Limbo. What have this game taught me?

From Henry's personal library
Source: https://theologygaming.com/review-limbo-stars/

This cute and charming game caused me to reflect upon how I play games. This game is designed around failure. The player is expected to die multiple times. However, the deaths aren't annoying or frustrating. At times they are funny or even pleasant.

Resilience v.s. Stubbornness v.s. Persistence. Something that has always happened to me in various games. Dying and trying again. Many times I would try nonstop for hours until I got fed up / tired and gave up. After resting a bit I would manage to get through that section. Sometimes overcoming that obstacle happened much later. This is often mentioned when it comes to studying math for example. Sometimes a difficult problem requires rest and not more relentless crunching. I had a teacher of calculus who would say that the answer to solve hard problems is to sleep. No, she wasn't talking that during her dreams the solution would magically show up or lucid dreaming. It's about giving your brain time to rest.

What does this have to do with making a game? The question is this: when you make a complicated or difficult game and expect the player to have a hard time to finish or get past a challenge. Are you thinking about that game in terms of persistence, stubbornness, or resilience? I don't have any formal training or scientific study to base myself on at the moment of this message. But if players are giving up on your game, could it be that you confused resilience or persistence with stubbornness? Many games are excessively difficult, and this could be due to testing failures or it could be intentional. There are levels and modifications out there of various games that are made with the intention of being impossible. Some videos out there count thousands of attempts until a world record of points or time is broken in a game. For example: look up for custom super mario levels meant to be nearly impossible to complete. Are the players of those levels seeking these records being resilient, persistent, or stubborn? From a personal point of view, I'd say that if a player is trying to break a record and, for each attempt improves a little bit and is always looking for ways to get better, this is persistence and not stubbornness. On the contrary, if the player is going by pure trial and error, this is stubbornness.

Stubborn players tend to insist on the same mistakes and disregard resting. I've done this in many games, and the result is that it becomes much more difficult, costly, and time-consuming than it should be to get past that challenge. There is a hidden belief in here which is similar to "time is money". It seems that subconsciously we feel that if we stop trying, we are wasting opportunities and this would equal to the solution in being further and further away. That or we are relying on sheer luck, such that if the probability is 1 in 300, we ought to try 300 times till it finally works. The mistake is thinking that by standing still we are not making any progress. Our minds have the ability to make future projections and some people are really good at them, while others are terrible. This strongly relates to cognitive bias but this is a very broad topic and I'm not delving into it here. We can make progress in the abstract space of our imagination, this is very important to stress out.

Our minds have the ability to make connections and associations between different things. When we hyperfocus on one detail or one aspect and disregard everything else, such state of mind prevents us from seeing the bigger picture. The result is that we lose this capacity to make connections and associations. Andrew Willis, the famous mathematician who solved Fermat's Last Theorem said that he took strolls in the woods to give himself time to think and relax. Artur Ávila, the first brazillian to earn the Fields Medal, gave an interview in which he told that to solve problems in mathematics he likes to just lie down on a sofa and stare at the ceiling or the sky. When we are in life and death scenarios our minds tend to look for quick solutions, whichever comes first. This type of pressure does not work with games and studying, because it's unnatural. When you study for exams you have to give yourself time to process the information. I'd say that the same concept applies to psychology and healing traumas. The key is that the subconscious is working "in the background" while we are consciously doing something else. It's a natural feature of our minds and we have to permit ourselves to take advantage of it. Rather than hammering your head over and over, take a step back and breath. Our minds have the ability to look at a problem and imagine different scenarios, different possibilities. Try it.

I left resilience and persistence for last and stubbornness first because I felt that it was better to begin by identifying the problem and the mistakes. Persistence, resilience and stubbornness can all be synonyms to insistence. However, it depends on how you insist to know the difference between the previous three. Hardships, problems and obstacles are just part of our world. We don't and are never going to have complete control over each and every variable in our lives. I've been through this confusion which was to think that persistence or resilience were synonyms to endurance, to resistance and even to patience. This applies to studying, to entrance exams and to playing games. To try an entrance exam multiple times can be wrongly associated to persistence or resilience. What if it's really a showcase of stubbornness, albeit you rationalize it and think it's persistence or resilience? You might be making the same mistake or multiple mistakes and just keep on doing it without realizing it! Nobody has an infinite pool of energy and everybody needs to rest. Nobody is stronger, more resistant and more resilient than everybody else. You can't live with such deceptive beliefs and if you have this tendency to compare yourself to others too much, you may as well be stubborn without knowing it! Do you really believe that you have something special that nobody else does? Or the opposite, what makes you think that you miss something that everyone else has? To keep on trying without taking the time to think strategically, to disregard resting or go on with brute force in hopes that, somehow, you are going to be lucky. This is stubbornness, plain and simple.

Persistence is about continuing, despite hardships and obstacles. Resilience is about not letting it get to you easily. Bernardinho (a famous Brazillian volleyball coach) and the winner team in the 2016 Olympics are a great example of resilience. They didn't had the best statistics, the support of the press (the press was more of an enemy at the time). They weren't the front-runners and their background of previous competitions didn't indicate that a gold medal was coming. Yet, the player's emotional and psychological resilience made them win the gold medal at that year. How to work out your mind? I don't have an answer for this and it wouldn't fit here even if I did had. What I'd say is that do take note that behind that gold medal was thinking strategically and self-awareness. You have to know that nobody is immune to criticism, to pressure, to fear and shame. Only a robot devoid of emotions would be immune to all the previous mentioned emotions. It may come as funny, but a player mindlessly hammering over and over a certain challenge in a game and failing to succeed is similar to a robot that doesn't stop to think or to rest. Isn't to study while being stubborn very similar to following a boring, mindless and meaningless methodology? The example that I left in the references about Lyoto Machida and how he lost multiple times to his older brother is a great example of persistence, because he didn't quit and keep on training. It's also about resilience because he did grow up from the losses and did learn from his father when the latter called him dumb from not understanding what he meant by stating that Lyoto had to train more. Some people might be severely shaken when someone criticizes them, but it wasn't the case of Lyoto. Susane Ribeiro and Mark Rosewater, which are also references that I used in this article, each in their own words, also talk about learning from mistakes.

Can stubbornness be a symptom of a mental disorder? It can, but I believe no diagnosis is made with this symptom alone.

A synonym that I didn't comment was perseverance. I'm leaving this for another article, because perseverance relates to philosophy and religion and I'd be too complicated to go on here. I'd say that perseverance is a stronger word than persistence.

References (english only)

References (portuguese only)

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