I died ~300 times, but last night I finally beat Isshin! And as a professor, I think Sekiro made me realize something deeper about the learning process more generally.

I'm a professor, and for the last week I've been dying over and over again on Sekiro's last boss. No joke...at points I would literally work on my syllabus for the upcoming semester as a break from Sekiro because doing work was less mentally taxing haha. But I did it!And in the process of dying over and over again over an entire week, I had a lightbulb moment about the learning process more generally (maybe I'm being ridiculous and still riding my adrenaline from finally winning, but bear with me). Sekiro is brutally hard, unforgiving, and uncompromising. Especially in that last fight, if your brain misfires for a quarter second, that could be it. But Sekiro isn't hard just to be hard; rather, the game is maybe the "fairest" game I've ever played. If you can learn and react, you'll win. There are no gimmicks. And I think that's why it's so satisfying and why so many people are willing to die hundreds of times doing one small thing over and over again: because it's fair and it's up to you to get good. Consequently, I got a bit further into the fight every night and learned more and kept going. I could feel myself recognizing patterns just a split second faster, and I knew I'd get there eventually. It never felt hopeless.So yeah...I think that applies just as much to a college class as it does to a game: anyone can make something hard. Making something hard is easy. But there's no value in something being hard just to be hard. The value in difficulty is when it's pushing you to get better but always up-front and fair. A few professors I've heard brag about their average class test scores in the 60s should maybe play Sekiro and learn that lesson :)

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