(TW: this piece includes a link to a news article which discusses suicide and self harm in the context of the UK benefits system. There's no discussion in the essay itself, however.)

Since May, I’ve racked up 100+ hours playing the video game Hades. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this has happened while I’ve been trying to change my job. Between these two activities, most of my free time for the last few months has been taken up with relentless failure.

For the unaware, in Hades you play Zagreus, the son of Hades, as he repeatedly attempts to escape the underworld against the wishes of his father. In doing so, you face multitudes of enemies sent to stop you, but you are assisted on your way by ‘boons’ from various Olympian gods granting you a variey of powers; the array you are offered changes with every attempt you make. There are other ways in which you become stronger between escape attempts, but one of the aspects of the game which makes it so addictive is that it’s nearly impossible to play more than one attempt with the same set of skills: even if the same set of gods show up, they will offer different powers, which will often have different levels of strength. It takes a long time to adjust to all of the different techniques on offer, but unlike many other video games, your past choices never trap you in future attempts.

In Hades, you are met with constant failure. You are routinely humiliated. Many of the people (well: gods) who are there to help you are borderline patronising and clearly have their own agenda. (Though at least immortal wisdom is far greater qualification to which any earthly government career advisor could lay claim.) The underworld itself is presented as the ultimate toxic work environment! It’s strange that I’ve resorted to something with so many clear parallels as my primary escape from the frustrations of finding a new job. But at least it’s a world in which it doesn’t matter what I’ve done before. Whenever I fail yet another escape attempt, I have endless new combinations of weapons and skills and allies to work with.

I’ve only managed to escape successfully three times in 230 attempts, but starting again in spite of all of the failure doesn’t feel as painful as beginning yet another job application. Even so, I’m just as compulsive around looking for jobs as I am about playing video games; it consumes an unhealthy amount of my thoughts at any given moment. We talk about video game addiction as a burgeoning social problem, but I’ve never heard of anyone else obsessively looking for jobs quite like I do. Trying to find a new job, on paper at least, is a compellingly clear-cut solution to a problem in a world where there are very few easy fixes. In reality, though, it's time-consuming and emotionally draining.

Hades has been available to play in some version since 2018. The same year also saw the release of Celeste, a platformer in which you play a young woman attempting to climb a particularly forbidding mountain. Unlike Hades, there are no combat mechanisms on your end: you are just running and jumping. However, they are both games in which failure is what drives you; Celeste is notoriously difficult, but due to the way that sensory feedback is incorporated into the game, you tangibly feel yourself improving with every failure. There is a ticker which counts how many times you die: at first, it’s disheartening, but then you learn to view it as a measure of your own persistence against the odds.

Both Celeste and Hades are regarded as two of the best games of all time. They have extremely similar Metacritic score sheets and devoted fandoms. They’ve also gained critical acclaim over a period when gaming has become a normalised past-time for Adults With Jobs And Responsibilities. Despite being completely different games in terms of genre and plot, they share something fundamentally liberating: regardless of how much time you have already invested, there is always a way through. It is impossible to trap yourself. Not only that, but due to increasing awareness of access needs in the game industry, both games feature an optional mode to make gameplay less challenging so that a wider number of people can enjoy the story.

The other day, I realised that during the four years that I was unable to work, employment conditions in the UK changed undeniably for the worse. Returning to work would have been daunting enough anyway, but on top of that this whole time I've been doing it on hard mode without really thinking about it. To make things worse, the government are proposing to radically alter the specific benefit tier I relied on when I was unable to work. Most days, I have to consider whether looking for a new role is jeopardising my health too much to continue. Life is harder than it was before, with failure becoming even less of an option.

It’s cruel and absurd that, in daily life, we don’t have the freedom to fail when it’s such an inevitable fact of existence. But in an increasingly punitive society, it makes perfect sense that games with relentless, yet consequence-free, failure have become popular. For my part, Hades has offered me welcome respite from the idea of failure as an innate personal quality affecting my ability to survive under capitalism. Instead, it’s a space where any failure is rewarded by the exhilarating potential of a fresh start.

Thanks for reading! This has been a particularly depressing essay, so I do specifically want to say that I'm hanging in there fine.

Some lighter news before I go: I've managed to harvest enough tomatoes to make the tomato and radish gnocchi dish from Greenfeast: Spring, Summer by Nigel Slater, which I'm counting as a success.

I also wanted to share that the new Jeff Rosenstock album HELLMODE as well as Doom Singer by Chris Farren have been vital listening recently! Life-affirming while pulling no punches about the state of the world is a tricky thing to pull off but they both manage it with aplomb.

I have No Idea when I'll be able to return to this regularly - fingers crossed it will be soon. I guess, though, if you see any jobs and think that they'd work for me, then please give me a shout! Until next time.