straight outta tartarus

in search of the inner sanctums

losing is part of the process — the point is to learn from your experience — how do you endure failure with enthusiasm? — how do you get somewhere interesting? — how do you find the thing-within-the-thing? ▣ — you feel your way to it

Tartarus, by Joanne Tran, artist for Supergiant Games

It’s 10:22pm. I just transfered my sleeping 1yo son into the crib. Part of me thinks I’m tired and should go to bed. Another part of me thinks I should try and write something. I’m going to try and write something. I find myself thinking about this challenge that I’m in– I would like to go to sleep by 11pm if possible. That gives me less than 40 minutes to write something. I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ve written a few drafts of a post circling around my thoughts about the game Hades by Supergiant Games. I have a vision for a version of that post that’s quite grand and intricate and beautiful. But every time I’ve attempted to write it, I end up running out of steam, and then when I look at the previous draft, I find it to lack the animating spirit that I’m looking for. I find it more difficult to add animating spirit to a draft when I’m tired, than to write something new from scratch. So here’s me attempting to write and finish a version of that post from scratch, hopefully with some animating spirit.

So, quick overview of what Hades is. (I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but there will be some.) You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, who oversees the Greek underworld. Your goal is to break out of the underworld and get to the surface, by fighting through a series of chambers with monsters in them. When you start a new game from scratch, you’re thrown right away into your first chamber. You don’t yet have a lot of health, you don’t yet have any special skills.

The game expects you to die.

Upon death, you’re transported by the river Styx back to the House of Hades, where your father scoffs at your foolish attempt at achieving the impossible. There Is No Escape, the game reminds you. But you also hear conflicting messages from other people in the House of Hades, such as Achilles and Nyx who encourage you to keep trying. I don’t want to give away too many details of the game in case you haven’t played it, but I want to say that, in a particular sense, it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.

The genius of the game to me is that losing is part of the process. Even if you’re a moderately proficient gamer, it might take you anywhere from 20 to 60 runs to get to the surface for the first time. It is incredibly satisfying the first time you finally make it out, because it requires you to develop an understanding of how the game works. It requires you to make good decisions with the power-ups that you get along the way, it requires you to allocate your resources well, and it requires you to learn how to avoid getting hit by the various denizens of the underworld with their wide range of tactics and attacks. And the story of the game compels you to keep going.

I feel like I learned something about myself and about life from playing Hades. The game encourages you and teaches you persistence. It teaches you to cultivate equanimity in the face of failure. And it teaches you to learn from your experience. I’ve completed the main story of Hades three times now on separate save files, and each time I feel moderately compelled to keep going to complete all of the other challenges that are available– though I’ve never actually gone the full distance on any of my saves. Rather, I’ve found myself interested in seeing, how much better have I gotten at the base game? Meaning, how quickly can I get to my first winning run? I believe it took over 60 runs on my first ever playthrough, and it took somewhere between 8-12 runs on my most recent playthrough. I find it gratifying to witness that clear improvement in skill. It reminds me that I can get better at things, particularly when life feels like a maelstrom of murky frustrations.

I went looking up some notes from my previous attempts to write about my Hades experience, and I found something funny, and I’ll just quote it directly and contextualize it after:

”ok so something kinda crazy happened, so much so that it might seem like i’m making it up. after winning only 5 runs in the first 25 (an 80% failure rate), I won 100% of the next 4 runs– 26, 27, 28, 29. Further update: I won 100% of the next 8 runs, too. So. I now have a streak of 12 wins.”

Context: I basically picked up the game again a few months ago to pass time while my son was napping on me, and also to challenge myself to sorta toughen up psychologically. Playing Hades can be a kind of strength training for the mind, because you can sometimes make it all the way to the final boss only to lose because of a few sloppy mistakes, which can be incredibly disheartening. It can feel like you’ve just wasted half an hour of your time. I wanted to experience those emotions in a low-stakes play environment, in the hope that I could deal with them better in a higher-stakes real world environment. I think I broke my streak at about 15 wins or so, which was a little upsetting but ultimately still a triumph that I made it that far– my longest Hades streak of all time.

(A relevant sidenote here is that not all runs are of equal difficulty– the game encourages you to manually increase the difficulty with optional ‘handicaps’, like harder-hitting monsters, beefier monsters, or less health and so on. This keeps the game from getting boringly easy– you can always adjust things to challenge you at the edge of your skill level. Which is itself, I think a valuable life lesson to ponder, when working on your own projects.)

Have you figured out where I’m going with all of this? Part of it is that I’m writing a sales pitch + recommendation for people who haven’t tried Hades, to try Hades. It’s a pretty decent first game for a non-gamer to pick up. I’ve heard some people criticize it as a little monotonous in its repetitiveness, which is valid, but I think that’s the point. So don’t pick it up if you dislike repetition. If you already have Netflix, I believe it’s available on iPhone or iPad for no extra cost, so that’s one way you could try it out.

But the real reason I’m writing this is for myself, and it’s… about my creative process. The reason I picked up Hades for the 3rd time was that I was getting increasingly frustrated with attempting to write essays and failing. And was struck by how each attempt’s failure reminded me of a Hades playthrough, emotionally speaking. And I’m not entirely sure I have the right attitude going into either a Hades run or an “essay run”.

How do you endure failure with enthusiasm?

I remember witnessing Haelian, a twitch streamer and youtuber who’s probably sunk thousands of hours into Hades at this point, lose a run with a level of equanimity I’m not sure I’ve been able to achieve ever. He had put in all that work into getting to the destination, and then crashed right before the end, and climbed out of the wreckage cheerfully saying, “well, that happens sometimes,” and moved right on to his next run. How?!

Part of it, I suppose, is that he’s a professional. Streaming his Hades runs is what he does for a living. Which means that he knows he has an effectively infinite number of runs ahead of him, so there’s no scarcity mentality about any lost runs. And he’s mastered the game so completely that I guess he has nothing to prove to himself. He’s one of the best players in the world. If I think about it, his job is really to be entertaining and to have a great time. Hades just happens to be the vehicle that he’s using to do that.

Now I return to thinking about my essays and drafts and notes and such. Why do I feel bad if I don’t finish an essay? Well, I don’t get the psychological rewards that come with shipping. But why not? Why am I so fixated on the outcome instead of the process? Could I rework my concept of what I’m doing, such that I appreciate myself for the hours I put into my creative process, rather than the outputs that come out of it? Something here feels ‘not quite right’, like I’m stringing together words that seem to make sense intellectually, but don’t actually get to the heart of the thing I’m trying to get to…

I think I got it. While I’ve experimented with writing large volumes of text for the sake of getting familiar with words, the point of my essays isn’t actually to pad out the wordcount.

The point is to get somewhere interesting.

The equivalent of “breaking out of the underworld” for me in my writing is roughly “breaking out of my existing model”, or maybe even “breaking into a new ideaspace”. I’ve written enough words that I mostly don’t feel any meaningful satisfaction at reaching 2,000 or 3,000 or 100,000 words written. I do think I can be quite comfortable tossing out large volumes of text. All of this has been preamble to asking myself the right question. And yeah, maybe if I had more time and energy, I could find a way to condense the preamble into something more economical. But the current form is decent enough; I’m okay with it. What’s the question? In a stupid bravery I asked “how do I write a good essay in a single sitting”, and the answer to that question was basically “navigate by feeling and focus on what feels deeply resonant”. I asked essentially the same question again in a matryoshka of possibilities, and arrived at a similar answer from a different angle, this time with more of a focus on describing and contextualizing things. In both of those essays I reference other essays in turn, and it’s becoming clear to me that all of these essays are like Hades runs– there’s a repetitiveness to them, but I don’t mind it because they feel like genuine attempts towards a better understanding of my process.

What’s the question here, though? This time the question isn’t “how do I write a good essay in a single sitting”, this time the question is something more specific, it’s something like, “how do I find the thing-within-the-thing"?” And once again I find myself wanting to talk about Inception (which I hope to write a more comprehensive essay about).

Quick recap for people who haven’t watched Inception or don’t remember the details: the protagonists want to implant an idea in someone’s mind, but they don’t know how they’re going to do it. They take him into a dream, where they find a photograph that’s emotionally significant to him, courtesy of his memory. They can then reasonably assume that the object in the photograph (the paper pinwheel) is the object that they can use to create their desired effect in a deeper level of the dream, or “dream within a dream”. Importantly, they had no way of knowing this without getting into the first level of the dream.

So. One of the reasons I love Inception is because I feel it mirrors the creative process, or at least my creative process. The first draft of an essay, or the first section of it, serves as “the first dream”, or “the outer layer”. It’s important for me to note that when I’m in the outer layer, I don’t yet know what the solution to the puzzle is going to be. I might not even know precisely what the puzzle is. My formulation of the puzzle might be wrong. This can be frustrating, daunting, overwhelming, etc– but like Miyazaki said about creative struggles, if it went away, I’d want it back. I want to work on this sort of complex puzzle!

It’s not much of a leap to say that a lot of my writing is fundamentally about me trying to Incept myself. I’m happy when the inception is successful, I’m frustrated when I fail. But the meta here is, even my failures teach me something about myself and my process, if only I’m able to be open enough to actually pay attention to them and actually learn from them. When I study what went wrong, I can get a better sense of how I might get it right the next time.

How do I find the thing-within-the-thing?

How do I gain access into the inner sanctums? For starters, I have to believe that inner sanctums even exist. This is something that I have sometimes forgotten, particularly when I’m feeling busy or hurried or burdened with some sense of importance. I try to plan and plot a beautifully crafted essay in advance, and it doesn’t quite work because everything that I plot is technically always going to be the outer sanctum.

I find myself thinking about how this applies to conversations, too. If you’re going to have an important or consequential conversation with someone, it can be helpful to rehearse a little bit, thinking through possible questions they might ask, and talking points you might bring up. But you don’t want to be overly attached to that, because that’s outer sanctum stuff. The point of the outer sanctum is to orient you towards the inner sanctum. Towards the possibility of deeper intimacy and understanding.

I wish I could stay longer, but it’s 1am and time for me to start wrapping up. Let’s recap. I came into this wanting to talk about a video game, because it made me think about my relationship with failure, which got me thinking about what my ‘victory conditions’ or ‘win criteria’ are, which got me thinking about sanctums, intimacy and surprises. The main thing I feel like I want to be reminded of here is that my planning and plotting is done mostly at an intellectual level, and is always going to be a layer removed from the emotional heart of the matter, which is always going to be something dynamic, something alive, something I have to approach afresh, anew.. I do believe that there is a real aliveness always humming beneath that which seems stale and frozen. I just need to feel my way to it. It’s calling to me always. I just need to feel my way to it.

The Church of Dolores Dei, Disco Elysium (2019)