I’m playing Elden Ring. I’m fighting a difficult boss¹, and I’m getting kind of frustrated. I die again. I’m thinking about whether I want to keep playing. I don’t know. Am I having a good time? I can’t tell. How is it that I can’t tell?

Fundamentally, good experiences are good, and bad experiences are bad. But what if I don’t know whether I’m having a good experience? How is that possible? A good experience is good because it’s good for me. An experience lives inside me. But when I point my internal gaze directly at my experience, I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad. That seems impossible.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but I think an important component is that I’m not examining my experince during the game; I’m examining my experience while not playing the game. When I die to a boss and I spend a moment introspecting while I wait for the game to reload, I’m not fighting the boss at that moment. I’m looking at a loading screen while feeling frustrated.

In that moment, the only question I can answer is, “Am I having a good experience while staring at this loading screen?” If that’s the question, the answer is a pretty clear “no”. I don’t want to be staring at the loading screen while feeling frustrated. But that’s not the same as the question of whether I will be having a good time if I start the game again.

A second problem is that I am experiencing multiple things at the same time. I feel some frustration at my failure.² But I also feel some excitement. I feel some motivation to make progress. I know that I feel all those things; I know exactly what my frustration feels like, because I’m feeling it. The hard part is weighing them against each other. Is the combination of excitement and motivation enough to outweigh the frustration? Unlike each feeling on its own, the combined weighted experience is not a raw feeling in my gut, so there’s no principle that says I must be able to intuitively evaluate it.

And there is a third, even deeper problem: reflecting on an experience changes the experience.

During the boss fight, I can take a second to think about whether I’m having fun. But in that second, I’m not focused on the boss fight; I’m focused on introspecting on my experience. How I feel while I’m introspecting is not the same as how I feel while I’m engrossed in the game. Fundamentally, it is impossible for me to check how I feel while I’m engrossed, because then I wouldn’t be engrossed. (I am not the first person to make this observation, although perhaps I’m the first to apply it to Elden Ring boss fights.)

I have noticed that I’m more likely to be confused about my own experience if I’m tired. When I’m alert, most of the time I have no trouble knowing whether I want to keep doing what I’m doing, or do something else. But when I’m fatigued, I have a harder time feeling out which direction my motivations are pointing. Does that say something about how introspection works? It suggests to me that the process of aggregating and weighting the different aspects of my experience is a cognition-heavy operation.

To review, there are (at least) three reasons why I can’t tell whether my experience is good:

1. The experience I’m having at this moment is not the experience I want to introspect on.
2. I’m having multiple experiences simultaneously, and aggregating them is not a primitive operation that my brain can perform.
3. Introspecting causes my experience to change.

Posted on Nov 05, 2025

Notes