You know it’s a “bad new bears” kind of vibe when people are actively routing for the collapse of the everyday, out of feelings of being totally over it.

While there is something to be said about patience being a virtue, another notion in my mind springs forth, and that is “be the change you want to see in the world”

We’ve covered a lot of conceptual ground since Silksong launched, far beyond any initial musings would have taken me. My notions of doubting my doubts were well placed, as the game has provided a veritable groundswell of cognizing the likes of which ATE has not seen on a singular title in all of it’s inspiringly obtuse glory, and for that, I remain gratified to have generated such thoughts with which to share. I mentioned awhile back that I was interested in parsing some of the metaphysics surrounding these ideas of difficulty and player contention with Silksong, in terms of expectations not met, of a sense of dissatisfaction and the reinforcements that prop the notions up. After some time to ponder as to why this is, and in the spirit of yesterday’s post, re appropriating some ideas from another thinkers tool shed with which to possibly enlighten the investigation with.

Granted, much like my musings involving psychoanalysis in assessing players and their relation to Silksong, I’m implementing some playful adjacency in my utilization of some realities, though I think the merits of magnification on the matter stand up to scrutiny. Which is why I do not mind in positing another similar assertion, in that I speculate one of the reasons so many players feel a sense of dissatisfaction in regards to Silksong’s difficulty, relate to feelings of alienation, and in particular, the ones Karl Marx discussed in reference to working jobs, and the unfortunate collateral associated with the ideological punching bag we know as capitalism.

Marx detailed four different types of alienation, and not all of them necessarily fit the bill in terms of Silksong, though two stand out to me as still being relevant. Alienation from the process of labor I think, is the most applicable, as this may go a great distance in detailing why the difficulty in Silksong runs up against so many ideas of disappointed sense of failed expectation, and it’s due to players feeling alienated by the very game they’re playing, as working through Silksong for many, is so grueling or demanding of them, the very basic motions of survival, boss runbacks, corpse retrieval, platforming segments, you name it, begins to feel like an unfulfilling activity, impossible to separate from monotony, and ultimately feeling like a forced sense of arbitrary difficulty, just to beat the player over the head with oppressive design in the name of misplaced excess and derivative standard.

I know some of you may be thinking the obvious: But Pashford, Marx was referring to the relation inherent between worker and labor, not player and game. You would be right with your recitation of Marx’s philosophy, though without much effort, the same notions can very much be applied to the process of engaging with Silksong, for similarly obvious reasons in my eyes, especially if you are a regular reader and have been following along in my own dissertation following my playthrough of Silksong, and the rationale is as follows.

I think it works in two different ways. Firstly, I’ve detailed before how I don’t think that every game or every section of a game is built from the ground up with the notion of fun in mind, as fun, by itself, is not the only driving force behind all of game design. I know this sound as if in contradistinction to the very essence of game design, but there is plenty of precedent for why one would want parts of a game to be more than or different than just pure, unbridled fun.

Like a lot of gaming, design is built around the fundamentals of engagement, and in order to engage folks on higher levels, you have to push them in ways to focus, learn, and overall master things like hand eye coordination and pattern recognition, in order for them to overcome some of the crazier challenges video games have to offer. This lends itself to a sense of achievement, even beyond just a quick dopamine hit, in really creating a sense of pride within the player for actually accomplish something, in bolstering their identity on some small level, and creating a level of satisfaction as a result. This requires more than just mindless entertainment, and like most activities that require brain power, application of abilities, and good old fashioned practice, it takes effort, and with enough effort involved over any period of time or in regards to the ethic of effort in involved, this is going to look and feel a lot like work on some level. Perhaps I’m being unnecessarily long-winded in “showing my math” on this, and such a process I usually chalk up to what I refer to as “fill in the blank writing”, due to another methodology I must utilize on the regular due to a lack of time, and that it referred to as “meatball theorizing”, but I had a few extra minutes tonight, so I could elaborate a little more than usual in this regard.

All of this to say simply: in very much the same way so many are alienated by their work under capitalism due to these feelings of lack of fulfillment, or monotony, or a feeling of forced activity, one of which feels like it’s robbing a player of choice due to repeating the same failing tendencies over and over again, no creativity in how they’re able to go about surmounting the issue, and even a feeling of lack of control of how they can accomplish anything at all and whether or not it matters if they even try, leads to detachment from the work, and in this case game itself. Even within the regard of Silksong, like so many other games, not necessarily being driven by the pure and basic notions of “fun” per se, but a feeling of striving to accomplish a goal through hardworking and belonging, it is fundamentally violating that very premise, and alienating the player in the process, for them feeling totally dejected by the entire experience, as if their labor meant nothing, as if the expectation of what this exchange meant, as if nothing mattered, and value itself in relation to the labor involved was totally negated in the process.

Of course, to reiterate my notion that this isn’t a 1:1 idealism in terms of comparative standard, Marx uses this rational to dictate why the ideology of capitalism has so much tension due in part to this process of alienation, the whole thing will eventually collapse and be replaced by something else. Obviously, the ideology of Silksong is not actually capitalistic nor marxist by design, though, within the deconstructionism of seeing capitalistic flourish within the machinations of game design itself, there is an interesting dictation involved that in order for one to overcome these notions of alienation, one can certainly use the social aspects of the community, to collectively outsource some strategy and insight into how to proceed, thusly pointing to, in some weird microscopic sense, a related notion of “equalitative sharing” on a community level occurring, in mirroring what would come after the fall in relation to the detriments of capitalism.

I was going to continue to detail the second of the two kinds of the 4 variety’s of alienation Marx lays out, with the second being Alienation from One’s Self, but I think there is already enough to chew on with what we have here, and leaves something on the table for us to possibly discuss at a later time. Unfortunately, I don’t have an excellent ending or wrap-up in mind for this particular piece, except for maybe an advocation of not being satisfied with surface level assessments and sense-data related deduction, on some level. They are obviously, the first place to start, as how we experience the world through our senses is unavoidable, but be sure to always take it a step further, and not only analyze what those reactions mean, but also what kind of thinking or experimentation has been done involving the subject material they relate to. It would be extraordinarily reductionist for me to look at Silksong and conclude: people aren’t happy because it’s difficult, but that doesn’t necessarily reveal why the unhappiness stems from the difficulty, which is a far more interesting notion to dive into. Something to think about, at least, which is the greatest possible virtuous aspiration we can ever reach for, as caring starts with thinking, cause we can’t start caring until we start thinking about why.

~Pashford