Between Battles

  • Why “Try Harder” is the Wrong Tool for Some Problems

    This isn’t about games, and it isn’t going to tell you to just think positive. It’s about the problems that keep beating you, and being honest about which ones you can change and which ones you can’t. The games are only a starting point. In games there is a particular kind of enemy that works…

  • The Drawer I Couldn’t Empty

    There is a drawer in my kitchen that I have tried to clean out four separate times, and four separate times I have failed. It did not start as a junk drawer. I am not sure any junk drawer does. They become junk drawers the way most things in a hard year quietly become something…

  • Why We Guard the Things That Do Nothing

    There is a small experiment you can run on almost anyone, and it exposes something they would probably deny about themselves. Find a thing they own that does nothing. Not nothing valuable, nothing functional. The specific mug they reach for when eight identical ones sit in the cupboard, the pen they would be quietly furious…

  • The Wanting Doesn’t Stop Just Because the Body Did

    There is a particular kind of suffering that does not get talked about much, because from the outside it can look almost like ingratitude, and from the inside it is too tangled to explain quickly. It is the suffering of still wanting. Let me describe it the way it actually happens, because the abstract version…

  • The Thing I Do Before the Hard Thing

    I want to tell you about the ten seconds in the parking lot. You know the ones, even if yours happen somewhere else. The engine is already off. You have arrived. You are sitting in the building’s shadow, close enough to read the sign on the door, and by every practical measure there is nothing…

  • The Save Point Problem Nobody Talks About

    Here is a question that sounds simple and is not. Why do some stretches of your life feel enormous in memory, vivid and long, while others, sometimes much longer ones, have simply vanished, collapsed into a blur you could not reconstruct if your life depended on it? A two-week trip somewhere new can occupy more…

  • The Strange Mercy of a Game That Lets You Lose

    Here is something I never questioned until one day I did, and then I could not stop seeing it. Games are built almost entirely around losing, and we play them for fun. Sit with how strange that is. You buy a game to enjoy yourself, and the experience it actually delivers is mostly failure. You…

  • The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Hard Mode

    There is a particular argument that breaks out among gamers with total predictability, and it is worth paying attention to because the same argument runs, quieter and meaner, through the rest of life. A game adds an easy mode, or an accessibility option, or a way to skip a brutal section, and a certain kind…

  • The Bonfire That Resets the World

    In a certain kind of game, beloved and brutal in equal measure, there is a mechanic that newcomers find baffling and a little cruel. When you rest at the bonfire, the thing that restores your health and saves your progress and lets you breathe, the entire world resets behind you. Every enemy you killed on…

  • Not Every Idea Needs to Become a Full Project Right Away

    On giving a thought the right-sized container before it gets too heavy to carry. I have a habit of making ideas too heavy before they have a chance to become anything. A thought shows up, and instead of letting it be what it is, I start imagining the largest possible version of it. A passing…

Related Posts: