We live in hypocrisy, and are often the makers of our own doom. I’m reminded of this sentiment these days, usually when I’m reading about others who lament the difficulty level in Silksong, as if they are tragically unfamiliar with the very nature of difficulty involving video game design since time immemorial.

A lot of Silksong players carrying big Charles Darwin energy when they’re complaining about the difficulties inherent within the title

In spite of my best efforts, I am seemingly doomed to a low energy existence come Saturday nights these days. I have no idea what kind of scorned witch I may have pissed off in my travels who deemed it appropriate to curse me in such an innocuous way, but it is an effective sort of vexing that creates unfathomable levels of disturbance in the most significant of microscopic manners.

With that said, my original plan for an article detailing some of my fanciful follies within the world of Silksong may have to be altered slightly, as I was anticipating a much greater air of majesty about my mood, the essence of imagination permeating my mortal vessel with lavishly infinite creativity in a radiant splendor of transcendental inspiration that would follow suit. The cold reality of what I am currently confronted with in the moment is, however, more akin to a reheated bowl of steaming dog shit, which needless to say, isn’t the same thing. A farcry from a bejeweled crown and gem adorned scepter of imagination previously dreamt up, though the stage is set, and I must still play my bit part with as much regalia as possible to summon henceforth.

Deep into Act II, I initially dodged a bullet from what I thought was going to be an aimless hunt for what I needed; this much I avoided, with some surprisingly keen intuition involving bee-lining it to the object in question. A short lived victory, however, as one of the final songs required to progress to the top of the Citadel does require a robust number of tools to score the final tune, which signals to me it is about high time to finally re-explore previous areas, armed now to the teeth with new upgrades and traversal abilities galore.

Yesterday, I alluded to an idea I had involving psychoanalysis in my write-up today. This notion was conceived of when I was bursting with energy and mental clarity, mind you, and I can’t quite make head nor tails of it now, given me sad, sorry, low energy state. The truncated, discounted, wish.com version of my premise involved a reference to an interesting phenomenon detailing what is called the “Erotization Resistance” in treatment, which is detailed briefly as follows:”

EROTIZATION RESISTANCE We come now to the second of the two special forms of resistance requiring more particularization. There comes a day when the patient undergoing psychoanalysis, in spite of its expensiveness in time and money, in spite of its dreariness and the bitter tears and memories it evokes, realizes that in a curious way he enjoys it. This pleasure is quite apart from the symptomatic relief the treatment may have afforded him. It is a subtle, secret, pleasurable sensation. It may make both the patient and the analyst slightly uneasy lest it justify the accusations of unsympathetic outsiders who allege that what certain patients want is not cure but treatment and that what some psychoanalysts want to do is to treat rather than to cure. There is a germ of truth in this, of course, but there is much more to erotization than this. Every patient’s first and primary motive, we assume, is to be relieved of his symptoms. He is prepared to wait a while for this result, and he expects the treatment, like all medical treatment, to be more or less unpleasant. But like the man who submits to the dentist or to the surgeon or to any doctor, he tells himself that the ultimate gain will be worth the unpleasantness of the treatment.

I’ve made jokes in the past about the self-therapizing tendencies of nerds, however inappropriate they may be, even as recently as within the weeds of writing about Silksong. Like many points I make, I am as much in earnest being serious as I am being completely sarcastic in the matter, putting forth the notion of the reality which holds a hint of truth, but one which is massively absurdist in equal measurements. I do believe, however, that this erotization resistance, reappropriated and applied to videogames, and Silksong specifically in this case, does bring up an interesting notion of “The curious way of enjoying it”, as in, the process of “getting better”, as it were. Within the pretenses of psychoanalysis, getting better being ever closer to remedying whatever the underlying issue may be, but never quite doing so, in essence, pleasantly trapped in the loop of analysis, and loving the eternal treadmill that comes along with it. Within the pretense of video games, “getting better” is a far more literal affair, with one always progressively becoming a master of their domain within the game itself, but never quite reaching the end nor fully mastering the systems in play, as if perpetually putting off reaching the conclusion of the title indefinitely, so one may always feel a sense of self-empowerment, while putting at arms length the idea of having the experience end, facing the music that comes with the sadness of the post-completion blues, knowing one will never be able to replay the game for the first time ever again.

There is a delightful amount to unpack there, with the sad irony being I have neither the time nor head-space to fully dive into the conceptual contrasting I initially intended to, though I can spare a notion or two before I must depart. This introspection involving the “erotization resistance” in some ways reminds me of my thoughts I had when trying to confront how I felt about Necrodancer last year, coming to realize perhaps it was always the challenge itself that thrilled me more than ever wanting to complete it, in some sense, with my perpetual quest of “becoming” front and center and my lust of it’s prolongation. It would be interesting to note which individuals who play Silksong enjoy the challenge for challenge sake, and which ones see the trials and tribulations only as temporary necessary evils to surmount in claiming the prize of completion as their own, bypassing the richness of the process of “becoming” that seems to intoxicate and in some ways arouse the more mad of us self-punishing lot.

Being a masochist who erotizices the idea of the eternal desires the perpetuation of edging for the rest of time, and knowing that one will remain suspended in the heat of the moment, thusly negating the eventual climax into nothing but a fantasy, must be one of the purest forms of self-inflicted erotically motivated torture one could concoct.

-Pashford