This week my first attempt at a legendary difficulty campaign of the XCOM 2 expansion, War of the Chosen, went down in flames. Also this week, I started my first real and persistent attempts at learning Unity and building a game in its toolset. It’s been a week of exploration, unfamiliarity, and uncertainty.
I’ve learned something about challenge, this week. I learned that you can either give yourself a difficult task or an unfamiliar task, and either of those might go poorly, but if you give yourself a task that is both difficult and unfamiliar you are really asking for trouble. When I started the War of the Chosen campaign, I assumed it was mostly the same as XCOM 2 with a few additions. It turned out that almost every mission type was completely different than before. It turned out that many of the things I’d learned about how to play the game from playing before the expansion either were no longer relevant or came with new caveats I wasn’t aware of. It turned out I shouldn’t position a soldier on a fire escape attached to a building that was slowly caving in on itself. It was very educational.
Not only does War of the Chosen introduce a lot of new mechanics to the game, the mechanics it introduces are comparatively opaque, driven more by narrative than mostly systems-determined missions of XCOM 2. This isn’t a bad thing, but it is a thing that will completely destroy an unprepared player who has reduced their margin for error to close to nil by playing on the hardest difficulty.
But what about Unity? Fortunately, in that case I was smart enough to not try to overlap two kinds of difficulty, and I set myself an easy task to do in an unfamiliar environment: Make some sort of game or game-like experience by the end of the month. Of course, my approach to doing that still makes things characteristically difficult for myself, such as by getting deep into the specifics of the physics system to get a jump animation to work just the way I want it to or to make a cursor in 3d space lock onto the closest available surface, but I’m getting somewhere and I’m learning a lot.
It’s important sometimes to be able to embrace ignorance. Having an appreciation of learning is only possible when you have an understanding of just how much you don’t know – the reason why so many people resent education and expertise is not resentment at the knowledge and skill people accumulate, but resentment at the implication, by having knowledge and skill, that those who do not have it are ignorant and unskilled. Learning becomes an insult, training becomes a prank. Everyone has this seed in them, a part of them that hates their limitations so much that they can’t stand to see anyone excel. Only by accepting our ignorance can we learn to move past it. It’s not like Socrates’ knowing enough to know that he knew nothing: It’s knowing that you know nothing so that you are able to replace the nothing with something.
Sometimes it helps to take a dive into the unfamiliar. Not only is it a necessary prerequisite to making the unfamiliar familiar, old assumptions and habits start to be cast into a new light and questioned anew. Scraping away superficial layers of knowledge sometimes helps one to attain a more complete, clarified knowledge.
Or, at least, these are pleasant things to tell oneself while one is being reborn, unaccustomedly ignorant, weakened, and infantilized.