Superficially, video games and prayer could not be more estranged.
Aside, from intentionally ataractic outings such as Journey and Flower (in which you quite literally play as a summer breeze), their effects on the being-ness of humans are a lesson in opposites. Not one entry in the Gears series has inclined me toward neighborly kindness. And when I invoke James Chapter 4 in a whispered breath at my bedside, trying to reconcile walking in His will with the little item of human agency, I’m generally not contemplating loot crates in Breath of the Wild. (“Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.”) One curses video games and God and sometimes in the same breath, but the child generally asks God for a video game. A few years into adulthood, however, I began asking video games for God.
My first time playing Red Dead Redemption 2, I found myself riding through moonlit, snow-covered forest with a prisoner bound and trussed on the back of a horse, and the only sound to be heard for miles was the swuush of my horse’s hooves in fresh snowfall. Even though I had either just finished or was on my way to do a deeply bloody thing, peace had wrapped its arms around me. A delicate, paradisiacal moment. Fight Night: Champion is nothing but pixels and unintentionally side-splitting commentary from Teddy Atlas and Joe Tessitore, but playing the game puts me in a simulacrum of the space I occupied when I boxed IRL, namely where the mind gets out of the body’s way and appreciation of the kinesthetic physical form, the temple of God so to speak, becomes a balletic, heart-thumping, sweat-sheened thing. Surely, there’s more at work than the incidental sidestep out of my own ego that attends any engagement with art or entertainment.
This has to be more than serotonin.
September 10, 2019. I remember the date because I’d noted it in an Instagram post. In my memory of that day, I’m in the living room of the apartment I will barely leave for at least the next two years. It’s late afternoon, there’s that gilding to things, to the furniture, to the TV that has started to turn into a somewhat annoying glare. But that’s how the day appears to me. I’m on the precipice of something the weight and import of which I have no idea. I cannot, could not, imagine what was ahead of me.
September 10, 2019, I started playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.1
My younger brother loves FromSoft games. Lately, he’s taken to sending me TikToks of his Elden Ring gameplay. And there is now as there ever was the same whipsawing between abject despair and vertiginous confidence. When we were younger, I always wondered why he played them. And I asked him. Because every time I would stumble upon him facing off against the Nameless King or simply trying to get through a particularly infested swamp in Bloodborne, he would look like he was on the verge of an aneurism.
I wasn’t and still am not, generally, that kind of gamer. The single-player, story-heavy stuff is more my speed. Give me The Last of Us, give me Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, GTA. Difficulty is, if not an afterthought, then at least a secondary concern. The storyteller, the craftsman, in me played games to figure out Act Breaks and character development, to take apart the Patek Philippe and see just how the story ticked.
But that September afternoon in 2019, Sekiro was on sale in the PS Store, and I figured, “fuck it, why not?”
BOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.
Three weeks later, I had come to the end of one of the most difficult things I’d ever done in my entire life. I say this without hyperbole, including in this list finishing law school and writing books. Yes, Sekiro was more difficult than writing Riot Baby. (Goliath, the jury’s still out.)
For the duration of the game, you play a taciturn shinobi named Wolf (thus named by your hulking father Owl, who found you as an orphan on a battlefield). You’re tasked with safeguarding a boy, Kuro, the Divine Heir. The Ashina clan is on the verge of collapse, and the Divine Heir, whose blood promises immortality, is the key to their resurgence. But the boy must be protected from them and from others at all costs. Enter: boss battles. Exeunt: my sanity.
Say the words “Guardian Ape” or “Lady Butterfly” to the right person and you may see the chattiest person in your life adopt the thousand-yard stare. They may curl into the fetal position, reduced by the memory of their trauma. I had no idea.
Again, I didn’t really bang with FromSoftware games. In part because the gratuitous difficulty didn’t appeal to me but also in part because the dour cast of the whole thing and your character’s absolute lack of vertical movement and all-around sauce just…eugh. But the monsters in the trailer for Sekiro had a vibrancy to them and you had a grappling hook and this fantastical rendering of Sengoku-era Japan thrilled my visual imagination. If I was gonna finally get my brother off my back and play a FromSoft game, let it at least be the pretty one.2
It was perhaps 6 or 7 in the morning when I nailed the final deathblow on the game’s last boss. I know the living room was blue with the day’s beginnings. I’d been up all night. And by the time of Isshin’s defeat, I was a husk of my former self. I didn’t know what to do, too much a zombie to be productive or engage in the business of living but too wired for sleep. I’d been trying to beat him for three whole days.
That’s how it was with many of the game’s bosses. Extended sojourns into a land of ritualized humiliation more exacting than filling out FAFSA forms with Mom as a kid. I don’t know that I ever cried at a boss, but I very nearly broke my controller. I sighed heavily enough to move Everest. If I’d had more hair back then, quite a bit of it might’ve wound up on my floor. It would be like this for hours at a time. I think I spent nearly 17 hours straight on Lady Butterfly. I still won’t talk about Genichiro. The completion-addict in me couldn’t ever contemplate abandoning Sekiro, especially after getting through the first few “levels,” but that meant losing entire days to the damned game. Somewhere along the way, however, I figured out why my brother did it. Why he played these infernal things. Why he threw himself at the concrete wall that was these games. Why he dashed himself onto the rocks. Why he put his hand to the stove over and over and over again.
Because one time—and all it takes is one time—magic happens and your hand doesn’t burn. You don’t turn into a stain on the rocks, you can fly. You don’t break your shoulder against the concrete wall, you crash through it. And that heady feeling of accomplishment…. Accomplishment is too small a word for what beating a FromSoft boss feels like. It’s validation and exhaustion and your greatest triumph. You want to laugh and cry and scream all at the same time. You fist pump. You fall to your knees. You thank God, you curse Him. You are 150% human.
The strangest thing, and probably one of the biggest reasons I kept coming back for my beatings, was that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d so viciously learned. I’ve been out of school for a minute and a half, and, either way, this was different from memorizing French verb tenses or macroeconomic concepts. This was feeling new wrinkles form in my grey matter. I could see it too. Hours in, I would realize that I’d memorized an attack pattern. Or it would occur to me to use a new prosthetic tool in an innovative way.3 Or I’d somehow get the timing on a deflect just right. I would still die. Like, I’d never felt so helpless as when I finally beat (Shura ending) Isshin’s first phase, and then he opened the 2nd phase of the boss battle with an inescapable “One Mind.” But I was getting better. I could quite literally feel it. I could feel my brain changing.
Now, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that this was simply delusion or tactile hallucination, but whatever it was was a completely new gameplay experience, if not in spirit then in degree.
Victory felt right. I’d done the difficult thing, and I’d finished it, and it felt right.
Raised in a Biblically robust household, I noticed very early on the Puritan inclination of the whole “Git Gud” mentality. This idea that choosing the “Easy” or “Novice” difficulty was evidence of spiritual defect and its corollary that completing a game “the way it’s meant to be played” evinced moral correctness. If its adherents aren’t as numerous or loud re Elden Ring, it may be because they’ve migrated toward the indie darling Sifu. The opprobrium Git Gud adherents unleashed when the most recent update allowed for an “Easy” difficulty in a game whose normal, choice-less course is absolutely operose was deafening. Accessibility is weakness, and hesitation is defeat. These are the central tenets in the Church of Git Gud.
There’s an asceticism to it all that, in certain lighting, I would have once upon a time found admirable. I used to nurse a kink for religiously-inspired deprivation. Lent wasn’t something I looked to with dread, it was more an occasion for course-correction I salivated for. If I could eliminate this vice from my diet, my routine, my life for 40 or however many days, then maybe I could free myself of it completely. If I could abstain for long enough, then maybe I could relieve myself of the burden of these cravings. Of course, I could talk myself out of any self-directed programme, but if I could hijack some doctrinal superstructure, then I’d have the guardrails I needed in order to straighten my path, bleed my existence of chaos and disorder, bring me closer to God. At work, in the earliest incarnation of this posture, were self-injurious impulses questing for a justification. And what better justification than the moral instruction that sometimes the best way to tell the right thing from the wrong thing is that the right thing is often the one that hurts more?
40 days and 40 nights in the desert stand to bring you a nourishment you may not find anywhere else. I remember when a dear friend walked me through one week of Ramadan fasting, and when I finally bit into the date at the end of my first day, beginning my inaugural iftar, I involuntarily closed my eyes and inclined my face toward Heaven. Just like in the movies.
Nothing has ever tasted as good as that date.
For a time, I took the spiritual uplift I got from these episodes of physical deprivation as indications that self-care as popularly conceptualized meant laziness and insouciance. Industriousness was self-improvement. Surely, the scraggly-bearded ascetic is some sharp-edged ideal, self-inflicted emaciation leading the self-lessened inexorably toward wisdom, stretching their finger closer and closer to that Thing Bigger Than Them. But starving is not fasting, and during those times in my life when my hip bones protruded when I would have had it otherwise, I confess I felt much closer to stealing a loaf of bread than purloining an hour from the day to converse with the Divine.
In college, when I had a paper or presentation due, I would often run full-tilt at the thing. My dorm room floor would be littered with splayed-open library books, my garbage can a graveyard of empty Red Bull cans, and me blanketed in a feeling of right-ness. For a time, those memories thrilled me. I know now that the thrill lies in how fast I was driving the car, in the danger I was courting. Not in contemplation of any sense of invincibility, but rather out of some darker incitement I could disguise as a productivity-jones.
It was The Power and the Glory that finally completed my turn away from self-immolation. To call it a tremendous book would be to indulge in criminal understatement. I may not have shed a single tear while fighting the Corrupted Monk, but my eyes were quite wet when I turned the last page of that Graham Greene book. I think I found what I found in that book because so much of my idea of faith is caught up in palpable theology, the God that exists in the blood and dirt of our existence. I came away from it understanding finally that, as regards the bounties of my Lenten endeavors, the act should not be the focus while the goal remains in the periphery; rather, it should be the purpose, the reflection, the healing, that stands center stage while the act, the walk through the desert, is in service of that.
My guide through that first week of Ramadan emphasized one thing above all else. My primary concern at all times should be my health. Health is paramount. Holy things shouldn’t be done just because it hurts to do them.
As life would have it, I happened to read The Power and the Glory during Lent.
Since that first Sekiro playthrough, I’ve gone through the entire game three more times. What brought me back that for that second go-around was the fact that the pandemic had hit the United States in earnest and my tour schedule had freed up dramatically. April 3, 2020, my journal entry reads: “Started Sekiro again. Like a dumbass.”
The game was easier that time, barely. But the high was still there. Later that year, on the one year anniversary of my beginning that whole sojourn, my brother reminded me of what I’d begun, and I noticed I was 25% away from my first Platinum Trophy. That Sekiro was the first game I ever Platinum’d is certainly some sort of perversion, but of what, I’m still not sure. It had, however, turned into something fun. As hearty and sanguine a repast as it was, it was fun. I could finally say that with confidence.
I will play Elden Ring at some point. I know this. I’ve submitted to that fact. General Radahn’s gravity magic at work.
So far, I’ve contented myself with watching other people’s playthroughs and streams, laughing at their rage-quits and rejoicing in their victories. But while watching, I can’t help but imagine how I would tackle that particular boss. I don’t worry that knowing what’s to come may ruin some of the game for me, largely because I know that actually playing the thing will be an entirely different experience from watching it played. Whomst among us has successfully dodged Malenia’s waterfowl dance on the first try? “Everybody falls their first time.”
But I do wonder, somewhere in the enormity of the excursion waiting for me, if there’s maybe space for an ambrosial moment or two somewhere in the Lands Between. Something like Donna playing “Pilgrim.”
I think of that moment in S4E5 of Halt and Catch Fire a lot.
That look in Donna’s eyes as she figures the game out. As she learns it. As she submits to it. As new wrinkles appear in her brain, the imprint left by celestial fingers.
I hope I can approach Elden Ring not in the posture of a Git Gud penitent but clad in more modest garments.
What does James Ch. 4 tell us? “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.”
Now reading: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Now listening: Crooked Soul (Reimagined) - Dayseeker
A little bit of background: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a single-player action-adventure game that incorporates elements of stealth, role-playing, and, what I would come to learn, emotionally punishing boss battles.
At the end of the Sengoku Period in Japan, a state of near-constant civil war from 1467-1615, a powerful warrior named Isshin Ashina has taken control of the land, but after two decades, it’s all on the verge of collapse. A group called the Interior Ministry is closing in. During that period of civil war, a shinobi named Owl finds a young orphan on a battlefield. In the cinematic sequence that opens the game, the land hisses with smoke, columns of the stuff spiraling up into the air. The groaning of wounded soldiers has stopped. The carnage is over. But amidst it kneels this adolescent boy.
The Owl is a hulking figure. Sengoku-era Juggernaut. And his sword is about as long as I am tall. He stands before the boy. And in a paternal gesture familiar to almost anyone who has watched anime, read manga, or played a video game inspired by either, the Owl draws his sword across the boy’s cheek and makes a small, slow incision, baptizing the boy Wolf.
Fun fact: this selfsame brother got so frustrated fighting the first real boss in Sekiro (the horse guy) that he quit the game and hasn’t touched it in over a year. I am convinced he will never return to that game, as much as I bully/beg him.
Hint: Try using Mist Raven against Owl (Father)’s shoulder check-slash-firecracker combo to wind up behind him for an open shot.