Video Games Should Be Easy

Thanks or the rant Grampa. These kids today and their video games, huh?

Now I understand why Steve loves movies. Because movies are games on the easiest possible setting, where they just play themselves and you watch.

Video games shouldn't be easy. They shouldn't be hard. They should be entertaining. That's it. Some people find it more entertaining to have to think and plan and act with skill. Some people find it more entertaining to have a power fantasy of being unstoppable. Both totally fine.

I think Data said it best: "The effort yields its own reward."

I respect your opinion, and I definitely don't think there's any reason to make things harder unless you want to, but to me this is like saying "why would you do a thousand piece puzzle when you could do a 100 piece puzzle" -- When things are Too easy they just become boring.

I just want to point out that sudoku and crosswords are not at all the same kinds of puzzles, nor is sudoku a math test. Sudoku is a logic test, while crosswords test a combination of trivia retention, spelling, and vocabulary.

It's like Star Trek. Some people want Star Trek to be an intellectual and Philosophical challenge, some people want it to be all lazerbeems and space battles. I like both. You, yourself did a video on "should Star Trek challenge us or comfort us."

Weird rant. As somebody with a pretty tough daily existence I play games on a harder difficulty because it gives me a sense of achievement that I don't find elsewhere. Life is a grind with seemingly no wins, so the wins I get I find more satisfying if they are hard won.

"If I want a challenge, I live my life"… but life sucks. A challenging video game is a challenge that's deliberately designed to be winnable. There's a promise that things will be fair, and if you keep going, and keep learning, you'll definitely succeed at the challenge. And games usually lives up to that promise. Real life makes the same promise, but it rarely delivers Learning to get good at Bloodborne is like learning to get good at archery: it's unlikely to be useful in modern life, but it's still a skill that some people find fun and satisfying to master

Between this and Not Actually Trek, Actually it’s clear Steve likes his video projects set to the easiest difficulty too.

I get what you are saying steve, but as someone who games a lot, it's like saying. "Why read difficult, challenging books? I could just keep reading Dick and Jane."

While it's clear to me that we both get very different things out of our gaming experiences, I think we can agree on one thing: People who judge other people for "playing the game wrong" need to shut the hell up and let people enjoy things.

I was waiting the entire video for it to be a satirical take on something else.

"Why are there cheat codes?" Well, you see, because QA teams testing a game need easy access to test specific aspects of the game without engaging with other mechanics. They need ways to get to specific levels to test those levels, and to ignore stuff so they can get to specific points. So they put in hex codes for them which you can then enter at say, the audio player menu, by entering specific sequences of numbers and letters, so the testers can test new builds using those parameters. It's why most games nowadays DON'T have cheat codes, as they have suites of external tools for testing them. But that doesn't stop greedy corporations from now CHARGING for their functionality.

While I respect your wish to play games on the easiest difficulty it does baffle me that you don’t understand why some people WANT a challenge in their games. Humans invent relatively pointless challenges for themselves for fun, people get satisfaction from managing to do something difficult, especially when there are no real consequences for failure, it’s just how many of our brains are wired. You’re just now figuring this out? It seems to me that overcoming an obstacle, even an arbitrary one and getting pleasure from that is a fundamental part of the human experience. Not everyone wants that from video games, and that’s fine, but it’s no great mystery why some do.

It’s kind of crazy how similar this is to a Bill Maher New Rules rant.

I actually thought this was a late April fools post at first because WOW! You just went right in there! There are two big things I think you miss. First, games are not like real life. In real life, hard things never go away. They stay and they sit and the niggle you FOREVER without ever relenting. In a hard video game, when you beat the hard boss the fucker is DEAD. You've WON, in a way you can't win against hard things IRL. You can get a sense of accomplishment from facing a challenge that actually has a light at the end of the tunnel, unlike nearly any challenge that exists in life. Second, not all games do that thing where you have a break for cinematics followed by a chunk of game-play followed by a break for cinematics. Sometimes, the story and the gameplay are integrated, and in those cases it can be REALLY HARD to pull off your themes if you don't tune the difficulty to match. There's an entire genre of games out there that love to tell immersive, very nihilistic stories for which being hard is a part of the experience. This is where "The Dark Souls of X" memes come from--to a member, the stories Dark Souls games are a full of in-depth nihilistic musings about the ephemeral nature of life, about how the last embers of the first flame are dying out and you have to find what hope you want to glean from the ashes of the world that was--and the games are hard and frustrating as hell to match that somber tone. Also, I hope you're ready for some heated debate. In one blog I used to frequent, the joke used to be "Talking about Dark Souls is the Dark Souls of talking about video games," because it's really hard to keep people reasonable when talking about video game difficulty. There are a LOT of invested people with a LOT of deeply-held opinions on whether games should always have an easy mode or whether it's ok for some games to just be hard, etc, etc.

Watched this in two chunks and the revelation that most of your experience with games is from the arcade and early home console eras makes a lot of sense. Arcade games were designed to be pointlessly difficult. Rather than offering a satisfying challenge they were made to extract as many "continue" quarters as they could from the player without them losing interest. Early home console games were made by those same designers and it took a while for game design to adapt to the new paradigm. Some concepts, like having a limited number of lives, even persisted almost to the present day. Difficulty in games now tends to be different. In a well designed game difficulty isn't about reaction time, dexterity, or memorization (at least, not exclusively). It's about learning the push and pull of the game's systems. It's less akin to setting your exercise bike to a higher resistance and more akin to learning to ride a bike in the first place. It's about the inherent joy of understanding and mastering a complex system.

I get your point where it concerns the "cinematic" games, but a narrative is only one of the forms of expression available in the art of video games. Tetris doesn't have a story, and the most classic iteration doesn't even have a win state (if anyone doubts Tetris can be considered art, sit down and play The Tetris Effect for an hour or two and get back to me) It's not about progressing to the next chapter, it's about honing your skills to improve your score, or maybe not even that and just enjoying the mechanical process of playing the game. And victory can feel even more satisfying when there exists a possibility of failure - after all, if it's not possible to lose, did you really win? And Sudoku isn't a math puzzle - there is no math involved; you could replace the numbers with letters or shapes or whatever iconography you prefer, the game remains the same.

"I'm not a gamer, but..." And that is why you don't understand.