- 26 Dec, 2025 *
When I was younger, I was an avid gamer. I might have been one of those people with a long backlog of games that he never got around to playing, but I was also one of those people who prided himself on finishing games that he started, and I typically finished one if not two games every month.
Some games are easier to finish than others. Games like Civilization have finite win conditions, and the point of the game is to earn more resources and points than the other players on the board to eventually secure a victory over the other nations; something like Mass Effect is much more on the rails, but at the highest difficulty setting provides a mechanical and strategic challenge. Games like Pathologic tax my ability to manage resources and think ahead and gauge whet…
- 26 Dec, 2025 *
When I was younger, I was an avid gamer. I might have been one of those people with a long backlog of games that he never got around to playing, but I was also one of those people who prided himself on finishing games that he started, and I typically finished one if not two games every month.
Some games are easier to finish than others. Games like Civilization have finite win conditions, and the point of the game is to earn more resources and points than the other players on the board to eventually secure a victory over the other nations; something like Mass Effect is much more on the rails, but at the highest difficulty setting provides a mechanical and strategic challenge. Games like Pathologic tax my ability to manage resources and think ahead and gauge whether an NPC is telling me the truth or not, whereas Dark Souls is more about persistence and recognizing patterns and winning challenging combat. Then there are more casual or cozy games like Stardew Valley where I’m able to shut off my brain for an hour or so and work on building my little guy’s farm up from nothing.
There are games like Destiny 2 and Dead by Daylight where I’m playing either on a team or against other players and there’s no "point" to the game; one of them has an overarching story with main quests and daily missions and a whole ecosystem built into the world, and the other one is an infinite loop where characters who die or are otherwise defeated during the match canonically can’t remember the match. There’s no "beating" Dead by Daylight the way one can beat Destiny 2’s story mission; there’s only winning or losing a match.
Then there are the games I cannot beat no matter what I do, either because I haven’t spent enough hours on them or because I don’t have the attention span to do the same thing over and over and over with minimal change in environment or strategy.
Slay the Spire is one of those games I can’t win, even though I’ve beaten it before.
For those of you who aren’t gamers, or who are and just haven’t heard of it, Slay the Spire is a 2019 roguelike deck battler. You control a character whose goal is to ascend multiple "floors" in a three-map dungeon, defeating enemies and collecting different cards, potions, and relics to help you in your quest. Your cards consist of Attacks, Defense, Skills, and Powers, and their appearance in your hand is randomized; you have a draw pile and a discard pile, and no control over how cards come out of your draw pile. You also can’t plan a route based on which enemies are most likely to appear, as the maps themselves are procedurally generated. You’re never going to run into the same enemies in the same order, and you have to plan your run around random encounters, rest stops, and visits to the merchant, who can sell you a random assortment of cards, relics, and potions.
You start out with a few attack cards, a few defense cards, one "advanced" attack card, and maybe a power card. At the start of the game, you have the ability to pick one "bonus" like more starting hit points or extra gold; that bonus doesn’t usually take you much further than the first three combat encounters.
If I didn’t find Slay the Spire fun, I wouldn’t keep booting it up after learning I’m not the gamer I used to be.
My ability to focus and think strategically is improving, in part because I’m spending so much time studying programming, and part of programming is learning how to break down and solve problems. But my ability to focus for long periods of time hasn’t improved much.
If I were more competitive, I would keep grinding Slay the Spire until I beat the final boss and reached the Ascension levels, which if you’ve ever played anything like Hades you’re familiar with the idea that once you’ve beaten the main level, you have to beat the game a set number of additional times with modifiers that make combat more challenges before you’ve actually beaten the game. And I’m not trying to play that kind of game, at this point in my life. Games are a way for me to unwind after I’ve spent hours studying mathematics or generic programming, not a way for me to prove myself to an audience or to myself.
At this point, I boot up Slay the Spire, I play one of the three acts, and then I take a break. I go do something else, and when I feel like I’m ready to focus again, I come back to the game. And I keep playing until I’m defeated, which doesn’t usually take more than twenty minutes.
The first time I played Slay the Spire was in 2019 or 2020. It was early in the game’s release. I was never big into Magic: the Gathering or other deck-building games, but I found the gameplay loop interesting and liked maximizing my deck for maximum carnage. It was fun to unlock other characters and different playstyles–there are four characters the player can choose from–and to experiment with different combinations of cards. I think I put 60 hours into it in 2020; we all remember what was going on in the world, and I was living in New York at the time, so I spent a good chunk of the year in lockdown, and the game was meditative without being mind-numbing, so it kept me focused on what I was doing and not on what was going on in my city.
Then I put it down and didn’t come back to it for five years.
Since picking it back up, I’ve been grinding with the Ironclad for about ten hours total, dying over and over and over because there will eventually come a time where I misjudge an enemy attack, or don’t make the most efficient use of my hand, or I don’t have appropriate items, and then the entire run is over.
I don’t think of it as wasting time if I don’t beat the game. But given that I beat the game as three of the four playable characters back when I first played the game, I had expectations for how the game was going to go when I picked it up again. It’s like I never played it at all and have to start from absolute beginner territory.
It can be frustrating, if I compare myself now to how I was not even five years ago. I’m giving myself another ten hours of playtime before I declare myself a lost cause, but given how vastly different the game is hitting me now than compared to five years ago, I don’t see myself finishing it, let alone beating it on Ascension 20.
Which got me thinking about what the point of playing a game is if one isn’t going to beat it.
This is what games do: they promise us that we can repair a personal inadequacy–an inadequacy that they produce in us in the first place. – Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure
I don’t consider it inadequacy to walk away from something that isn’t working, presuming I have put what I feel is an appropriate amount of energy and effort into making it work. I do consider that I might be inadequately equipped to beat this game. I lack a competitive spirit, maybe, or the tenacity necessary to persevere when a hobby presents a challenge. I’m playing a difficult game with a laidback attitude; I don’t "lock in", as the kids say.
There are reasons why this game feels impossible compared to when I first started playing it, and a lot of it has to do with my own attitude and the reasons I’ve already discussed. I’m not the same person in 2025 that I was in 2019, or 2020. Few of us are. My priorities have changed, and Beat this game that I’m struggling with is not a priority for me, when I’m also struggling with advanced mathematical topics that I’m not prepared to tackle, or learning how to develop programs that are memory efficient.
My cognitive load is so high that I need to be considering what I’m doing when I’m playing games; if I’m not playing games as a form of escapism, then I need to find games I’m able to play while I’m doing other things, like listening to podcasts or lecture videos.
If that means I have to put down Slay the Spire and go play Stardew Valley instead, then that’s a choice I’m able to make. I’m not playing video games as part of my job, or because I’m a content creator. They’re meant to be fun. And "fun" is subjective, and mutable.
It irks me to consider uninstalling a game because I’m not having fun with it, but life is too short, and my backlog is too long, for me to keep persisting at a game that I’m not progressing or improving at. And I have to question whether I’m improving at Slay the Spire or whether I’m just making the same mistakes over and over again because there’s no skill involved, only the ability to sustain attention and make quick intelligent decisions and other traits that I’m lacking at the moment.
So yeah, I may be inadequate, but the inadequacy is why I cannot beat this game; I am not inadequate because I cannot beat a game. That distinction might only matter to me, but I’m the one who has to make the decision about how I’m going to spend my time when I’m not bent over a textbook struggling to understand the difference between algebraic structures or how to pass an iterator over a vector in C++.
The real rub is sitting with the realization that I used to be a gamer, and now I am a casual player. That’s the hardest part of walking away from a game that I used to be good at and now can’t get the hang of. It’s like I have to walk away with a realization about myself that I wasn’t ready to make, and in order to walk away I have to sit with it first.
What I have to sit with, and what I wasn’t originally prepared to have to sit with when I started this post, is that by putting down this specific game, it feels as if I have to finally acknowledge I am not the man I used to be. I am not a gamer anymore; I don’t pride myself on my ability to beat challenging games. I’m still trying to play the sorts of games that would have appealed to a younger version of myself, and that younger version of myself doesn’t exist anymore.
It may feel like I’m walking away from my younger self, or that I’m leaving behind a huge part of my identity by saying, I’m not going to keep playing a game that isn’t fun. Because the younger version of myself would have kept playing this game until he beat it. A younger version of myself did keep playing this game until he beat it. Three times. Because that was fun for him.
This isn’t fun for me, and I have to do what’s best for myself, not for the past version of me who would have been disgusted with my concession of defeat. He isn’t here anymore, and I am.