I Died In Diablo III, And I’m Still Grieving.
Sometimes, life needs to be mindless and pointless.
My friend and I have spent a lot of time together in the past two months devoted to a singular task: playing Diablo III, a hack-and-slash role-playing-game. At the very beginning, I insisted on playing on the hardest difficulty possible to make it the most challenging experience, so my friend and I did that. However, we also insisted on adding an extra challenge: playing on hardcore mode.
In Diablo, hardcore mode is a mode where once you die, your character is dead permanently and you cannot play that character again. I don’t know why we chose to go for hardcore mode, possibly just due to youthful hubris and a desire to keep things interesting and spice things up.
My friend and I played through several lives where we died and didn’t make it very far in the game. We were unskilled and unexperienced, but each death sent an indescribable sensation of simultaneous shock and disappointment through our systems. Usually, life is a story of upwards progress, even when it doesn’t seem like we’re making progress and making the same mistakes over and over.
But when you die in hardcore mode of Diablo III, all your progress is gone. It’s wiped off the face of the Earth. The hours you spent devoted to the game…
