An Ode to The Iterative Process (feat. My Video Game Hyperfixation)

I promise this isn’t just an excuse to gush about my favorite thing. 

So, I play a lot of difficult fighting video games. Or rather, I play the same handful of difficult fighting games multiple times until the hardest fights (boss battles) get a little too hard for me. I love these games because they’re difficult, and I’ve noticed that every time I start a new play-through, the boss battles get easier. I become accustomed to the bosses’ movements, like the slight twitch of an arm that signals I’m about to encounter the devastating blow that’s killed my character many times before. My reactions get quicker, and I learn the exact millisecond-moment I can dodge to safety, or the timing of the perfect parry that’ll keep me in this fight, if only for a few seconds longer.

This, in itself, is an excellent example of using an iterative process to learn, the very same concept we refer to when teaching legal research. However, my determination to simply be better at video games is not what gave me a deeper appreciation for the iterative process. No, that came when I started replaying the game Blasphemous.

I’ve played Blasphemous a few times before, but I’ve admittedly never beaten the game’s final boss, His Holiness Escribar. There are nine required boss fights and two optional ones a player must win before they can challenge Escribar and end the game with his defeat.

I was almost to Escribar on this most recent play-through. I’d fought my way through everything and everyone in record time and made it to the penultimate fight with Escribar’s most loyal knight and protector. I’d struggled through this fight plenty of times in the past, so I figured I’d breeze through it and be fighting Escribar in no time at all. It was already late on that fateful Friday night, so I put the game down, promising myself I’d be at the final fight before lunchtime the next day. But I didn’t exactly put it down. Like the title of this post suggests, this was a hyperfixation.

I’d become so ravenously curious about the lore of this game’s world, I needed to know everything, and I wanted to stay immersed in it until I shut my eyes that night. I threw on an hours-long YouTube video describing the world’s lore for background noise while I got ready for bed. I listened absentmindedly until about forty minutes in, when the narrator began to describe how acquiring a very specific item would allow a player to bypass the fifth boss fight entirely.

…Excuse me?

I didn’t know that was possible, and all it required was stumbling into a particular area of the map before arriving at the doorstep of that fifth boss fight. I wish I’d known that before I’d reached as far as I did in my current playthrough. Ah, well. I tell myself I’ll have to remember that for next time. I keep listening, my interest piqued. Immediately after, the narrator describes how this little discovery can affect the ending of the game entirely.

…EXCUSE ME?

My tired eyes glued themselves to the screen. I sat fixated, paying much more attention. You see, Blasphemous is one of those games that only shows you which buttons to press in its tutorial. It doesn’t tell you where to go or what to do beyond a few cryptic words given by a strange man in a woven mask and pointy hat. It seems simple enough when you first start: just keep defeating enemies. The game didn’t tell me I had other options. Then again, I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t tried to explore different routes than the ones I’d always taken, I just kept using brute force hoping to get better. Though that worked for a while, I still hadn’t learned enough to defeat the final boss, had I?

The YouTube video went on, describing how bypassing that fifth boss fight opens a whole new possibility to the player where, after a series of complicated steps including defeating both optional bosses, the player can unlock the ultimate form of their weapon, and the true ending of the game. I was both elated, and very, very devastated to hear that. I was so excited to learn that there was more to this game than I knew, and completely and totally crushed at what I knew I had to do next.

I had to start over.

Yes, I had to start over. I didn’t give myself much of another choice. The call of a true ending, of finding something new and exciting in this game just about forced my hand. The next morning, that’s exactly what I did. Even faster than before, I breezed through those boss fights until I got to the fifth one. I obsessed over my new checklist of steps, diligently setting myself up for that true ending, and I had a blast.

A few days later when recounting my gaming weekend to a colleague over coffee, she joked that I was lucky I consulted a secondary source before finishing the game. Though she might have just been humoring me because we were scheduled to teach secondary sources that week, she was right. That’s exactly what I’d done. Still, it struck me as odd. I didn’t seek out that video because I didn’t understand the game or because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t go looking for a general overview of the game with the focused intent to learn enough to beat the final boss. I didn’t go looking for a secondary source for the same reasons we emphasize to our students. I put on the video because of a very simple itch to know more.

All that got me thinking. We teach legal research as an iterative process, one that requires us to repeat our steps, tweaking and adjusting as we go, until we’re satisfied with our results. Even so, we don’t often give examples of what that can look like, how that trial and error and constant revision can feel frustrating and chaotic at times, and how answering a question we might not have known to ask earlier can change our course so drastically it almost hurts.

In thinking about my time playing Blasphemous, I began to realize just how important it can be for the iterative process of legal research to begin with something as simple as passionate curiosity, the kind that doesn’t care how small a question is and asks anyway, even when so very close to the end. I realized that sometimes, the magnitude of the responses to those questions will be devastating, and we’ll have put in loads of work just to find out we haven’t even scratched the surface. In those moments, though it may seem like it, all is still not lost. There is still valuable learning in those moments when we’re on the wrong track, hacking and slashing our way through a problem that doesn’t seem to need more than a hack and a slash. Even then, we’re gathering information, verifying what we know repeatedly so when more questions arise, we don’t have to start from nothing.

Hear me out. I know this sounds goofy, cheesy, or whatever third adjective you have in your head right now, but in preparing my students for what legal research will actually look like in practice, I find it deeply important to stress that hitting a research roadblock will happen, but it doesn’t mean we give up. It doesn’t mean we throw our hands in the air and say we’ve done all we can and ignore the rest. It is an iterative process, after all. It means we hold onto what we’ve learned and start over if we must. It may take more time than we’re comfortable with spending, and we might feel dejected at the perceived loss of effort and product, but when we keep going despite that, we can only be better researchers for it.

Anyway, I’ve got a cool new weapon and a fight with Escribar to get to. Wish me luck!