’m doing my homework makes me happy to be alive. 

i feel the seasonal depression comes for me less in the winter, and more in the summer. is summer-seasonal-depression a thing? is the opposite of winter-seasonal-depression a thing? because i’d have that. 

given my love for winter, the holiday season feels like a love-letter to that essence. tinny jingle-bell saturated carols play 24/7 from the radio, odes to the very things i adore about winter: the creeping expectation of snow (and the snow days that come with it,) of thanksgiving (not the holiday, though i do love that too,) of time with friends and family– i love it all. 

this year, though, felt different. 

christmas crept up, slowly, like some inconspicuous holiday instead of the big deal it really is. it felt like school started, i blinked, and suddenly the first semester of my junior year was almost over, college applications are about to start, and oh look! winter break! what with junior year’s expectedly unexpected unbearable toll, i barely had time to prepare presents for my family and friends between the everpresent tests and the foreboding future of college applications breathing down my neck. 

so the preparation for christmas might have happened, but i missed it in my depression haze of doing everything and nothing all at the same time, driving unseeing past the flashing decorations that would have had my nose pressed up against the window just a year prior. 

on christmas eve, far later than usual, i hauled the old plastic tree my parents had bought at costco all those years ago out of the garage and decorated with my brother, running my fingers along the warped plastic lines of those ornaments, memories from too long ago. we didn’t go through the effort of putting up lights this year, but the house on the corner more than made up for our lacking. 

christmas day was nice. i got a nice box of chocolates, and spent the rest of the day playing minecraft, which i had bought for my brother and i, while my parents drove up north to attend a concert. i can only hope i’ll have more time in the future to play games with my brother between all the rushing about for the all-too-quickly approaching future. 

i went to bed early that night, bidding my younger brother goodnight, and stumbling up the stairs, feeling like i was about to puke everywhere from my overenthusiastic shoveling of hot pot at dinner. i didn’t really shower– just stood under some lukewarm water for a long time, staring at the wall– before curling up in my sheets and Not Sleeping. 

christmas had felt lacking. i hadn’t woken up excited like i always had, hadn’t skipped steps down the stairs to check on the presents under the tree, stuck my hand into my stockings to feel about for trinkets. no, i’d overslept an hour, and when i did finally wake up, i’d sat on my be with the curtains drawn and tried to ignore the mess of homework and clothes on the ground. the rest of the day, i’d only floated around, like some sort of ghost haunting the colder corners of my house, preoccupied not with the past, but with all that laundry i needed to do tomorrow. 

it feels like i’m writing about nothing at all. am i just getting older? is my disappointment with christmas simply a reflection of my own maturing mentality? 

maybe i had thought i could retain that sense of happiness and naivety for a little longer. maybe i had hoped, subconsciously, that for the rest of my life, i could continue to set aside a whole season of celebration for nothing at all except for an arbitrary holiday for a religion i don’t even practice, like my younger brother who’d raced around, joyous, waving his new kirby game around and around and around in the air. or, maybe, this is just because i’d set aside my worries for too long, and now that it’s the end of the year, i have to do all this stuff, and i can’t enjoy anything anymore without being too caught up with how i’m literally drowning in my responsibilities. 

the doom and gloom from christmas day, made worse by my realization of it, has carried through to now, enough that i am sitting here writing about it. is this regret for not enjoying this christmas season enough or dread for the next one? 

diagnoses have never been my strong suit– often, particularly when running into a situation that turns out to be particularly disappointing, i prefer to wallow in my sadness before picking up the pieces of myself and running away. but i miss christmas too much to lose it like that, so, for today, i’ll be like gregory house. i think the problem with this year’s christmas is that i didn’t even try to look forward to it. 

christmas is always a big deal to me because i spend half the year looking forward to it. every little detail– from my neighbor’s new christmas decorations to the cafe’s menu changing to accommodate hot peppermint coffee– is noted in my anticipation. this year, though, i was so caught up with everything else that i didn’t even think to pay attention. how could i possibly expect to enjoy a season where half of the fun is in the anticipation if i didn’t even think to anticipate? 

it’s the little things about christmas that make me happy– i’ve known this for forever. i guess, now that i’m older, the little things are more difficult to see amidst the all-encompassing nature of the terrible horrible big things. 

next year, i can believe that i’ll pay more attention. next year, i can believe that things will be better.

damp and dark seattle weather has me feeling like it’s constantly dusk; the sun has been setting all day– in fact, it never rose. 

contrary to popular opinion, i’m a big fan of this gloomy weather. or maybe i’m just a seattleite. whether i have a vitamin deficiency from the lack of sunlight or not, i feel tired all the time come wintertime, and the constant rain and overcast sky feels like a suitable excuse. now i can go around saying i feel tired because of the dark sky, the cold, etc., instead of forcing an introspective conversation regarding the underlying causes of my less-than-ideal sleeping habits on an otherwise mundane tuesday afternoon. now i am complaining for a reason. 

complaining is the topic of today’s reflection (my first one, everybody clap!) because i feel the need to complain about how often i end up complaining. often, i feel like a serial complainer– whenever there is a lull in the conversation, where another person might redirect to a more worthwhile topic or simply sit in the silence, i feel the inexplicable urge to complain. i don’t even feel particularly strongly about the things i complain about; i simply choose what seems to be most popular at the moment, like something i’ve seen online or overheard in passing, and play up a reasonable opinion. 

thus, when i complain about the rain, trust that i do not truly feel that way. i love the rain. i love that wet muddy smell, i love the way the leaves shake fat droplets of water onto my face when i least expect it, i love the sound the wind makes when it rattles the windows and makes my entire house creaks. i especially love being inside when it rains– watching the water pour into the gutters like a miniature river and thanking the heavens above that no matter how bad things are, at least i’m not out there. and yet, i take rain by the neck and throw it into the path of whatever incoming bus there is whenever the lunch table gets a quiet. sorry, guy. 

i decided, today, that i need to make an active effort to stop complaining. and then i immediately forgot about that effort when i found myself complaining about the same thing (traffic, if you were wondering) for the third time to the same group of people. (again, if you were wondering, i quite enjoy traffic when i’m not in a hurry… something about a whole group of people collectively stuck in transit.)

it dawned on me then how little this group-project of people i hardly know truly care about this trivial thing that i cannot seem to stop myself from sharing with them, simply because my slightly over-reactive brain felt that things were a little too awkward. what would i gain from sharing this minor inconvenience? in fact, if i were them, i know i wouldn’t care about traffic in the slightest– maybe i’d shoot an empathetic look their way, or pretend that i, too, really cared about the state of traffic in seattle, but eventually, the conversation would move to bigger, better things. 

i never know what to say when someone else begins to complain about a trivial thing– how could i expect better from others when i start to do the same? 

anyways, a resolution, one that i hope i don’t abandon or forget: quit complaining about things i don’t care about.

the weather today is great.