42 thoughts on “walked upon the edge of no escape”

1. I am in the same boat. I can’t play games beyond easy difficulty, my time is too limited. I would also like to recommend a game called “Gris”.

2. Thank you for the metaphor – for taking this beyond just a conversation about gaming and into the wider world. Its part of what I love about reading your posts – I never know where they will take me, but about 85% of them take me somewhere I find interesting. Thanks for sharing the inside of your head once again.

3. You might like Jedi: Fallen Order. It’s Dark Souls-y in terms of structure and gameplay, but you can adjust the difficulty at any time, down to “Story”, which is basically “Press X to murder enemies.” I literally used this to bypass several bosses that proved too hard for me. I took as many runs at them as I could without exhausting my patience, then dialed down the diff a notch at a time until I got to where I could complete the encounter.

   I wish more games would do this.

4. That’s funny because I recently decided to go back to school and I applied to a green technology and engineering program and when I got the acceptance letter I was like… “Wait… Engineering? STEM fields are mercilessly misogynistic. That’ll be miserable, what the hell was I thinking? I don’t need that shit in my life. There’s no way that’s going to be worth it.” I declined the offer of admission. So you’re kind of right.
   But also, remember how Hilary Clinton was smart and competent and had a lifetime of experience as a public servant but yet somehow people thought it was a better idea to let Donald Trump be president (which was both indefensible and heartbreaking for women all the over the world btw. I felt that personally and I’m far from alone)? Yeah, being a woman is more like that. See, with time and effort and practice and raising your skill level, you can actually win a video game. Women rise to the challenge all the time and still lose. You know what often happens when you’re a woman and you’re the smartest and most capable person in the room? You’re a bitch or maybe you just need to calm down and not worry your pretty little head about it. So you’re also kind of wrong.

   1. I love your perspective. Thank you.

      1. Awww thanks! I actually love your perspective too. I do. I love that you make so much effort to understand other perspectives and to empathize. That’s not the easiest thing to do and it’s not easy to talk about it because you know you can never get it 100% right. It’s a lot easier to not bother.
         BTW I saw the most recent episode of Ready Room and thank you so much for the clone club reference because I could not stop thinking it when I was watching. Honestly, when you brought it up it was so satisfying. Good job asking the important questions in life.

   2. I second these emotions <3

   3. “But also, remember how Hilary Clinton was smart and competent and had a lifetime of experience as a public servant but yet somehow people thought it was a better idea to let Donald Trump be president ”

      Most people actually did not think that. Hillary got 3+ million more votes so, the people actually thought it was a better idea for her to be president. The archaic, broken and failing system delivered us shit-bag Trump. He still represents only a minority at best.

      1. True. So I should have said that Hilary was smarter and more capable and had more experience and was better suited for the role AND more people thought she should have the job, but Trump STILL got it instead. I think my original point still stands.

   4. Or, Stephanie, it’s also possible that STEM isn’t mercilessly misogynistic. After all, you got in upon your first application. Some people apply for years to get into competitive educational programs. These folks dropped your acceptance letter on a silver platter the first time you knocked on their door. That would never happen in a “mercilessly misogynistic” field. It’s possible that the truth of it is that you’re not yet mature enough to commit to hard work, and that you’re afraid of failing. Most people are like this. To be successful, you must overcome the fear of failure and apply yourself. The good news is that you are living in the greatest time and place in history and the only obstacles to your success are in your own head and you can overcome them. Go talk with some successful older people. You wouldn’t believe how much successful older people like to help bright-eyed young people. It’s one of the secrets to life. The fact is that most people want you to succeed. Stop paying attention to the handful of loud annoying dingbats who tell you life is crap. It isn’t. Life is great – or it can be if you go after it.

      Oh, and success doesn’t come to anyone easily. That’s a myth, and the people selling that myth usually have a truly crappy reason for so doing. Eliminate their influence from your life or they’ll drag you down.

      Find something you think you can be so interested in that you can become the best at it and then go commit to it. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s quantum physics or hand-made sandals. The best at anything will make a fine living and never hate going to work. (Mark Thatcher started Teva in his garage – I’m wearing Tevas right now and I just finished vacuuming and I have a Dyson which reminded me of Tracy Dyson, the astronaut)

      Risk failure, Stephanie. Risk giving something your all and failing utterly, because in failing, you will learn things that cannot be learned any other way. Then find the courage to get up and take what you’ve learned and try again. I don’t know either Thatcher or Dyson, but I’d bet folding-money that neither of them succeeded the first time, and I know for a fact that neither of them would have succeeded if they’d have withdrawn their participation because they didn’t want the inconvenience of hard work.

      To be clear, what I’m saying is this: The limitations you believe the world has placed before you are actually limitations you’ve placed on yourself. Face them or live the quiet life of desperation of which Chekhov spoke.

      1. Well hey Wil, looks like you’ve got the answer to your question in real time. Regard:
         “Some people apply for years to get into competitive educational programs.” where people = men. Men work hard and don’t get in. I’ve e heard this speech before. It always means men.
         “These folks dropped your acceptance letter on a silver platter the first time you knocked on their door” = because I couldn’t possibly have actually earned my way in. After all, I’m a girl!
         “That would never happen in a “mercilessly misogynistic” field” = Anti discrimination laws exist and are enforced, therefore misogyny is not real. See also: not everyone who works in engineering is a misogynist, therefore it’s not a misogynistic field.
         “It’s possible that the truth of it is that you’re not yet mature enough to…” = I can’t possibly be a grown woman who knows her own mind and doesn’t feel like it’s worth it to spend the rest of my life constantly striving to convince a bunch of guys I’m smart. It can’t possibly be that sexism exists. The entire issue here, is that I, a grown woman, educated, capable, married and raising a child, am too immature. Fun fact: the last time I heard this particular variation on the “why sexism is womens’ fault” was in high school, from some 23 year old creep, who was hanging around at my high school with his also creepy 23 year friend who was there too harass me because I didn’t want to go out with him. When I lost patience with their creepiness and tried to tell them off, he replied with the “you’re just too immature speech” which he then followed up by saying (and I quote) “a piece of ass should know its place.”
         See also: men aren’t sexist, women are too sensitive.
         Also fun fact, I competed a 4 year degree is 2 1/2 years (with thesis) with a cumulative average of 87.47%. And since then I’ve been working for years. There are no wise elders out there waiting to nurture bright eyed young people. Just a lot of assholes who want to use you for your talents, and take credit for your work, or tell you that you aren’t worth investing in because you’re just too qualified, so you won’t stay but also not experienced enough for a better position.
         Or maybe I’m entitled and immature and scared of failure and hard work.
         Either way, I’m sure writing this post makes me come off like a huge bitch, I mean, Bob meant well.

5. Boy do I relate to this one. I was experiencing similar feelings while getting started with Borderlands 3 and discovering that I needed to play on easy mode to make any kind of progress. However, after putting in about 400+ hours and repeatedly snuffing out frequent ragequit impulses, I ended up reaching TVH level and unlocking Mayhem mode. Total sense of accomplishment and much fist-pumping ensued! Victory lap around the coffee table! Sometimes life is all about hanging in there and embracing the suck until good things happen.

6. Control is so frustrating – most of my solo PC gaming has been things built on the Half Life style engine where I can quicksave at any moment, change the difficulty, or even drop into god mode. (God mode was how I handled dragon fights in Skyrim because I really don’t care about the damned dragon fight so let’s get this over with, shall we?) But the story in Control is interesting, the ambient audio with murmering is creep-tastic on headphones, and the art design – particularly the brutalist architecture – is totally gorgeous.

7. stands and applauds. I haven’t played Control yet (thanks for the point), but I play MMORPG a lot. Several of my white male friends have chosen to take on a female character. They are pretty much shocked at how they are received/perceived, and the treatment they get. And us women are like What? You didn’t believe us all along?

8. This metaphor?

   https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

   I agree that it’s a powerful one. As with all metaphors, it falls apart if you push it too hard, but this one definitely covers a lot of ground.

   I found the above (and Scalzi’s blog) from this paper when I was working on a communications theory paper and presentation when I was finally finishing my 30 year journey to a degree.

   https://adanewmedia.org/2012/11/issue1-nakamura/

   Take care,

   Scott

9. I tried to include a couple of links and those may have caused my comment to be swallowed by the spam filter. Search for “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” on Scalzi’s Whatever blog. I found that (and Scalzi’s blog) through a paper, “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital” back in 2014 when I was working on a paper for a class as I finally finished my 30 year journey to a degree.

   Take care, Wil. I’m glad you’re gradually doing better.

   Scott

10. You should try Bloodborne… seriously, the toughest game I’ve ever played! I’ve also played though RDR2 a few times… like five times. Watched all the different endings. RDR2 is a masterpiece! Days Gone was okay, glitchy, but worth a play through or two…

11. I can’t use game metaphors because I get simulation sickness so the only thing I can play is 2D games (and do so very much, thank you)
    But I straddle the line on the bullshit oppression of women. I get to be a member of the “boys club” often because of my attitude and my height (I think?). Standing more than 6 feet tall will shut up a lot of people who get an inkling to say shitty things to me. I don’t get it a lot. I still get it from time to time.
    It’s a complicated place to live, this tall female life. I’ve been called sir more times than I can count. I’ve been searching for months for “a bra that fits.”
    I can’t buy shoes, pants or coats in a store.
    I’m losing track of my point. But I’m saying I appreciate your perspective.
    I wonder if other tall ladies get more respect from men than average height ladies. Or if I’m totally disillusioned.

12. Wow, Wil. I really love thinking about this metaphor. As a woman and a mom of a special-needs kid, I intensely feel that sense of, “I only have so much ammo, and it will be really expensive and damaging to miss!”

    1. Well said! I might have to borrow that….

13. Interesting thoughts — applies to race, too. Can’t ragequit being female or darker-than-beige, can only keep on keeping on. I’m glad you wrote this. Thanks for the food for thought! Signed, a femmish gamer — cheerfully not great at games but plays the heck out of the ones she has fun with. 🙂

14. Kobe was buried last week. Crickets.

15. I see someone has already beaten me to Jon Scalzi’s blog post.

16. There are some great playthroughs of Control on YouTube if it’s the game’s story that’s most compelling to you instead of the gameplay. I haven’t played it myself because of the early performance problems on PS4 – and then before I knew it, I’d watched the whole game on YouTube because I found the story so interesting. I’m not a Dark Souls-style player either; frustration is not the experience I’m chasing when I play video games. I prefer games with difficulty settings because that gives the player more agency. And, yeah, life doesn’t come with a difficulty setting but that’s the great thing about video games – they’re games. Your analogy is very apt, and as a woman, I think it’s awesome that spending time with a female protagonist – being in her head, so to speak – is getting you to think about gender equality, etc. But to be honest, my first reaction was from a gamer’s perspective – are you spending enough time grinding up that skill tree? Are you rushing forward along the main story quest line a little too fast? That could make a big difference to how difficult the game feels.

    Also, have you played The Witcher 3? I effing love that game. TW3 is my RDR2. I’m on my sixth playthrough, and I can not recommend it enough. It also has multiple difficulty settings to choose from.

17. I’m glad you wrote this column and the great metaphor, you created. Now here’s a question…how about going back to Tetris?

    1. I play Tetris almost every night! I have it in my arcade emulator.

       1. Oooh, my Switch has pretty much turned into a Tetris 99 system, have you tried it? And thanks, still planning to pick up Control for $20 when I can. Completely prepared for old man irritation, seems to come with most games nowadays. “I remember when I could …”

18. Take two aspirins, play a few nostalgic games of “Gradius” and call me in the morning.

19. I’ll say this about the metaphor: it works, but I think my main criticism would be that it also suggests that the life of a white male is purely easy and fun. I think there’s ample evidence that life is hard for everyone. I agree it’s harder for women, but I think the baseline is far from “easy RDR2 scenic mode”. Further, even white males don’t choose their own difficulty level. It’s handed to each of them individually, based on a million factors. And not all white males face the same level of difficulty, which I think often gets overlooked.

    But just to be absolutely clear, I think the metaphor basically works and I agree women have a bum deal. And I’m actively keeping that in mind as I raise my daughter, who I sincerely hope will find the world to be better and brighter than I have.

    With respect to games themselves, I actually find myself playing shooters (most recently Borderlands 3) on “normal” difficulty, which is usually one up from easy. And I usually do just fine. But every so often I’ll run across a sequence that I hate – like any series of jumps you need to make to clear a level – and then I literally find myself saying out loud, “I’m not having fun anymore, guys.” There’s just this fine line that the game needs to tread between something being challenging enough to make you feel like succeeding is actually an accomplishment, and being so challenging that you just don’t see the point in spending your time on it. As your post ably points out, this line is actually a moving target because it’s different for everyone.(And let’s face it – jumping challenges in shooters have always been pure idiocy! That’s what platformers are for.)

    But it occurs to me that there’s also a tie in here. We can extend to metaphor to encompass that moving line as well. Somebody earlier commented that you can’t rage quit life. But in fact, you can. And people do. And I’d suggest that it’s partly because everybody has their own internal difficulty tolerance, and every life runs into a lot of difficulty along the way. Evolution has likely given most of us a fairly high tolerance, but there are clearly those situations that break people. I’m sure we’ve all run into them.

    Does this tell us anything more about men vs. women, though? One could argue that women (and minorities) need to have a higher tolerance for difficulty. Therefore, it’d be easy to conclude that they must have a higher tolerance than white males. But that’s actually faulty logic. Just because white men don’t need as much, doesn’t mean they don’t have as much. Any formal logic professor would be quick to point that out.

    But perhaps it’s an interesting thread to tug at for a bit. You could attack it from the nature vs. nurture perspective – is the tolerance set once and done, or is it developed over time as we encounter adversity? We all know we can get better at computer games with practice, and find things easier to handle than we used to.

    And yeah… that’s as far as thinking out loud has gotten me tonight. Dunno if you found any of that interesting, Wil, but you did ask for feedback.

20. I was on the fence about getting this game, but this put me off the fence…

    But boy do I hate it when it becomes a video game with a boss battle, especially when it takes two dozen or so runs at it to get the shape of the level, and you have to sit through 30 second loading screens every time you die.

    I tried to play Bloodborne multiple times, for example, but gave up because the controls are ass and the gameplay is wildly unbalanced and unpolished. I’ve been told and have read that it “has a steep learning curve” and the learning curve is what makes the game “worth it.” BS, says I. I really have no patience for games which insist on being “cinematic” with their QTE push-this-to-pay-respects button.

    My PS4 has been sitting untouched for months because I’ve been gaming on my iPad. Hyper Light Drifter, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Battle of Polytopia, Amanita Design’s Pilgrims, and other Apple Arcade gems. These iOS games are closer to the personal vision of an auteur or small creative group which just takes more risks than than the massive games by committee that are okay, but not great.

    I’m also sick of the MCU. I want to see small ball! Not soylent beige in a tube.

21. WIll Hindmarch is good people, and full of good ideas! I’m glad his newsletter is helping to spark your own thinking.

22. I am 37 but there are clones of me in alternate realities who are 45 (those clones of me were born in August 1974). That means that you (Will Wheaton ) are 2 years older than those alternate reality clones of me, Patrick Stewart is 34 years older than those alternate reality clones of me,Jonathan Frakes is 21 years older than those alternate reality clones of me, Diana Muldaur is 35 is older than those alternate reality clones of me etc. There are other clones of me in other alternate realities who are 53 (those clones of me were born in February 1967). That means that those alternate reality clones of me are 4 years older than you (Will Wheaton), James Doohan is 47 years older than those alternate reality clones of me, Leonard Nimoy was born 35 years before those alternate reality clones of me were born, Oliver McGowan was born 59 years before those alternate reality clones of me were born, George Takei is 29 years older than those alternate reality clones of me. I am serious and the Many Worlds Interpretation/multiverse are proof i am right. Maybe in some alternate realities where my clones were born in 1967 they appeared on alternate reality Star Trek the Original series.

23. Dear will
    Please do a cameo in Picard either with the traveler or as Starfleet officer your awesome keep being awesome

24. This is story about control. My control Control of what I say. Control of what I do. And this time I’m gonna do it my way.

    I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. Are we ready?
    I am ‘Cause it’s all about control. And I’ve got lots of it. When I was 17 I did what people told me. Did what my father said, and let my mother mold me. But that was long ago. I’m in Control. Never gonna stop. To get what I want. I like to have a lot. Now I’m all grown up

    First time I fell in love, I didn’t know what hit me. So young and so naive, I thought it would be easy. Now I know I got control. Rebel, that’s right. I’m on my own,
    I’ll call my own shots. Got my own mind. I want to make my own decisions; When it has to do with my life
    I wanna be the one in control.

    So let me take you by the hand, and lead you on this dance. what I’ve got, because I do with chance I don’t wanna rule the world, just wanna run my life. So make your life a little easier. When you get the chance just take control.

25. I’m not a console gamer, so if you don’t have a PC (not an Apple), you could give Guild Wars 2 a try. It is free to download and free to play for the first half of the story so far. You can do lots of it solo, but there is also lots that will require (or at least be added by) joining others. By the way, this is a MMORPG in case you did not know.

26. I think you will find that most good programmers do not play video games other than a few times around. Give that some thought before you play your game next time. I was never a good programmer but knew enough to make my code work but was too impatient to write decent error recovery and documentation. Basically, games are simple puzzles and offer nothing of value in return. Try writing your own games and I think you will quickly understand why programmers do not play games.

27. Dude I’m sorry – probably not the right place to post this but I’m not great at technology so here it is…. been watching you on the ready room, and I’m such a fan especially of the way you read books (Can’t imagine the ready player one in anyone elses voice). But I got to know, where the hell did you get those black and red boots? Or Shoes? They are dope.

    1. My shoes are all by Fluevog. Aren’t they cool?!

28. I thought you might enjoy listening to this program about letting go of dreams, even the dreams of others.

    https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-59-tapestry/clip/15764545-tapestry25-life-advice-from-rabbi-harold-kushner

29. God help me with the political bullshit on here… I’m sure that’s just the response you were looking for. SMH Anyway I’m not even here to comment on your thought-provoking post either except to say one thing. I adored you as Wesley Crusher, forgot you existed, saw you on Big Bang (holy cow he’s old but still cute, no offense, so am I, old that is) and now I’m reading (you’re reading to me) Ready Player One and I adore you again. I come here, read your latest blog and kind of love you now. Haha.
    Take care, Wil.
    Also, JJ above is trippin. I’m not saying he’s wrong…I’m just saying… I can only imagine the posts you read thru. Lol. Like mine for instance? Yeah, pretty much. 😂

30. Hi Wil – love a lot of your stuff, love you. Hope you and your family are doing as okay as possible with this F timeline. Be well, be Wil.

31. You okay Wil? Hope so. Really enjoying your interviews with the cast of Picard.

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