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QP: Fun and frustration.

So I've been playing a lot of Dead Cells, and while it's been crazy fun, it's also been crazy frustrating.

Dead Cells is a roguelike or rogue-lite metroidvania from Motion Twin... Basically, you explore and battle through this ever-changing, randomly generated castle, and when you die you start over. But it's never the same twice, and you improve as you go—new weapons, new tricks, and so on.

I know part of the problem is I lack or am at least weak in some of the basic skills necessary, such as timing and strategy and such. I keep forgetting to dodge or get hit by stupid attacks and all that, and it gets really frustrating.


Frustration aside, I'm having fun when things go well...which is a good chunk of the time, I guess. What sucks is how hard it is for me to let go of that frustration and how unwilling I am to look at things objectively. 

What I think I need to do—and this isn't easy, at all—is reframe my losses as something other than failure and either deemphasize the frustration, reemphasize the fun, or both. This is a game; it's supposed to be fun. Challenging, but fun. And it's mostly that.

The risks and challenges—learning to dodge, for example—are part of the fun, even if it's probably harder for me than it would be for other players who come to this with more of the basic skills in place. And, like, I also need to remember that this was never going to be an easy game, but I am probably improving, albeit understandably slowly. This is supposed to be tough even for those seasoned players!!

Worst case scenario, I give up. I'd hate to, really, and not just because I spent money. I am enjoying it, and I want to enjoy it, but it's true—sometimes the challenges are too great, and it stops being fun. Alternatively, I may set the game aside now and then (play other things, do other stuff) so I can cool off, maybe process, and come back refreshed and ready.


I'm gonna maybe try out these "quickposts" once in a while in which I share about something relatively briefly—or with relatively low effort put in. It's not that I don't love you, dear reader; it's that sometimes these posts take way, way too much time and energy, so hopefully this will help bring more content to the table? I should probably revise this blurb and reuse it when I do these, yup, especially once I formalize my expectations for them.
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