In the game Super Mario 3D World, when a player “dies” too many times on a given level, the game then provides that player with a special item. This item is called the Invincibility Leaf and it does two things: first, it makes the player invincible to enemies; second, it turns Mario into a raccoon, because that’s what leaves always do in Mario games. (It only makes a little bit less sense than the idea of a mushroom making you big, if you think about it.) These effects obviously make it easier for the struggling player to complete the level and progress in the game. And, of course, using the Invincibility Leaf is strictly optional; you can always ignore it and try to beat the level without assistance. So it’s a harmless little feature, there for children and inexperienced players, to keep them from getting too frustrated, to keep them enjoying the game.
But I hate that leaf and everything it represents.
The simple explanation for why I hate the Invincibility Leaf is that it feels like the game is patronizing me. I don’t like to be pitied or given unsolicited help, and especially not by a machine. The robot uprising hasn’t quite come yet. I am still theoretically the boss of my Nintendo Wii U. But when a video game I am playing seems to notice that I am having trouble with it and offers to make itself easier, it feels a little too human for my liking. A bit too Black Mirror. And besides, that means the game is looking down on me, judging me, laughing at me. Mentally comparing me to all the other players who didn’t need the leaf. And that makes me feel insecure.
As for the long answer: I feel like the leaf represents a fundamental misunderstanding in our culture of what ought to count as a problem. By providing the player with a tool to make the level easier, the game is sending the message that he or she should not have “died” so many times. The fact that he or she did is a problem. Something that needs to be solved.
Whereas when I sit down to play a video game, I fully expect that there are going to be certain levels where I die many, many times. The frustration that I experience is an inherent part of what it means to play a video game. That’s what it’s supposed to be like, at least some of the time. And the flip side of that feeling of frustration is the sense of accomplishment that comes when I finally do beat the level (or complete the quest, or defeat the boss - whatever task it happens to be.) You can’t really have one without the other. There’s a reason why reaching the summit of a mountain is more satisfying than walking to the corner store. The greater the struggle, the greater the payoff.
At the risk of sounding like (and being) someone who waxes nostalgic about the media of his or her youth, seeing the past through rose-colored glasses: older Mario games did not have anything like the Invincibility Leaf and they were better for it. When you reached a difficult part of Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World, you just had to figure it out. Sure, you could look up the solution online (as long as no one in your house was using the phone and you were willing to listen to thirty seconds of dial-up cacophony beforehand) or you could swallow your pride and ask a friend/sibling/drifter to beat it for you, but the onus was still on you. The game itself wasn’t going to help you out. As far as the game was concerned, your struggle was not a problem that it needed to solve.
Struggling was not a bug; it was a feature.
I think there is a distinction to be made between good problems and bad problems. Good problems are expected, necessary, and important. They are part of life. Figuring out how to deal with them as they arise makes us better human beings, and eliminating them would make our lives less meaningful. Having to shovel your driveway when it snows is a good problem. Bad problems, on the other hand, are the ones that we really should try to solve and eliminate. They do not enrich our lives in any way. Climate change is a bad problem.
For the sake of comparison, I also think there is a similar distinction to be made between good tired and bad tired. Good tired comes after you have been busy all day, engaged in meaningful work or enjoyable conversations or enthralled by great media, and now you would like to rest a bit. Bad tired is when you feel completely gray and dull and lethargic and like you’re barely even a person.
Insomnia makes you bad tired.
Or good hungry and bad hungry. Good hungry is when you just haven’t eaten in a while and now you’d like some delicious food; bad hungry is being miserable and weak and misanthropic. The two experiences really aren’t anything alike (sometimes when you’re bad hungry, you don’t even realize that a lack of food is to blame for your unhappiness until you eat) but we lump them together under the same word.
Obviously the particulars of what should count as a good problem versus a bad problem are going to be up for debate. (And so, by the way, are the terms we use for the two different concepts. There is almost definitely a more sophisticated way to talk about them. I’m just using the terms that I’m in the habit of using in my inner monologue.) What I care about is that we rarely seem to make the distinction at all. We have such a low threshold for any sort of struggle or difficulty that everything is seen simply as a problem, period - something that necessitates a solution.
I definitely experienced some struggles during my first year teaching. Mostly with classroom management and mostly in one particular class. But as the year went on, I slowly realized that what really bothered me was not the struggle itself but the fact that it was perceived as a bad problem. There were people who offered me advice and assistance, but they seemed to have the attitude that I was not supposed to be having the problems I was having. They took them as a sign of failure rather than a normal part of being a first-year teacher (or being a teacher at all.)
And that implicit attitude rubbed off on me. I came up with a bunch of reasons why I shouldn’t be struggling the way I was: because I had worked in a more challenging school the year before, because I was fortunate to have small classes and sufficient resources, because I was supposed to be good at things god damn it, and so on. But when I really thought back to the previous, when I was a long-term substitute in a school with objectively more challenges (more students, more behavioral problems, more English Language Learners, more students with IEPs) - it occurred to me that the people I worked with had a much different attitude. They validated my struggles and admitted that sometimes they struggled with the same things, despite being older and more experienced. And they viewed this as a natural and inevitable part of teaching. A good problem.
Let me be clear. I’m not trying to make a moral point here. I don’t think it makes you a bad person to buy a Perfect Brownie pan, or to devote your time to the creation of something unnecessary. (I mean, arguably, art is unnecessary. But that’s a separate issue.) I’m not saying that the guy who invented the Perfect Brownie pan should have been fighting climate change or world hunger instead. No, my point is just: who wants to live in a world where brownies don’t ever get messed up? Who wants to have a life where there are no inconveniences or aberrations, no struggles or challenges or difficulties as you go through the day?
Who wants an Invincibility Leaf, anyway?
Well, we all do. And that’s kind of the problem. We all want to eliminate our problems, even our good problems. But doing so makes our lives less interesting, less rich, less full. It makes us bored - and does so in a way that we don’t even realize why we’re so bored, which is even more worrying to me. So we’ve got to be strong-willed and thoughtful enough to stop creating Invincibility Leaves, stop giving ourselves and each other these shortcuts, stop trying to rid the world of what are really good problems to have.
Because, sadly, “choosing not to use the shortcuts” is not going to be enough here. Once an Invincibility Leaf appears, it changes the whole situation. There’s a difference between choosing to do something in a more difficult way than you have to and doing it that way because you have no other choice. For one thing, the former makes you seem kind of stubborn and set in your ways and resistant to change and anti-progress and so on and so forth. Certainly that's how I feel when I wash the dishes by hand when there’s a dishwasher right there, or when I refuse to use a GPS in anything but the most dire of circumstances. Like a stodgy old conservative curmudgeon who won’t “get with the times.” Ed O’Neill’s character on Modern Family at best; Bill O’Reilly at worst.
But just because we call something “progress” doesn’t mean it actually makes things better. (Man, I hate how politically charged that sentence sounds. But I promise I’m not talking about LGBT rights or ethnic diversity or legalizing marijuana.) And I think our litmus test for “better” should be the real effect that something has upon the real experience of real human beings. If it doesn’t make lives better - in the fullest sense of the word - then it’s not a solution to anything at all.
Of course, I totally get the temptation to eliminate problems from our lives. We are problem-solving creatures, after all; it’s in our nature. But that’s the thing. We are problem-solving creatures. We need to be encountering problems - challenges, obstacles, inconveniences - every day of our lives and figuring out how to deal with them as they arise. We can’t just deal with them once and for all. That’s the recipe for a tiny, private dystopia. A brave new world inside your mind. A life of quiet desperation.
Let’s take Chance the Rapper literally and apply the double negative. You don’t want zero problems, big fella.
 |
Of course, SM3DW also brought us the joy of Cat Bowser, so
it's really a draw.
|
As for the long answer: I feel like the leaf represents a fundamental misunderstanding in our culture of what ought to count as a problem. By providing the player with a tool to make the level easier, the game is sending the message that he or she should not have “died” so many times. The fact that he or she did is a problem. Something that needs to be solved.
Whereas when I sit down to play a video game, I fully expect that there are going to be certain levels where I die many, many times. The frustration that I experience is an inherent part of what it means to play a video game. That’s what it’s supposed to be like, at least some of the time. And the flip side of that feeling of frustration is the sense of accomplishment that comes when I finally do beat the level (or complete the quest, or defeat the boss - whatever task it happens to be.) You can’t really have one without the other. There’s a reason why reaching the summit of a mountain is more satisfying than walking to the corner store. The greater the struggle, the greater the payoff.
At the risk of sounding like (and being) someone who waxes nostalgic about the media of his or her youth, seeing the past through rose-colored glasses: older Mario games did not have anything like the Invincibility Leaf and they were better for it. When you reached a difficult part of Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World, you just had to figure it out. Sure, you could look up the solution online (as long as no one in your house was using the phone and you were willing to listen to thirty seconds of dial-up cacophony beforehand) or you could swallow your pride and ask a friend/sibling/drifter to beat it for you, but the onus was still on you. The game itself wasn’t going to help you out. As far as the game was concerned, your struggle was not a problem that it needed to solve.
Struggling was not a bug; it was a feature.
I think there is a distinction to be made between good problems and bad problems. Good problems are expected, necessary, and important. They are part of life. Figuring out how to deal with them as they arise makes us better human beings, and eliminating them would make our lives less meaningful. Having to shovel your driveway when it snows is a good problem. Bad problems, on the other hand, are the ones that we really should try to solve and eliminate. They do not enrich our lives in any way. Climate change is a bad problem.
For the sake of comparison, I also think there is a similar distinction to be made between good tired and bad tired. Good tired comes after you have been busy all day, engaged in meaningful work or enjoyable conversations or enthralled by great media, and now you would like to rest a bit. Bad tired is when you feel completely gray and dull and lethargic and like you’re barely even a person.
Insomnia makes you bad tired.
Or good hungry and bad hungry. Good hungry is when you just haven’t eaten in a while and now you’d like some delicious food; bad hungry is being miserable and weak and misanthropic. The two experiences really aren’t anything alike (sometimes when you’re bad hungry, you don’t even realize that a lack of food is to blame for your unhappiness until you eat) but we lump them together under the same word.
New Turing Test: Does this look delicious? Any answer but "yes"
means you're a robot. |
Obviously the particulars of what should count as a good problem versus a bad problem are going to be up for debate. (And so, by the way, are the terms we use for the two different concepts. There is almost definitely a more sophisticated way to talk about them. I’m just using the terms that I’m in the habit of using in my inner monologue.) What I care about is that we rarely seem to make the distinction at all. We have such a low threshold for any sort of struggle or difficulty that everything is seen simply as a problem, period - something that necessitates a solution.
I definitely experienced some struggles during my first year teaching. Mostly with classroom management and mostly in one particular class. But as the year went on, I slowly realized that what really bothered me was not the struggle itself but the fact that it was perceived as a bad problem. There were people who offered me advice and assistance, but they seemed to have the attitude that I was not supposed to be having the problems I was having. They took them as a sign of failure rather than a normal part of being a first-year teacher (or being a teacher at all.)
 |
| Ooh, look who read the Wikipedia page "Criticism of Capitalism" one time. |
And I am concerned that because we don’t distinguish between the two, we spend far too much time and energy trying to eliminate our good problems instead of focusing on the bad ones. I hate sounding like some college-freshman-pseudo-Marxist-Tyler-Durden-wannabe, but so many of the products we buy are attempts to solve problems that aren’t really even problems. Take the dishwasher. What problem is a dishwasher supposed to solve? Having to clean dishes by hand at the end of a meal? Hell, I enjoy washing dishes. It’s therapeutic in a way. The warm water feels nice on my hands, and the whole ritual allows me to feel productive and practical and concrete - especially since it often feels like all I ever do is play around with words.
Or, if I’ve alienated you with the dishwasher example, let’s look at a more extreme one. How about the Perfect Brownie pan? Surely everyone can agree that the Perfect Brownie pan is ridiculous and unnecessary. What problem is it supposed to solve? Sometimes brownies are messy and uneven? The brownies on the edge of the pan have more crunch than those in the middle? Those aren’t problems. Those are just things that happen when you make brownies!
Or, if I’ve alienated you with the dishwasher example, let’s look at a more extreme one. How about the Perfect Brownie pan? Surely everyone can agree that the Perfect Brownie pan is ridiculous and unnecessary. What problem is it supposed to solve? Sometimes brownies are messy and uneven? The brownies on the edge of the pan have more crunch than those in the middle? Those aren’t problems. Those are just things that happen when you make brownies!
Let me be clear. I’m not trying to make a moral point here. I don’t think it makes you a bad person to buy a Perfect Brownie pan, or to devote your time to the creation of something unnecessary. (I mean, arguably, art is unnecessary. But that’s a separate issue.) I’m not saying that the guy who invented the Perfect Brownie pan should have been fighting climate change or world hunger instead. No, my point is just: who wants to live in a world where brownies don’t ever get messed up? Who wants to have a life where there are no inconveniences or aberrations, no struggles or challenges or difficulties as you go through the day?
Who wants an Invincibility Leaf, anyway?
Well, we all do. And that’s kind of the problem. We all want to eliminate our problems, even our good problems. But doing so makes our lives less interesting, less rich, less full. It makes us bored - and does so in a way that we don’t even realize why we’re so bored, which is even more worrying to me. So we’ve got to be strong-willed and thoughtful enough to stop creating Invincibility Leaves, stop giving ourselves and each other these shortcuts, stop trying to rid the world of what are really good problems to have.
Because, sadly, “choosing not to use the shortcuts” is not going to be enough here. Once an Invincibility Leaf appears, it changes the whole situation. There’s a difference between choosing to do something in a more difficult way than you have to and doing it that way because you have no other choice. For one thing, the former makes you seem kind of stubborn and set in your ways and resistant to change and anti-progress and so on and so forth. Certainly that's how I feel when I wash the dishes by hand when there’s a dishwasher right there, or when I refuse to use a GPS in anything but the most dire of circumstances. Like a stodgy old conservative curmudgeon who won’t “get with the times.” Ed O’Neill’s character on Modern Family at best; Bill O’Reilly at worst.
But just because we call something “progress” doesn’t mean it actually makes things better. (Man, I hate how politically charged that sentence sounds. But I promise I’m not talking about LGBT rights or ethnic diversity or legalizing marijuana.) And I think our litmus test for “better” should be the real effect that something has upon the real experience of real human beings. If it doesn’t make lives better - in the fullest sense of the word - then it’s not a solution to anything at all.
Of course, I totally get the temptation to eliminate problems from our lives. We are problem-solving creatures, after all; it’s in our nature. But that’s the thing. We are problem-solving creatures. We need to be encountering problems - challenges, obstacles, inconveniences - every day of our lives and figuring out how to deal with them as they arise. We can’t just deal with them once and for all. That’s the recipe for a tiny, private dystopia. A brave new world inside your mind. A life of quiet desperation.
Let’s take Chance the Rapper literally and apply the double negative. You don’t want zero problems, big fella.
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