There is a period of around three to four months (or more, depending on your luck) after you submit your thesis where you just…wait for your viva date. The only left to do is to prepare for it, but let’s be real: nobody takes three to four months to prepare for a 20-minute presentation (at least not in academia).
If you, like me, had sought the advise of the Wise Ones on what you should do with this time, you’ll inevitably find yourself needing to choose between two distinct camps:
- The Wise Ones: This camp will tell you to never set your thesis aside until your viva date. They’ll tell you to keep reading and referring to it, making sure you never forget your research so that when the viva date comes, you’ll be ready and not in full-on panic mode. The four months, they’ll say, are there for you to study.
- The Ones with Wisdom: This camp will tell you to set your thesis fully aside. Reading it will only reveal to you the many, many mistakes and imperfections that you have submitted, so casting it aside until the viva date will make you feel less anxious, they will say. The four months are there for you to relax, at least until two weeks before the viva date.
Of course, I personally fell into the camp of Those with Wisdom. Spend four months studying something I had spent five years working on? No. Not me.
The same day I submitted my thesis, I took the printed version and I handed it off to my husband, begging him to take it away out of the house so that I had no access to it. To me, the thesis had been submitted anyway. What would be the point of putting myself through the agony of finding typos and mistakes and second-guessing my work?
My husband, ever the supportive spouse, carted my printed thesis away.
And then I turned to Elden Ring.
I like to believe that, like many others born in the 90s, I had a great childhood. We were, after all, probably the last generation who had any semblance of childhood outside of home and school. I remember spending afternoons after school roaming around the neighborhood, climbing trees and playing with friends.
But I also spent a lot of my weekends playing games.
Gaming, for me, started with an old Sega Genesis console, which my siblings (and parents) and I would play Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighters when I was four years old. To this day, I am not able to listen to Emerald Hill Zone without feeling like I can take on the world. There’s just something about that 16-bit music that makes me feel so, so happy.
Some time after first grade (or around thereabouts), my parents got my siblings and I a PlayStation and with it, a copy of Final Fantasy VII. And that, my friends, was history. That was when I began playing games in earnest. Unlike Sonic and Street Fighters, Final Fantasy was a long-form game over three CDs. It wasn’t a game that we need start over and over from the beginning. It had a storyline. A spiky-haired hero. A mystery. A villain. A death of a beloved character.
It had everything, and I became obsessed over Final Fantasy games ever since.
I loved the story, the characters, the world.
Everything.
I slowed down playing games in my teenhood as I found myself being swept away into the world of writing stories and reading books. Once I began my degree, I started playing more. I bought a limited edition, white Dissidia Duodecim PSP and started playing games again. If a class was particularly boring, I would sit at the back of the classroom and play some games, though being the nerd I was even back then, this was rare-ish.
Then I graduated and started working. The long hours and large, tiring workload forced me to reduce my gaming hours even more. I had limited free time, and had to choose between reading, writing and gaming. Reading and writing would always take precedent back then. A week would go by without playing anything. Then a month. Then several months.
By the time I got married in 2016, I had quit gaming entirely and sold off my limited edition PSP. I half-regret that decision. It would have been nice to still have it, just for display purposes. The decision to quit gaming was bittersweet, but with marriage and kids on the horizon, I was ready to let that part of myself—the Gamer Mai—go.
Fast forward to September 2024.
After ten years of not playing games, in honour of submitting my thesis, I bought a controller, bought a copy of Elden Ring from Steam, and started to play again.
I have always really liked Elden Ring. Even though I hadn’t been playing games, I was still interested in news and its development. Stories about new technology, new titles, and so on. I would also, sometimes, live vicariously through my friend, an avid gamer, who since 2022 had often shared screenshots of Elden Ring for me when the game came out. And my goodness. The game is absolutely beautiful.
I mean, it was the perfect escape that made me forget entirely about the upcoming viva.
There were a few things about Elden Ring that made it the perfect game for me, at least post-viva. The first was that it did not have a strict “storyline” for me to follow. It’s an open world game that allows players to explore and it was just so nice to not have the pressure of having to finish a main questline or anything. I was able to just…roam around and enjoy the views, because the game definitely gave a lot for its players to enjoy and see.
I wish I could just spam screenshots in this post, but I shall not. Suffice to say that the game was just amazing. As someone who had kept close attention to news surrounding the Final Fantasy franchise (without directly playing the games), I knew how spectacularly games have evolved graphics-wise. Elden Ring just did not disappoint, despite the unremarkable specs my non-gaming laptop was operating with.
Shamelessly, I shall admit that 95% of the game was played with a friend. But it wasn’t about defeating the bosses on my own for me. It was just about…walking around and experiencing. And enjoying the escape for what it was.
There was one boss, however, that I did defeat all by my lonesome. And that boss is Morgott the Omen King.
Yeah, that’s him.
I can’t remember how many times my friend and I attempted this boss, but it became late enough that she decided to call it a day. I, however, was annoyed that I was not able to beat this boss. I knew I could do it, but somehow I was not able to. So I kept at it. Death after death, it took me ten attempts on my own until I was finally, FINALLY able to beat him.
TEN ATTEMPTS!!
And yes, there were other bosses (i.e. Malenia) that took us even more tries than that.
I have since learned that a lot of FromSoftware games, like Elden Ring, are designed to be like this. They give you impossibly tough bosses, and you are designed to die. Repeatedly. You are designed to die a lot. Death is inevitable. It happens often. You will try to navigate a rooftop and slip and die. You’ll try to jump down onto a platform and die. You’ll get hit by an arrow the size of your house and die. You’ll ride on a horse and fall off a cliff and die.
The game is littered with blood splatters in random places, marking places where other players in their own worlds have died in real time.
Suffice to say, if you’re playing this game and are not dying ten times in ten minutes, it means you’ve been at it for a while, is all I’m saying.
In all honesty, however, Elden Ring offered a lot more to me than just a way to escape and forget the viva.
A lot of gamers have said that games like Elden Ring have done a lot for their self-esteem and general resilience in life, and I’d like to echo that and say I feel the same way. In fact, as I’m writing this post, I realised that there were many things that Elden Ring had taught me.
Elden Ring taught me that I could defeat any boss. The way the game was designed was just notoriously beautiful with this. Time and again I found myself confronted with one impossible boss after another, but with the right equipment, stats, training—I get to understand that I actually can beat a boss on my own if I put my mind to it. It boils down to a matter of competence, or attitude.
There’s an optional fight that you can have with one boss, Malenia, known for being the hardest boss of the game. And for good reason. I am not at all exaggerating when I say I have probably died beyond fifty times trying to beat her. With the help of a friend, eventually we did, but I did not feel at all accomplished with it. In fact, she’s the one boss I kept thinking back to. I mean if I ever find myself replaying Elden Ring, it would be because I wanted to fight against her again and beat her on my own terms.
The thing is, Elden Ring allows you to beat Malenia with a friend. You can summon really strong friends to help you with 95% of the bosses, and it’s an allowable part of the game. So essentially, what I learned about myself is that I actually do feel a sense of accomplishment when I am able to do something by myself. Morgott the Omen King is the one boss I felt truly accomplished with, because I beat him myself. So feeling the loss with Malenia’s defeat revealed a lot to me about myself. I wouldn’t have minded dying another fifty times. I would have wanted to beat her myself the next time I play this game, if ever.
I also learned that I could play games again, if I wanted to. As a responsible human being, I didn’t just play Elden Ring all day, every day. I limited myself to just Friday and Saturday nights, after the kids were asleep, and this made me realise that if I truly wanted to, I could make this work.
But, actually, Elden Ring made me realise that…I’m actually pretty done with games. And this is probably the biggest thing that Elden Ring taught me. Not that I wasn’t ready to quit gaming ten years ago. I was. But Elden Ring made me realise that I can be nostalgic about my childhood and gaming as a hobby, without needing to get back into it to address that nostalgia. I can continue to bask in that nostalgia and remember it fondly for what it was, and what that time had given me. Deep down, I knew, even when I first started Elden Ring, that gaming was not something I’d take up permanently again. There wasn’t sustainable way for me to keep the hobby, unless if I am willing to make certain sacrifices to my time and sleep, which I am not.
And so, that made me learn something else about myself. It made me realise that I value my family time more than anything else. I don’t want to sleep late and play games to pay the price of feeling groggy the next morning. I want to sleep early like the old soul I am, wake up refreshed, and spend time with my family. I actually enjoy keeping my house in order and having the energy to cook and declutter. It makes me feel good when the house is clean and tidy. It sounds boring and very domestic, but it’s the truth, and I’m okay with that.
I finished Elden Ring in on November 30th, around three weeks before my viva. I had bought DLC, and even started playing it a bit. I also picked up a couple of other games. But come my viva in December 2024, I stopped all gaming and have not played since then. Six months have now passed without the controller in my hands—and that’s okay.
To be frank, I didn’t need Elden Ring to teach me that I can do whatever I put my mind to.
I didn’t need Elden Ring to show me how much I value my quiet, domestic life.
I didn’t need Elden Ring to remind me that I’d rather experience life with others, than go it alone.
I didn’t need Elden Ring for any of that.
But, I did need it to remind me that life is full of wonder. That even after finishing my PhD, there still are new places to explore, beauties to witness, and memories to make with the people I love. There are still mountains to conquer, skills to equip, and friendships to cultivate. I also needed it to remind me that I can enjoy nostalgia without needing to renew or re-experience it in any way.
I thank you, Elden Ring. You were the perfect game for me to celebrate the submission of my PhD thesis and revisit a hobby that I used to absolutely love as a child and since.
Arise, Ye Tarnished.