Starting Over from Scratch

Alas poor PS3, I knew him well.

            This past weekend I suffered a terrible first world tragedy. My Playstation 3, after almost six years of faithful servitude, ascended into video game system heaven. Having owned consoles since the NES days, this is the first console to die on me ever. Now, if my NES, Super Nintendo, or GBA died, I’d be annoyed, but all I’d need to do is purchase a new console and I’d be fine. However, with the newfangled consoles of the last generation, these systems included such revolutionary technology such as hard drives. A hard drive saves the progression of your video games so that you can come back to your game later and not lose your place. This is a potentially huge issue: if your system dies, you die in the real world your game saves die as well.

Honestly, I didn’t lose much when my system died. I can just buy a new system and redownload all the games I had on my original system without having to pay for them again. I don’t play my PS3 all that much, so most of my game saves can be made up easily. Yeah, I lost my pinball high scores, but that’s just annoying. Not so with two of my other games.

See, in 2014, I purchased Dark Souls, an action RPG lauded for its punishing difficulty. I bought the game because my best friend Marcus was a huge fan of the series and talked about it a lot with me during our game chats. The world of Lordran intrigued me, so I picked up my own copy on a lark to see how far I could get. Turns out I wasn’t half bad at the game – not a master, mind you, but I could survive the punishing difficulty.

Early on, I had Marcus jump into my game, and he gave me equipment he had built for me, which gave me a leg up from most starting players. Together we would stroll through new areas, and he’d take care of tough enemies and bosses while I ran around and made sure I didn’t die a painful death. Occasionally, I’d strike out on my own and make some progress myself, like defeating the Belfry Gargoyles and ringing the first bell, an important quest in the first third of Dark Souls. Eventually, I was able to handle the game mostly on my own and only summoned Marcus for bosses I knew would give me problems.

I traversed the Depths and escaped without getting petrified by the game ending basilisks, I navigated Pootown Blighttown and took out the hated blowdart snipers, and with Marcus I rang the second bell, entering the second phase of Dark Souls.

But then I had to put Dark Souls aside and focus on writing my first novel. As much as I wanted to play my game, I had a responsibility to fulfill. This meant I didn’t play Dark Souls again until three weeks ago.

I was ecstatic to get back into my game and get closer to finishing it. I escaped the deadly traps of Sens Fortress and defeated the Iron Golem with Iron Tarkus. I ascended the heights of Anor Londo and managed to get past the famed snipers, who have ended many a Dark Souls player’s run. Together with Marcus, we cleaned out Anor Londo and defeated Ornstein and Smough, considered by many to be one of the toughest bosses in Dark Souls. The Lordvessel was mine, and I entered into the endgame of Dark Souls.

Then Friday happened. I had finished running some errands in the game to make my character stronger before turning the system off to have lunch. When I came back and turned my system on, all I saw was a glitched screen. My heart sank – something was terribly wrong. After searching online for answers and trying a few different tips, I came to the horrible realization that my system was dead. Kaput. And with the death of my system went my 60+ hour game save. Everything I had worked for in the past two years was gone in a flash.

For a moment I considered never picking Dark Souls up again. After all that time I invested, I didn’t want to go and start all over again, defeating the same difficult bosses again. What’s worse is that I had started a new file just a week prior to play around. That meant I’d be doing the beginning of the game for a third time!

Yet, I learned something from that second playthrough. As this other character, I went through the same old areas with something I didn’t have the first time around: knowledge and experience. I tackled the first few bosses in the game on my own, when I needed my friend’s help beforehand. My skills had grown, and I was no longer the newbie running from danger. I could run to areas I wasn’t supposed to go as a new character and grab equipment that I didn’t have in the game until much later. I might’ve lost my progress in my old game, but with my previous experience I could advance through the game at a much faster pace.

My wife replaced my system as a surprise to me the other day, so today I restarted Dark Souls for the second time. As frustrating as it is, I know I’ll be back to where I was in a few weeks. I just need to rebuild and move forward.

Something similar happened to me with my writing a few years ago. I had been stuck on my final project for grad school, my movie length script for my portfolio. After dealing with the worst case of writers block I’ve ever had, I wrote my script over the period of two months during weekends. What was once a huge mountain was now manageable, as I conquered it page by page. By mid-October, I had finished my first draft at a whopping 350 pages. Satisfied with my work, I emailed my script to my professor as I celebrated my victory with my wife. This celebration was short lived.

Two days later, I received an email from my professor. The news was grim. He told me that I had gone way over the page limit for my script, and he refused to read a page of it! I had to cut the script down to 120 pages before he’d open the file and read it to give me feedback.

I went numb. After months of grueling work, my professor wouldn’t even read a sentence of my project. I remember sitting with my wife, flabbergasted as I lamented my situation. As I sat in my chair, distraught, my wife looked at me and told me, “You’ve got this. You’ve written it once, you can write it again.”

            And that’s exactly what I did. I took the rest of the week off of work and spent the next five days locked in my garage as I pored over the notes on my laptop and scriptwriting program. Characters were cut, plots disregarded and changed, and I reassembled the toppled jenga tower that was my story. By 3 am on the final evening before returning to work, I had written ‘The End’ on my story. In the end, I had rewritten 80% of the story, and only reused a miniscule of content from my original story.

            I sent my revised script to my professor the following day. He congratulated me on getting the revised script to him so quickly, which I’m sure surprised him based on my past work. That night I went to bed early, exhausted, but a stronger writer from my ordeal.

            Starting over on something you’ve been working on can feel absolutely crushing, all of that hard work gone in a blink of an eye. But even when technology or rules fail you, you haven’t lost absolutely everything. You still retain the experience of your ordeal, and that makes you all the stronger for it. You can approach that blank slate that was once so intimidating and know exactly how you need to change. Don’t lose heart, as this new beginning might make for a better story.

            Now excuse me, I have some souls to collect.