Nye's Digital Lab is a weekly scribble on creativity at the intersection of AI & Distributed Networks.

This week I'm taking on the boss at the end of the level, and hoping the next generation can do it without AI.

It's 3 AM in my cramped Venice apartment.

I'm a grown adult, screaming at my Xbox, having just died again, to a video game boss called the High Priestess. I've screamed so many times my voice is hoarse. Tomorrow's productivity is out the window. I have become completely, irrationally consumed by their inability to progress past a single boss fight in Outland, a Metroidvania-style platformer from Scandinavian indie developer Housemarque.

This is the moment that taught me more about education than anything else.

Outland is mechanically elegant in its simplicity: you're a platforming character who switches between red and blue states, navigating a world where colors matter. Red enemies can only be damaged when you're blue; blue platforms pass through you harmlessly when you're red. It creates a cognitive load that transforms simple jumping and slashing into a kind of chromatic meditation. When you're in flow, it feels zen-like. That's probably why this boss fight has thrown me into such anguish.

I'd blazed through World Two with impatient confidence. I didn't explore the nooks and crannies. I didn't seek out the upgrade rooms or the seemingly pointless coin-collection chambers. I just wanted to progress. I just wanted to win.

And the game said: "Not yet, Nye."

The next day at work, I showed up blurry-eyed and completely useless. Instead of doing my actual job, I was deep in YouTube rabbit holes and Reddit threads, watching other people beat the High Priestess. I knew all the strategies intellectually, could recite the exact timing and button combinations, but when I got home and tried again? Still dead. Turns out you can't just download skill into your brain.

You actually have to earn it the hard way.

In near-desperation, I realized what I had to do. I had to go back. Not to the boss fight, but to the beginning of World Two. I had to unlearn my impatience and let the game teach me what it had been trying to teach me all along.

When I replayed World Two again, I took my time.

I asked "What are you trying to teach me, Outland?"

Those optional rooms I'd ignored? They weren't just coin repositories or "completionist bait." I realized, they were the curriculum. Each one was a micro-lesson, a carefully designed moment disguised as optional content.

This is where great level design stands apart. It embeds skill development within exploration, making learning feel like discovery. The game never announced "TUTORIAL: AIR-SWITCHING MECHANICS." It simply created spaces where mastering that mechanic was rewarding, where the challenge was low-stakes enough to experiment but meaningful enough to matter.

When I finally returned to the High Priestess after fully exploring World Two, something had shifted. Not on my first attempt, but within a handful of tries, I beat her. There have been few times that I have been as happy in my life as in that moment. Victory was, at last, mine.

The game had taught me, but only because I'd finally consented to be taught.

This is the fundamental architecture of well-designed video games, and it's the principle we're catastrophically failing to apply in education, especially as we hurtle into an age of artificial intelligence and automation.

Games understand something profound: you cannot skip the boss fight. You cannot automate mastery. The struggle isn't a bug in the system...

it's the entire point.

Mega Man is a sadomasochistic relic of 8-bit gaming.

You must defeat six boss masters using only your basic abilities before you're rewarded with their special weapon.

You have to prove you can survive Ice Man's stage and defeat him with your standard blaster before you earn his Ice Slasher. The game forces you to master the fundamental skills before granting you the augmentation, the automation, the easier path.

This is what I call the Mega Man Principle: automation should be a reward for mastery, not a replacement for learning.

We're violating this principle in modern education, and the consequences are about to become really bad. I've watched AI tools transform student work from challenging engagement to frictionless production. Students come to me showing a character system wall running or doing some insane complex physics mechanic, only to reveal they actually vibe coded when I ask them to slow the speed variable down.

They're trying to fight the High Priestess with walkthroughs and save-states, never developing the muscle memory that makes victory meaningful, or as the vibe coding example reveals, even possible when the context changes.

One of my colleagues teaches sculpting, digital character modeling (to be specific.) His approach is deliberately, almost sadistically thorough. He makes students model every aspect, adjust every vertex, understand every principle of form and topology. The process is agonizing. Students complain about the work to me regularly.

Then, after the agony, in a "wax-on wax-off" moment, he reveals the automation. He shows them how to press a button and generate what they've spent all that time crafting by hand. And suddenly, the earlier "tedium" transforms into literacy. They understand what the automation is doing because they've lived through the manual process. They can debug when it fails, and perhaps most importantly, they appreciate the labor the tool is eliminating.

This is the boss fight pedagogy:

You don't get the automation until you've beaten the boss without it.

The danger isn't that AI will make certain skills obsolete, it's that students will never develop the foundational literacy to know when the AI is wrong, or how to adapt when it produces something that doesn't quite work. They'll be drivers who can't change a tire, chefs who can't identify spoiled ingredients, programmers who can't debug their own code.

The path forward isn't to reject automation. (I'm afraid that ship has sailed.)

Instead, we need to design educational experiences that embed boss fights that force students to master fundamentals before granting access to augmentation. We need to create those optional rooms where low-stakes practice develops essential muscle memory.

We need to say, with the authority of the Grey Wizard: "You shall not pass!"

Because here's the ultimate truth that I had to learn beating the boss. Winning is about the person you become in learning how to win. The automation should be prizes for demonstrated mastery, not shortcuts around the learning that makes mastery possible.

You will not pass. Not yet. Not until you've earned it.

Thanks for reading. I do this every week. If you vibe to the ideas I express here, please consider subscribing or sharing with friends. We'll see you next time!

Nye Warburton is an educator and metroidvania junkie from Savannah, GA. This essay was written with human labor, and then augmented with Claude Sonnet 4.0 after beating the boss. For more information visit https://nyewarburton.com

• Nothing, August 10, 2025

• The Revolution will be Automated, September 18, 2024

• Here Comes Reinforcement Learning, March 30, 2025

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