MUST one imagine Sisyphus happy, though?
Did you know there’s an entire genre of video games where you play as Sisyphus, trying and failing to roll a boulder up a hill? It’s true! There’s this one you can play right in your browser, and this one you can play on your iPhone, and this one and this one on Steam. These games are all brutally difficult — some literally impossible.
But wait, you might be thinking. Wasn’t Sisyphus’ boulder, like… a method of eternal punishment? Isn’t that a really strange choice for a video game, a genre of activity that is supposed to be fun?
Why, yes, reader. Yes, it is. And yet people keep on making this game!
The apex of the Sisyphus game genre is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. It isn’t actually technically about Sisyphus at all, but rather Diogenes. You play as Diogenes in a pot, swinging a hammer, and you have to use the physics of the hammer to traverse the level geometry. You can play a cute version of it with a cat here if you want to, but also, I’m not going to judge you if you don’t want to spend your time getting literally tortured. That’s a totally fine choice and I salute you for it.
I saw my partner play this game once, and it looked just stunningly un-fun. One wrong swing of your hammer and you go flying down the mountain and lose all your progress. And that’s the point. The game is supposed to be a grueling test of mental grit. The game trailer on Steam has an overlay that reads:
Why did I make this? This horrible hike up an impossible mountain. I could have made something you would have liked, a game that was empowering, that would save your progress and inch you steadily forward. Since success is delicious, that would have been wise. Instead, I must confess this isn’t nice. It tastes of bitterness. It’s capricious. It sets setbacks for the ambitious. It lacks lenience; it’s bracing and inhumane. But not everyone’s the same. I created this game for a certain kind of person. To hurt them.
I guess my partner is that certain kind of person, because this game was totally his jam and he was super into its vibe (even though he honestly didn’t last much longer playing it than I did the cat version). And I don’t think he’s alone, especially after seeing this tweet from a few weeks back:
But — and you can probably see this coming, if you’ve been reading my tone here and also have read anything else by me — I am not this certain kind of person. I HATE these games. So much.
This shouldn’t be, and maybe isn’t, a hot take — that I don’t enjoy games that aren’t meant to be enjoyable and simulate literal torture. But I do think there’s a sort of shame for gamers in admitting that you’re just not that into the Dark Souls-type games of the world. The ones that hurt you and punish you and are supposed to be grueling tests of perseverance, gradual skill mastery, and fortitude. What, you just want your games to be FUN? What are you, a child?!
I was thinking about this recently when I tried for the umpteenth time to play a new Soulslike game. Surely this one would finally be the one that made the genre make sense to me! The game is called Another Crab’s Treasure and is about a hermit crab trying to get back his repo’d home/shell and fighting capitalism and pollution by swinging a fork and dodging with perfect timing. If that sounds absurd and great, that’s because it is! It’s a wonderful game. My kids loved watching me play it because it’s cute and your character swears with cute oceanic minced oaths like “Crab crab crab!” I did not love playing it nearly as much as they loved watching it and passionately longed to activate the accessibility setting that gives you a shell that is a gun that kills any enemy in one hit.
When Camus concluded his chapter on the Myth of Sisyphus by writing, “The struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” one gets the impression that he was trying to blow some midcentury minds. The idea that Sisyphus was anything other than miserable was philosophically somewhat groundbreaking. But we’re now so deep into late capitalist grind culture that what was once an edgy French intellectual argument against suicide is now the stuff of generic LinkedIn threads.
This is the point where I feel like I have to jump in and show some kind of street cred with hard games I’m actually good at. I’ve beaten Civ 6 on Deity difficulty, ok? But also, I want to remember that I don’t need to justify myself to myself, or you, or anyone. It’s ok to play games in easy mode if that’s what you need right now. It’s fine to want your relaxing hobbies to be fun. Not everything in your life needs to test your limits and be an opportunity for personal growth!
I do feel self-conscious, though. I feel like my dislike of this genre, my unwillingness to play a game where I’m pushing a boulder up a hill forever, is a sign of a lack of philosophical depth. A shallowness of mind and character, where I just want my video games to be candy and not a nourishing kale salad, or something.
Isn’t it amazing that I managed to find something to feel ashamed and self-conscious about even just with the playing of video games? An activity I do just for fun, for myself! One that many people would say is inherently a waste of time.
Even while writing this I felt a flicker of doubt, remembering how annoyed I used to get when my 11 year-old daughter only wanted to play video games in sandbox mode, on the easiest possible difficulty. It always worried me — she was already so privileged, in many ways born into the easy mode of life. Was she going to resist any challenge? As with most of my parenting fears, I was worried about the wrong things. She now eagerly seeks out the hardest video games she can find. And when she gets frustrated to the edge of tears, we try to remind her that the point of games is to be fun, and it’s never a bad time to touch grass. There will be plenty of opportunities in life to be miserable as she gets older.
I was trying to figure out how to end this newsletter and I decided to try to cat version of Getting Over It again, because wouldn’t it be ironic if, over the course of writing this, I discovered that it actually is perversely rewarding and satisfying to have my ass kicked again and again and yet emerge victorious? But I’m happy to report that the game still made me completely miserable. Sorry, Sisyphus.
It might make you feel better that when I teach that chapter to my French students, there's invariably at least one student who argues that Sisyphus's supposed happiness is lulling us all into complacency, and Sisyphus should incite a revolution and smash the boulder, or just sit down on the mountainside and refuse to play their silly boulder-pushing games.
All is not lost!
Salutary to remember, though, what classics sound like to the normies. So, it's like a poem that you read forever, and you'll never understand it? About a bunch of gods that didn't exist? And when I finish it there's another one to learn? And I'm supposed to do this every day to make my brain swole?
I fear this is just another Dumb Thing Humans Do.