You Didn’t Beat Him, Did You?

“Do you want to watch me fight Rennala?” My son Samson asked me.

Samson started playing the video game Elden Ring last week.

Nobody should ever play the game Elden Ring. Not because, as my other son Solomon warns us, the game is too violent. Nobody should ever play Elden Ring because it is a stupid video game. The story is incoherent. The gameplay is random. Dodging attacks is nigh-on-impossible, each boss is stupid-harder than the last, and the game has no point.

I spent months trying to beat Rennala. A powerful sorceress, head of the Carian Royal Family, and leader of the academy. Of course you’d need to look all these descriptors up online, because the game gives you no context as to who or what Renalla is when you play. No, she appears in the game as all the other characters do – with malice and without any discernible purpose.

I was sure that it would take Samson months to beat Renalla. I sat down on the couch and watched as Samson entered the boss fight.

It took him two tries. Renalla was dead. And with her, the myth that Samson’s dad was invincible.

***

“I beat her quicker than you did, Dad,” Samson reminded me for a fortieth time.

“Renalla was easy for Samson, Dad,” Solomon reminded me for a fiftieth time.

“That was funny,” my wife Katie said for a sixtieth time.

I sighed for a seventieth time.

Katie, Solomon, and Samson watched me struggle with Rennala for months. She wasn’t the only precursor to my breakdown that wasn’t really a breakdown in the fall of 2023, but she may have been one of them.

I was reminded of when Dad brought home a Nintendo when I was a kid. He stayed up all night trying to get to level 1-3. That morning, I sat down with a controller, and learned that the princess was in the other castle. Found myself in level 2-1.

“How did you do that, Sam?” Dad asked. I shrugged, beaming with pride.

“How did you do that, Samson?” I asked my son after he massacred poor Rennala, head of the Carian Family. Samson shrugged, beaming with pride.

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever will be. The myth of the father dissolves.

***

“You didn’t beat him, did you?” Samson asks each time he beats another boss I never beat.

No, Samson, I didn’t.

In two weeks Samson is further than I was after months of painful struggle. I surrender to my weakness. I celebrate my son’s successes. What else can I do?

Did you know I wrote a humor piece in McSweeney’s about Elden Ring? If not, enjoy. I think the game is a disaster. A masochistic creation intended to fry the brains of our youth. Not because of the violence, but because of the sheer incomprehensibility and difficulty of the game. The creator of that game, unlike the Creator of this universe, must have been a real sicko. I’d Google the team that came up with the game, but I don’t want to even give them that.

I didn’t beat him, no. But my son did. And who knows what Samson’s children will do? There is always hope for what comes next, even when Renalla, leader of the academy, is disintegrating you with her full moon spell. Even when the world looks impossible, it is true that new people can do something different. Improvisation is always possible. Hope for transformation is something to take solace in.