Video games are (usually) designed in such a way that there is a guaranteed path to victory. You just need to find it. So failing means you found one more path that doesn’t lead to victory. That mindset helps motivate me to keep trying until I find the path that the designers made for me to find.

Life is not that way, unfortunately. There are plenty of no-win scenarios. Running into those makes me want to curl up in a ball under a blanket and run away from my problems.

I’m currently experiencing this, which is why I’m on lemmy instead of working. I’m currently in database hell and I can’t find the way out.

You term it in a very positive way but I term it as nothing but “hopium”.

The hope of may be you will do better in the next game or in the next next game or the one after - gamer developers use this to keep us hooked is what I believe.

You will definitely get better aa you keep playing the game and this improvement will give you even more of that hopium drug. It is a cycle which cannot be broken unless you get genuinely bored of the game.

Glad that impossible NES games taught me i’m a failure early on

Joke’s on you… I’ve never finished a video game!

“Don’t go hollow, now.”

There is so much focus on the lore of Miyazaki’s games, but not enough about how it also has hella meta commentary on games and players, too. One of the main ones is how death doesn’t matter, and no matter how hard things get you, the player, can overcome all these obstacles and beat the game if you persist. There are examples of those who do survive until the end, and many examples of those who give up at various stages of the game, much like how real players would if they find themselves unable to beat a particular boss necessary to complete the game. The NPC’s stories often mirror that of a player who faces the same objectives.