The Boss Fight That Taught Me Patience

I'm not going to tell you which game it was. Partly because of spoilers. Mostly because if you've played it, you'll know exactly which boss I mean, and you'll either laugh at me or put a hand on my shoulder, and I'm not ready for either.

It's one of those games people call a Soulslike, where dying over and over is basically the point. You're supposed to die. The game expects it. You die, you go back to the last checkpoint, you walk all the way back to the fight, and you try again. The idea is that every time you die, you learn something.

I'd been told that. I nodded. I did not understand it at all.

Attempt 1

Lasted about nine seconds. She did a spinning thing with two swords that I didn't even see start. The screen went dark and red and my daughter Ellie, who was eight and supposed to be doing her reading log on the couch behind me, said, "Oh no, Dad," in the tone you'd use for a dropped ice cream.

I laughed. I said, "That's fine, that's just the first one."

Attempt 9

Not laughing anymore.

Attempt 23

This is the one where I threw the controller. Not hard. Onto the couch. But Ellie saw, and she gave me a look over her book that I'm pretty sure she learned from her mother.

I want to explain what I was doing wrong, because it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it. I was trying to win. Every single attempt, I walked in and tried to kill her as fast as possible. Hit, hit, hit, dodge when it looked bad, hit some more. When it didn't work, I did the exact same thing, just angrier. Like if I wanted it badly enough, the game would notice and give up.

I do this in real life too. I'd just been passed over for a promotion at work, for the second time, and my plan for dealing with that was basically attempt 23. Work later. Push harder. Send more emails. Get mad when nothing changed.

I didn't connect those two things at the time. I just put Ellie to bed and went back to dying.

Attempt 41

Something changed here, and it was an accident.

I was tired. It was past midnight. I walked into the arena and I just didn't attack. I didn't have the energy. I held up my shield and backed away and watched her. For maybe a full minute I just watched what she did.

And she did things in order. That was the shocking part. The spinning sword thing always came after she jumped back. The big leaping attack always came when I was too far away. When she raised her left arm, three hits were coming, not two, and the third one was the one that had been killing me all week because I always rolled after two.

I died anyway. But for the first time I died knowing why.

Attempt 58

Ellie had started watching properly by then. She'd sit cross-legged on the floor next to me with a bowl of Goldfish crackers and call out what was coming.

"Spinny one. SPINNY ONE."

"I know, Ell."

"You didn't dodge it."

"I know, Ell."

She was right about half the time. And when I died she'd go, "It's okay, you're learning," which was exactly what I'd been telling her for months about her multiplication tables. Hearing it come back at me in her little voice was a lot.

Attempt 87

I got her down to a sliver. A sliver of health, a hair, one hit from dead. I was so excited I pressed attack three times in a row instead of once, and my character did this slow, heavy swing that left me wide open, and she cut me in half.

I put the controller down very gently on the table, went into the kitchen and stood there for a while with the fridge open, not looking at anything.

Ellie came in and stood next to me and said, "Do you want a Goldfish?" I said yes. We stood there and ate Goldfish crackers out of the bowl with the fridge open, letting all the cold out, which is a thing we are not allowed to do in this house.

Attempt 112

I don't know exactly when it happened, but somewhere in here I stopped trying to win.

I started treating every attempt like a lesson that cost nothing. Okay, this time I'll just practice the triple hit. Okay, this time I'm only going to learn the leaping attack. Okay, this time I'm going to see how long I can survive without swinging at all. Some attempts, I didn't even try to hurt her. I got better in a way I could actually feel, in my hands, like learning a song.

And here's the thing that still bugs me. I stopped being angry about it. Not because I won. Because I'd stopped measuring each attempt by whether I won. Every attempt was just information. Even the bad ones.

Attempt 136

Ellie was asleep. It was a Tuesday, about eleven at night, nothing special about it.

I walked in, held up my shield, waited for her to jump back, rolled through the spin, took my two hits, blocked the third. Waited. Leaping attack, rolled toward it, not away, the way I'd learned on attempt 97. Hit once. Only once. Backed off.

Nine minutes. I've watched the clip. Nine minutes and nobody in the room but me.

When she went down, I didn't yell. I'd always pictured yelling. I just sat back and breathed out for a long time, and then I laughed a little, quietly, so I wouldn't wake anyone up.

The part I actually wanted to write about

About two months later Ellie was learning to ride her bike without training wheels. She fell, and fell, and got back on, and fell, and on the eighth or ninth time she threw the bike down on the grass and yelled, "I'm never going to get it," with real tears.

And I heard myself, without thinking about it, say, "Okay. Don't try to ride it this time. Just try to push off and put your feet up. That's all. Just that one thing."

She looked at me like I was being stupid. But she did it. Just the push off. Then the next time, push off and pedal twice. Then three.

She was riding by dinner.

I did ask for the promotion again, by the way. The third time, I went in and asked my manager what specifically they'd wanted to see that they hadn't. I wrote it all down. I worked on it, one thing at a time, for six months. Got it in the spring.

I'm not saying a video game fixed my life. That would be a lot to put on a game. But I think about her sometimes, usually when something at work is going badly. Usually around attempt 23.

Ellie still calls it the spinny one.

If you've got a game that changed something for you too, the Geeks section is full of people like me writing about exactly that. Come say hi on VocalsMedia.