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Against the extermination of hard games
In this post, I argue against the extermination of hard video games, that is games that are hard to beat, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Those who wish to exterminate these games usually do so by broadly advocating for the implementation of easy modes. I deal with two main arguments, the "narrow liberal" argument and the argument from accessibility. The narrow liberal argument simply asserts that the inclusion of an easy mode does not harm those who wish to play on a harder setting. I refute this by showcasing advantages of unique difficulty settings. The argument from accessibility states that accessibility concerns should trump concerns regarding the enjoyability of the game. I show why this doesn't make sense. Lastly, I take a broader perspective and end up with the metapolitical implications of applying a "narrow" or "broad" liberal worldview.
Whenever FromSoftware releases a new game, a deluge of articles pour down demanding for an easy mode to be implemented. While, ostensibly, these articles are about FromSoft games, most of their arguments apply to any game. Furthermore, in none of these articles is it argued to implement easy modes only in certain types of games. Therefore, in this article, I will argue against the notion that every game should have an easy mode. Of course, I am not the first to do so. Youtuber Ratatoskr has, in my opinion, the best arguments against implementing easy modes in every game and I will draw in part from his work. However, I believe that his videos still don’t sufficiently express just how utterly wrong, egoistic, and exclusionary those are, who aim to exterminate hard games by arguing in favor of easy modes in all games. With “hard games” I mean games that are difficult to finish even for a seasoned player on the easiest available difficulty. In particular, I focus on the subset of games that have a unique and hard level of difficulty.
All articles arguing in favor of easy modes base their thesis on one central argument, which I dub the “narrow liberal argument”.
The narrow liberal argument
Implementing an easy mode does not hurt those who still wish to play at a harder difficulty level because the harder difficulty levels are still available. Nobody is taking anything away from you when implementing an easy mode and there are absolutely no downsides to it.
If this argument was true, the discussion would be essentially over. Unfortunately, it is completely wrong and disrespectful.
Why is it wrong? Even a single, small benefit of a unique difficulty setting is enough to prove the narrow liberal argument wrong. Here are some benefits that a unique difficulty setting provides, and that an easy mode would undermine:
It provides a sense of meaning to your struggles. When beating a challenge in a game like Sekiro, the reward is that you are able to progress through the game. Overcoming the difficulty has meaning because if you didn’t overcome the challenge, you could not have moved on. Conversely, if there was an easy mode, beating the challenge on “normal” only means that you did not have to lower the difficulty in order to overcome the challenge. It, thus, lowers the meaningfulness of your victory.
It provides a sense of unity and comradery. In Dark Souls you can literally see other peoples’ struggles against the exact same challenges that you face. This engenders a feeling of comradery against a common foe, which would be weakened if you couldn’t be sure that they aren’t facing a lesser challenge.
It provides a sense of identity for the game. It is no coincidence that discussions about difficulty always pop up around the release of FromSoft games. The unique difficulty setting has helped to create the identity of FromSoft games as “hard games”. Think of other “hard games”. How many of them have an easy mode? Having a strong identity, in turn, makes it easier for people to understand whether a game caters to their tastes. Everyone knows what to expect from the next FromSoft game. In some cases, the difficulty is the entire point of the game. For example, I wanna be the guy, QWOP, and getting over it are specifically designed to frustrate the player.
It provides a sense of pride when beating the game. The fact that some people cannot beat the game but you can, is a potential source of pride. If you enable everyone to beat the game, it is gone.
It saves on development time spent on balancing the game, which can be used on other areas. If the developers care about properly balancing all difficulty levels, this time save can be significant. If they don’t, which seems to be the usual case, the idea of implementing multiple difficulties is flawed in the first place. In the usual case of “easy/normal/hard”, normal is easy but hard means bullet sponge enemies and difficulty spikes. In some cases, it even ruins the game economy. I started out playing “ELEX” on ultra difficulty as an archer but had to quickly realize that killing enemies wasn’t worth it because I simply couldn’t afford the arrows to kill their bloated health totals. Thus, the difficulty setting didn’t provide a challenge for skilled players, it turned the game into a broken, unbalanced mess. There is no way this would have happened, had the developers balanced the difficulty around skilled players from the start.
It allows developers to generate their intended atmosphere more accurately. Some parts of games are meant to be hard to create an oppressive atmosphere. Others are meant to be easy to create a cathartic feeling in players. If there are multiple difficulty levels, a player may increase the level when the game is “too easy” and decrease it when it is “too hard”, thus undermining the developers intended atmosphere.
It provides commitment to a challenge. Hard games are oftentimes not that enjoyable to play in the moment but they provide more satisfaction when you finally beat them:
image in article
However, humans are impatient creatures who are prone to depriving themselves of long-term satisfaction for short-term enjoyment, e.g. by lowering the difficulty below what it needs to be. If you only have one difficulty setting available in the first place, this is impossible.
It provides peace of mind. In the beginning of a game with difficulty settings, you need to choose a setting without really knowing which one will be best for you. Maybe “hard” is good, maybe enemies are just bullet sponges. Don’t ask me what to pick, I’m here to play the game, not to design it! During the game, you are always faced with the choice of lowering or increasing the difficulty. With a unique difficulty setting, you don’t have to think in the back of your head that you could always lower the difficulty when struggling against a difficult boss. You simply have to…
…git gud. git gud means that there are some challenges that don’t scale to your level and that can’t be side-stepped. It represents the struggle of man to overcome his own limitations against all odds. Failing to git gud means to fail the archetypical struggle of humanity. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, it doesn’t matter that others are more privileged than you are. This is your challenge and you need to conquer it. However, if there is an easy mode, you no longer have to git gud. No longer gitting gud means that we lose a part of humanity itself. If you do not instinctively get what I am alluding to, you lack an essential aspect of humanity, sorry. Games are one of the last areas where git gud still applies in the West (another is love) and it does so with relatively low stakes. In the words of one our time’s foremost philosophers Fetusberry ‘Ass Bastard’ Crunch...
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The random mention of "goyslop" makes what would otherwise be a reasonable article to reference elsewhere impossible to use in "polite company". Why did you find it necessary?
To begin with, why would the Jewish/non-Jewish dimension even be relevant here? There may have been some case the JQ-posters could have made in the case of TV where I believe the term was originally coined, but Genshin Impact may be the biggest extreme spoonfeeding quest marker open world game out there at the moment, and it almost certainly has a higher fraction of Jewish players than Jewish developers.
Can we please have a moratorium on word policing? Especially if it's literally all you have to say? There is nothing more obnoxious, low effort, and uncharitable that picking a single word out of a 10,000 word essay and harping on it for a lazy paragraph.
No. It's entirely appropriate to tell people that dropping random slurs into an otherwise okay post is derailing and serves no purpose except to let everyone know who you want to boo, however irrelevant.
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There are other forums without this rule.
This is a silly rule, and you should feel silly for citing it. I've over the years seen members melt down and rage quit over topics they wanted completely censored being allowed here. Like HBD. By even allowing anyone to mention HBD, they felt like they were not being included in the discussion. So all that rule really boils down to is the caprice of whoever receives it in the mod queue.
There's a distinction between censoring manner (what the rule is referencing) and censoring topics (what people flamed out about).
I mean the issue is over-policing of a rule about the manner in which something is written as a gotcha. If the post had included a statement that even implied that Jews or Judaism were even part of the discussion, then I would see the point. None of that appears in the post. It’s not even about who controls the games. So the point of bringing up “goyslop” as a word — in what amounts to a substack length post — not only derails the conversation with an isolated need for rigor, but reads a bit like an accusation of dog whistling. If you think he’s trying to be back door antisemitic, fair enough, say so plainly and have at least some evidence beyond a fairly common slang term for “bland and boring”.
No. People are noticing it because it's not common. Using it is a sideswipe attack on Jews. And there's no backdoor or dogwhistle; it's blatant.
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Ironically, that would make the choice of words less bizarre.
What is isolated about this demand? For that matter, what does it have to do with rigor?
Is the claim that 4bpp was... Dog whistling about dog whistles? I think he spoke pretty plainly. It's really only common in forums where antisemitism (ironic or otherwise) is common.
Maybe rigor is the wrong word. But I think it’s a case where people are simply taking a word in a post of several thousand words, and assuming with no context that even implies antisemitism that 4bpp was clearly trying to imply that Jews were somehow involved in making games easier and thus more bland, boring and so on. And this without anything else that points in that direction.
And the thing I observe about most dog whistles is that they’re rarely one off events. I’ve never known anyone who could keep a clean profile online and only have one incident. I wouldn’t say it’s never ever happened, but it’s extremely rare for someone to sincerely hold an opinion and never say so in the open.
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But you fuck one goat...
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Low-quality, unhealthy food, seen in antisemitic circles as being promoted by Jews for consumption by gentiles for malicious purposes .
Yes one word can ruin a comment, however long. Try it out! You can literally ruin any normal discourse with a single turn of phrase.
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Given the views that are sometimes expressed here, I don’t think you should be sharing any links to this forum at all with “polite company”.
And if you just want to share the essay without showing where it came from you can just edit that word out.
The word was in the longer substack post linked at the bottom.
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Mostly because I find the word very funny. But you are right, I shortened it to just "slop".
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