“You are now owner of the party” my Play Station 4 read as I watched two other players disappear from my Fortnite lobby in 2018. Fortnite was the top game in the world, and somehow, I could not get teammates who would play with me consistently when it first came out. Today, I see this as a gift.
I was not allowed to play shooter games until early high school, so when Fortnite grew to be a cultural staple I was simply bad at the game. It took me 557 games to get my first solo victory. I played game after game to get good enough that my friends at school would be not only happy to have me on their team, but would seek me out. I had more time on my hands back then.
In 2022, when Elden Ring first came out, I tapped out after beating Godrick the Grafted, the second-story boss, due to the immense difficulty of the game.
Through the summer of 2024, I played Elden Ring and its notoriously difficult DLC (downloadable content) to completion. It was an excellent experience.
All of a sudden I felt empowered through my days playing games that had, to me, massive obstacles that took legitimately hundreds of tries to get past, such as 557 games to win a game of Fortnite or at least 400+ tries on Promised Consort Radahn in “Elden Ring.”
I was not alone in this fight, as it turns out. One post by Reddit user Dawooky is titled “Elden Ring has helped with my depression.”
“What the game has reminded me of is with persistence, planning, and the right attitude that even this will pass,” Dawooky wrote.
This is not uncommon either. Another post by Reddit user Grandmasterpmd on r/darksouls, the subreddit behind the game that popularized the genre of Elden Ring, says they found the game “therapeutic.”
“I can honestly say that I’ve found Dark Souls to be one of the most therapeutic games that I’ve ever played,” Grandmasterpmd wrote. “Yeah. The atmosphere of it is bleak and getting wrecked by a boss or an area over and over again can be really demoralizing but you keep going and you keep getting wrecked… until you figure out how not to get wrecked.”
The user finished by saying “Don’t any of you dare go hollow.”
The finishing phrase of his post is a phrase within the community that encourages players to stay strong and not lose hope.
On PlayStation 5, trophy statistics show that only 56.7% of “Elden Ring” players have defeated Godrick, the aforementioned second boss of the game. Despite this, 10.8% of players have earned the Platinum trophy, which awards players for completing every achievement in the game.
One in 5 players who defeat the second boss in Elden Ring ends up beating every major and minor boss and finding many if not all major items in the game. This is despite that 43.7% of players never get past the second boss.
Being bad at video games is fine, but getting good at them can help one access experiences that are of the highest quality within the medium. This is downstream of the real world. We all hate feeling lesser, but not being afraid of failure in the smaller aspects of life can go a long way.
Confidence, for many, is not built on tangibles. Improving in a competitive game like “Marvel Rivals” can be a tangible piece of evidence that you can outwork those around you to achieve more. Beating bosses in “Elden Ring” can do the same when it comes to obstacles and struggles within one’s life.
At the end of the day, the small things we partake in could offer nothing more than a little enjoyment, but they also could be the first step to getting through major struggles by simply giving one the confidence to face them.