I never finished Metroid as a kid, but I expect that the reveal that underneath the spacesuit Samus Aran is a woman made a lot of people question the idea that only men can be action heroes.

A more recent example for me was when I played and finished Dark Souls 3 and then Bloodborne.

I had been reading the discussions on a fixed vs growth mindset, and grit, but it hadn't really clicked for me. I realized that my default state was a fixed mindset. I remember my mother praising me for always being better and smarter than other kids, not based on any real results or me having spent a lot of effort doing something, so I just assumed it was something built into me. In school, I had an easy time with some subjects, but a harder time with others. This didn't encourage me to work more on the hard ones, but avoid them. I valued people that displayed seemingly effortless genius rather than people who worked hard, because I thought the hard workers were stupid or less skilled and just had to make up for their lack of talent.

I finally had a tough time with math as a master of science student at the university, because I didn't have any study habits and expected math to be effortless like before. When I did pass the exams after multiple attempts, having finally sat down to study, I wasn't proud, I was just relieved and hated the whole experience. I was annoyed that math seemed to be based on making mistakes: You reach a problem you don't immediately know how to solve, you attempt it and fail, and study the rest of the material until you can figure it out. But the whole point is to be challenged! If you could breeze through all math problems without failing, the level of math is too easy for you. But I hated failing or feeling stupid.

Back to Dark Souls 3! The game is very hard, but it's also very fair. When you die it's because you made a mistake, but the game will throw the same thing at you again and now you can avoid it. Enemies are placed behind corners that surprise you the first time, but the second time you know they're there. Bosses telegraph their attacks. The first time you fight them, you're supposed to die and have to fight them again and again, learning their moveset. If you could beat all bosses in a Dark Souls game at the first attempt, same as with math, the game would be too easy. It's supposed to challenge you and, same as math, force you to be precise and focused, forcing you to accept that you will have to adapt your playstyle to the bosses to beat them.

In Dark Souls there's a a feedback loop where you die, but get infinite lives and can retry the same section of a map or a boss over and over. You know that other players can beat the boss, so why shouldn't you? The game definitely taught me grit and perseverance, where I before would quit a difficult game, this time I attempted again and again until I had figured out the map or boss.

A lot of people view playing the souls games as masochism, and I can see that in the same way that I considered studying math to be masochistic. Now I've learned to appreciate the process and take joy in learning to incrementally overcome an obstacle. I'm no longer afraid of not knowing enough when I start a task at work, but instead know that by just spending time and incrementally attacking a problem I will be able to figure it out. Dark Souls and Bloodborne helped me move from a fixed to a growth mindset, something I try to instill in my kids today.