How Dying in Sekiro is Like Getting Rejected in Writing
You will die but then you will get published
On an October morning in 2022, a month after quitting as copy editor of a monthly newspaper, I hit a “slow” period. Silence on several promising pitches. McSweeney's had rejected my umpteenth submission (no hard feelings). I was also studying for the DC real estate exam (another story).
The productive thing to do would've been to meditate, exercise, start the book I never intended to write, fix a few world problems, then put together a plan for the week. But I was burnt out. The pandemic was officially just ending. The kid was finally back in school. There was space for a self-care day here and there. I wanted to be productive but self-care dictated I close a loose end.
The black TV screen gave me a 1000-yard stare. The Xbox One taunted me, Lord Isshin is in here, Matt. He says you suck.
Time to die, Lord Isshin.
Are you fucking kidding me?
I am a former gamer – not the ‘watch me frag this motherfuker from 300 digital yards with a knife’ kind of gamer, but I could hold my own. I’d just finished The Witcher 3 – a year-long love affair – and wanted a new challenge. A real one.
One award-winning game kept whispering to me from the incandescent flatscreen of my ancient Macbook Pro. I watched the game trailer several times and read deep into the reviews.
It spoke to my oldest unrequited fantasies: being a ninja.
Sekiro the air vibrated.
An old friend from highschool commented that their tagline was "You will die.”
And die I did – a thousand deaths. Always in the same set of ways. At the end of a NPC's blade, intermittently burned, shot, blown up, or smashed by a giant. Occasionally, I had my entrails ripped out through my back end. By the time I reached Sekiro's four-phase final boss, there was no death in the game's repertoire of murder I hadn't experienced.
Each time 死 (shi; death) appeared on the screen, the “frustrated-kid-playing-Mario” urge to chuck my controller welled in me.
Big area bosses took days and weeks of pattern mastery. From insights gleaned from guides (I read and saved many), I tweaked combos of combat arts and prosthetic upgrades to better exact the Divine Heir’s quest. By the end of the game, I could’ve written my own guide but instead wrote this article.
Nearly 80 deaths at the hands of Lady Butterfly (you can skip her but mastery doesn’t come from leaving out optional bosses – She had to die).
James Bareham of Polygon framed it best:
"As frustrating as it was to be locked in this Groundhog Day-like loop of death, it was more infuriating to know that it was entirely my own fault. Every time I was pummeled by a single stroke, I knew exactly why: I had been too late with my deflection, I had pushed the wrong button, I had accidentally unlocked my target because I was squeezing the controller too tight. When I rushed or panicked, I died. Every. Single. Time. There was no mystery to my failure."
Bareham tried to quit but couldn’t get Sekiro out of his head. I can understand this. Dying because you're not good enough is an itch you can only scratch if you don’t suck. Like finishing a flawless 750-1200 word article you know will get accepted, you just have to do the work.
Doing the work, you get past the “you suck/this sucks” stage and reach a kind of flow state – a harmonic resonance between main character and couch potato player. The distance between intended action and actual action becomes more finite. To really stretch the analogy, it was like your thoughts coming together and the paragraphs effortlessly unfolding in your mind faster than you can type them.
Success in Sekiro wasn't gained in a vacuum, though. I researched the shit out of the game: the thoughts, experiences, and strategy of other gamers. I followed mentors, watched their YouTube videos, and tested their methods against the game and developed my own style. The purpose of the game is to eventually discover your own ‘Iron Code.’
If only I'd applied this level of thought, scholarship, and reflection to studying in college.
Like Bareham, I became very good at the game. My abilities reached a level of subconscious effort that bordered on uncanny when compared to my early ones. Death blows became addictive. Through Wolf, I experienced a cold, expert satisfaction after every execution, especially when using the ever frustrating mikiri counter.
To most of the gamers who've had positive experiences with Sekiro (there are no dearth of haters), the game forces them to drop the assumptions they had coming to it. Bareham wrote that Sekiro "simply wouldn’t let [him] progress until [he] figured out exactly how to play."
There's a writing analogy in that somewhere, but it's true. Game play exacts a single-minded focus. You must be sucked in in order to achieve any success. A well-earned 忍殺 (shinobi death) on a boss filled me with a dopamine rush – a well-earned success. Dear Writer, I love your article and would like to publish it.
Isshin’s life will inevitably end at the edge of your blade through accepting that each frustrating death gets you closer to perfection, and completion. You will also finish that article and overcome the next rejection.
If you persist.
What I’m up to:
Last year, I took the kid to Awesome Con in DC. It was her first one, and mine. Lss, we gravitated to the indy author area and started talking up a sci-fi and fantasy writer (he’s written some other things). I told him I used to love the genre but hadn’t been able to focus on fiction since the beginning of the pandemic. He suggested I check out his books and promised me my skepticism of urban Fantasy would be proven wrong and maybe I could escape my fictionless slump. Ahead of this year’s Awesome Con, I finally started reading his books, and he wasn’t wrong. So far, the first book is familiar but original, good magic system, and good characters. Check out The Rave by J.R. Traas.
Science reads: currently making my way through the January issue of Scientific American. Specifically, Cosmic Nothing – *nothing* like delving into the massive cluster of galaxies-sized voids throughout our cosmos.