The Consequences of Our Own Actions

Words: 2471 Approximate Reading Time: 18-23 minutes

Video games exist in a weird grey space sometimes. We often want some kind of challenge from games, but actually encountering those challenges can become a source of major frustration. We want to be tested, but in a very specific way. If things are too easy, we find the game boring. If things are too hard, we find the game unfair. And what constitutes “too easy” and “too hard”? We don’t really have a good definition for those things.

Frustration can come from a number of sources. A game itself can easily be the cause through things like “friction” – the game does not operate on rules that the player expects. Design is often about identifying those potential points of friction and getting rid of them. To create an experience for players that is intuitive and controls intuitively.

But I want to examine the ways in which we can be the source of our own frustration. How we can make choices that create problems that we don’t think about. I don’t want to say that by creating this frustration a player is playing the game “wrong” or has made “bad” choices. Perhaps in some cases that could be true. Rather, we can create a frustrating experience for ourselves by making decisions that make sense at the time, and yet wind up being detrimental to “fun” play.

It’s easy to try to place all blame on the players for this phenomenon, but even when I am trying to identify the player as a source of frustration, this can still find its origins in the game itself. Players can end up making bad choices because they aren’t given the necessary information to make better choices. Games that aren’t properly forthcoming with information that would be useful for players to figure out strategies and overcome obstacles can wind up leading players into holes.

Nevertheless, there is a way in which players can address some of this frustration. But it requires us to step back and think more consciously about how we’re playing and how well it works. To actually assess our strategies, rather than continually bash our head against the same wall. To stop and think about what the game might be trying to communicate to us.

In what follows I’ll try to examine in what ways players can create frustration for themselves, and how they can address that problem if they wish.

Understanding Choices

So imagine a game gave you a few different weapons to use throughout your playthrough. And moreover, it gave you the opportunity to upgrade those weapons, making them more powerful. You upgrade two of those weapons…and then continue to use the third for actually fighting. As a result, enemies keep taking a while to die, and you’re sitting there frustrated about how many times you need to hit enemies.

Now it could be possible that this was an issue with the user interface. Maybe you thought you were upgrading all of your weapons, or upgrading the weapon that you’re using. Maybe you thought you had changed your weapon, and you actually hadn’t. These are design issues, and the problem in these cases wouldn’t be the player.

But if you yourself made the choice to continue using your un-upgraded weapon, then that frustration would ultimately be your own fault. Because you are running into a problem that is of your own making: the game hasn’t necessarily become more difficult in a relative sense, you are simply using the wrong weapon to attack them.

Now this example might seem silly. Really now, who would upgrade weapons and then not use them? But the thing is we do this kind of thing all the time. The “upgrades” may not be weapons. Maybe it’s a skill we unlock, or an upgrade to our character. Maybe we ignore our magic skill and then complain that we don’t do any magic damage. Or we focus exclusively on magic and then complain that we don’t do enough melee damage. We can find plenty of examples of frustration that are the result of our own choices.

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples comes from the Souls series, and the way players often make up rules for what counts as “legitimate” play. These rules can include things like not summoning other players or NPCs, or insisting on not using any items beyond the replenishable Estus Flasks. These rules can even go so far as denying an entire build its legitimacy by declaring it to be “easy mode.” Whatever the case may be, these rules are imposed by players upon themselves, and can become a source of frustration as players struggle to beat bosses when summoning help or using items would make their job much easier. Indeed, when the game could very well be trying to scream at the player to use these things.

While players should certainly be able to make choices about how they play, there are also consequences for many of those choices that players may not like. We can choose to never upgrade anything in any game and play with the most basic character that games provide us. That should be our choice. But we should not go in expecting that success will be easy or viable. We have made the choice – directly or indirectly – to make the game more challenging, and so we should not be surprised if the game meets us with that greater challenge.

We are not called to enjoy these demands placed on us by the game. Sometimes players do not like having constraints placed upon them, and limitations on where you can go “for now” are one such constraint. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to just go in whatever direction I fancy? Why must I go to this place first? Players are certainly free to dislike a game for that reason. But the frustration being felt is either the result of the player’s own choices and refusal to engage with the game as designed, or a mismatch between the player’s desires and the convention of a particular genre or developer.

Sometimes the choice may simply be to engage with game elements we don’t like. I’ve talked before about the weird social relationship we have with puzzles and how some players who just categorically do not enjoy solving puzzles will insist on playing puzzle games anyway, with obvious results. If we find ourselves playing a genre of game that doesn’t mesh with what we like, it’s useful to ask if we should be playing that kind of game at all. There’s not much chance for the next game to change our minds and win us over, so why keep punishing ourselves like this?

In looking to this problem, it is important to step back and ask the question “why am I frustrated?” And from there we ask how it could be addressed by us as the player. Could I be the source of this frustration? The answer may not be “yes,” but it is worth asking the question and really searching for alternatives. If our approach is causing problems, why insist on that approach, after all?

Reassessing Choices

Even if we can identify ourselves as the cause of our frustration, that doesn’t help us unless we can turn that into action of some kind. Is this a problem that is solvable through the game itself? Can we change our approach and get a different result? If we don’t have a process for figuring out new solutions, it doesn’t matter much if new solutions exist.

The first thing we can ask is what the game is trying to communicate to us. Have I wandered into an area that is too difficult for me at the moment? A game might directly tell us that we’re currently too weak for an area through enemy levels. If you’ve played an open-world game, you’re likely familiar with a skull icon next to an enemy’s health bar to indicate “hey, this guy is too much for you, you should get the hell out of here.” Conversely, a game might indirectly tell us that we’re too weak by just absolutely destroying us. If we’re supposed to have enough health to survive a few hits, and we’re dying in just one, then maybe that’s a good indication that we should go somewhere else for the moment.

As an example of this in action, Elden Ring uses its early game bosses to communicate this very idea. One of the first enemies you encounter once you step into the proper game world is the Tree Sentinel – a big dude on a horse. Your first instinct is likely to take him on, and you find that you do very little damage to him, and he can destroy you with just a couple hits. The placement of that boss – and the first “major boss” of Margit later on, are ways of telling the player to explore and become stronger. Rather than facing the same challenge over and over again until you win, you should be out gathering strength in some way. When you come back, the challenge will be easier and you’re more likely to win.

So knowing how to listen to what the game is telling you is important. And sometimes the strategy may be as simple as doing what the game is telling you to do. Insisting on ignoring the game just so we can be frustrated is cutting off our nose to spite our own face – we are insisting on avoiding things that make the game fun because we think that fun absolutely must come from our own choices. Which is not to say that we must always be led by the nose to each successive objective, but if the game is telling us we should do something and we ignore it, we have made a choice and we must face the consequences of that choice.

Sometimes we can also experience a mismatch between how we play a character and how we build that character. This problem can usually occur in role-playing games of some kind, where we have the option to upgrade certain abilities or unlock certain skills. If I have decided that I want to play as a melee character and get up in the face of enemies and hack them to bits, then it would make little sense for me to invest in ranged abilities and weapons. By the same token, if I am going to invest in those ranged abilities, then I should be orienting my playstyle around those upgrades.

Identifying this issue revolves around thinking about the systems we’re engaging with and the paths we have chosen. What skills or stats have I invested in, and what does that mean for how I should play? Once we answer that question, we then figure out our next step. Is the way I should play the same as the way I want to play? If not, what can I do about that? Ideally, we might have the option to reallocate all of these upgrades and create a new character that fits our playstyle. If not, we either need to adapt, start over…or just stop playing.

Whatever we do, as long as we recognize when there’s a mismatch, we can take steps to alleviate our frustration.

And finally, there are points where we might be appropriately set up for an encounter and have adopted the “correct” playstyle, and yet we still run into a wall. We’ve tried to fight a boss over and over again, and yet we can’t seem to make any progress.

In these cases, our frustration can often be the result of an insistence on trying the exact same strategy over and over again in the hopes that it finally works. This is a phenomenon we can most often see in watching others play difficult games like FromSoftware titles or games that take inspiration from those titles. You’re up against a tough boss, and you keep getting hit by the same attack and you keep not finding an opening. And so you get frustrated by the fact that you keep getting killed.

But what this usually means is that we’re running on autopilot. We are letting our basic sense of how to play the game guide us, and not actually stopping to monitor the situation and figure out how to read information that is being provided to us. I wrote before about how talking ourselves through problems can help us play more consciously, and that conscious play can help us identify problems and solutions that we wouldn’t normally think about.

By slowing down and processing all of this information consciously, we might notice opportunities or mistakes that just wash over us. This might require some trial and error, but going into a fight with the intent to learn can help us later go in with the intent to win.

When to start asking any of these questions is important, and there’s no right answer. But one strategy I like to employ and encourage in others is identifying a limit for when you stop just doing the same task. How many attempts am I going to make on a boss before I decide to stop and rethink my strategy? I like to go with something fairly small, like five to ten tries. If by that time I haven’t made significant progress, I will rethink my strategy. Knowing when to stop and think is just as useful as how to stop and think.

Concluding Remarks

Trying to identify flaws has come close to being a default position in our consumption of media. Criticism in all of its forms is something that can be attention-grabbing and even profitable, and we don’t even need to be “good” at it to succeed as long as we can get the right people to listen for long enough. Not to mention that we are inclined to treat our likes and dislikes as something that is “justified”: we dislike a game because it is flawed, and it must be flawed because if it wasn’t, we would like it.

But we need to keep in mind that how we engage with a game is just as relevant to our enjoyment as the actual quality of the game. And that engagement can be just as much a source of frustration as the game itself.

Knowing how to identify the points where the choices we’ve made have caused us to become annoyed with the game can help us look at games in new lights. It won’t make us like every single game we hated: sometimes a game is still poorly designed, or sometimes it’s just not the kind of experience we’re looking for. But rethinking our approaches when we’re stuck can help us get unstuck, and allow us to better understand games as a designed experience.