I’ve been wanting to post about this topic for a while now, I just wasn’t sure if I could articulate it well enough. Oh well, here goes.
Among the many things the gaming media tends to ramble and discuss upon, one of the subjects that pops up occasionally is the alleged observation that today’s typical video game has become a lot easier than those of the past, out of necessity due to the tastes of the modern gamer. I’m sure you can find articles and forum posts about this with some quick Google searching, but from my observations, the majority seem to imply a common stance: that challenge in a video game is seen as a negative and that something needs to be done to degrade or buffer the difficult aspects of a game to in order to make it fun. Hence, your average big-budget, mainstream, moneymaking title made for a wide audience is likely to include a myriad of incremental checkpoints, instant saving and continuing at each checkpoint upon failure with no loss of anything (and in some cases freebies get handed out upon restart), and some form of hint or tutorial snippets that basically tell you flat out exactly how to beat the game. This practice of rewarding without really challenging allows the player to experience everything the game has to offer with the least amount of stress; getting to the end of the game is basically guaranteed, and the only thing that really matters is putting in the time it takes to get from point A to point B in an X hr game.
I can understand why this has become the accepted practice in an ideally designed video game. Speaking from the context of a 20-something year old, when my fellow gamers and I were kids, one thing we generally had in abundance was free time, but conversely due to our incomes being reliant solely on our parents/guardians or our low-wage, part time job in our teen years, we had the ability to obtain a limited amount of what was out there in the gaming world. This often meant having one console per cycle and having a handful of games that would have to carry you for long stretches until you could conjure up enough savings to purchase another game. In result, even if a game was seemingly impossible, it was more likely to be tolerated since you really didn’t know when you would be getting your next game and you had time on your hands to replay it over and over until you mastered it as much as you could.
Now that we’ve all become adults, many of us have full time jobs and the means to purchase the necessary hardware along with the quantity of games that would be unimaginable to our kid selves. However, though the volume of video games obtained have increased, the responsibilities that come with being an adult, be they work and/or family related, continue to eat away at our once abundant free time. Thus within these parameters, the grown up gamer who was once tolerant of difficulty, has become impatient with it and more likely to be easily frustrated. The ultimate goal is to utilize the limited free time to get through the current game as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to move on to the next game in a desperate attempt to stay current with the often rapid fire new releases. A difficult game that takes more skill than usual to beat will disrupt this cycle, and so they have since become frowned upon by the masses.
The problem I have with this mentality is that when you put in the mechanisms to make games easier to beat, you lose the sense of accomplishment that comes from beating a video game that was more prominent in the older days. This sense of accomplishment is one of the reasons I became so attracted to video games in the first place, and its something that I still look for when I play games today. It’s why I still gravitate towards the arcade style games and harder titles that have mostly become niche now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against playing the more casual, toned down stuff, but it always seems like there’s this feeling missing when I play them. For instance, a couple of months ago I played through Uncharted 2, one of the big games of the moment at that time. Like several games of this nature, I basically played by going from checkpoint to checkpoint as recklessly and haphazardly as possible, not really caring about how well I was doing. Because you’ll immediately come back to life at the last checkpoint (which were frequent, almost like save states) with no penalty whatsoever, all the threats the game has to offer become non-threats. I had this detached, indifferent feeling every time Nathan Drake and his buddies were in a tense, dangerous situation or a harrowing, life or death, quick-time event cut scene, softening the thrill and suspense they were meant to ignite. Nothing’s on the line so why does it matter? Even if you up the difficulty setting, little changes. The enemies are harder to kill, but the lack of consequence for screwing up remains.
Even though games like Uncharted may have some entertainment value at the time I’m playing them, later on, when I look back on all the games I’ve played, those are the ones that are likely to become largely forgettable experiences. Like the movies that you may enjoy watching at the time, but have not the slightest inkling of ever wanting to watch again. Instead, I tend to think more fondly of the games that challenge me. Games that encourage, or even outright force me to develop my skill at completing them if I want to reap the rewards it has to offer and doesn’t hold my hand through the process. Where despite the sting of setback and penalty being aggravating, the failure to succeed is merely your own fault and the game won’t feel bad for you because of it. When you eventually develop the skill to overcome a particularly troublesome obstacle, the sense of triumph is much more fulfilling then some brute force grind through sequences with minimal risk and skill involved.
The thing is, many games today seem to polarize at one extreme or the other. The more casual ones tend to go for the overly accommodating game mechanics, and the games with punishing difficulty are usually marketed to specific, niche audiences. In the future, I would like to see more games that try to balance these aspects. Of the few recent ones that come to mind in which this is attempted, I liked the way that New Super Mario Bros implemented its hand holding feature, where if you have enough trouble getting through a stage and lose a substantial amount of lives, the subtle solution block shows up that you can hit and it will beat the stage for you. It helps out the people less skilled at old-school Mario platforming who want to enjoy the game, but it doesn’t feel as intrusive about it for people who don’t need it. Bayonetta is interesting in the fact that it really does try to appeal to all groups. The main story mode has the typical checkpoint to checkpoint type game play of a mainstream title, but encourages skill based game play in regards to scoring and getting unlockables (though mostly averted since you can get most of the same unlockables through relativity mindless currency farming, or even cheat codes). Of course, you can’t really clumsily button mash your way through the game and expect to win, but even if that becomes intolerable, you can lower the game’s difficulty setting and become a master of Bayonetta’s myriad of moves and combos by pressing ONE BUTTON. I also suppose you can do it the upcoming Mega Man 10 way and put in an entirely distinct easy mode where the stage design is purposely rearranged to accommodate the less skilled, while leaving the core challenging platforming the series is known for as is in the default mode.
Of course, I’m sure there are many viewpoints I didn’t touch upon here, so (if anyone’s still reading) I’d love to hear some thoughts. “Are games easy/hard enough?” “What do you consider too hard?” etc.
