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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25294 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Whenever the subject of feminist narratives comes up on this forum, one of the recurring arguments is that feminist messaging is ineffective, self-defeating even, the usual reason being given that it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place because they’re pretty much acculturated in a feminist milieu anyway. (I know all this doesn’t necessarily sound fair or unbiased, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)

The most fitting example of this that is usually mentioned is the message that “we need to teach men not to rape”, which is supposedly a favorite of feminist activists on college campuses, corporate HR boards and elsewhere. Apparently they promote essentially the same idea as a great tool to combat sexual assault and harassment.

I don’t think I need to explain in detail why this argument sounds so dumb to the average man. Even when I come up with the most benevolent interpretation of this tactic that I can think of, it still seems misguided and, well, dumb. But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.

From that perspective, it all makes sense, sort of. Am I correct, or is there something else going on as well?

The question is whether they want to reduce the incidence of rape or if they want to lecture men who are not rapists.

The answer is in their behavior and rhetoric.

I don't think these people aren't interested in reducing the incidence of rape. I think it's pretty common to want a certain outcome while also being emotionally invested in the idea that there's a single correct way or achieving that outcome (the obvious similar case being environmentalists who protest nuclear power).

This seems pretty much correct and is a staple for all of modern identity politics. You never blame the oppressed group, always the oppressor. You don't blame Blacks for underachieving, cultivating violent norms of behavior, reproducing in an unconscientious manner, etc. You don't blame gays for their sexual behavior when contracting HIV. And you don't blame women for getting blackout drunk when they had an unwanted sexual encounter. The main point is to wrestle power away from the oppressor towards the oppressed, never the other way around. That is the main purpose of identity politics, not solving the individual problem. Otherwise, the focus would be to a significant degree on the things that are already in the power for the oppressed to do.

Pretty much. “Teach men not to rape” is less consistent with a general principled stance on victim-blaming and more consistent with the usual Who? Whom? and efforts to maximize female freedom and minimize female accountability.

Hence why “teach men not to rape” is A Thing, but “teach men not to murder” sounds farcical and “teach black men not to murder” would be considered hateful and offensive by many.

Those who shriek against “victim-blaming” when it comes to advising women to be responsible for their own safety are disproportionately likely to immediately suggest that a victim of black-on-white or black-on-Asian violence said or did something to provoke the attack, a victim of pitbull-on-pretty-much-anything-not-a-pitbull nannying did something to trigger the pibbie’s reactivity (such as making a sudden movement, making a loud noise, or breathing).

They may also advise to leave your car windows and trunk open when you leave it as a good faith signal to Persons of Burglary that you have nothing to steal, and if you don’t it’s your own fault that your windows got smashed.

I think this is overthinking/projecting too much theory behind what is a pure power move similar to those Trump is renowned for on the other side of the aisle. "Teach men not to rape" infuriates the political opposition (being loaded in the classic, "when did you stop beating..." way), but there is no way to speak out against it without either flagging yourself for cancellation (if your response is something similarly laconic of opposing valence) or looking weak (if your response is nuanced/lengthy/cautious).

"Teach men not to rape" infuriates the political opposition

The political opposition was routed out of places like university campuses where this stuff runs rampant. It's aimed at fellow traveler men.

The vast majority, even in campuses, is neutral and politically unengaged, but might range from mildly for to mildly against SJ if pressed. The latter group is a natural target for this.

Why is "victim blaming" in quotes? You're actually blaming the victim. This is the second post I've seen this morning asking women to have more agency over being raped or assaulted.

You shouldn't have to actively cover your drink at a bar or avoid walking through a busy park in broad daylight because you may be forced into a portapotty and raped by a vagrant, or not take the subway becauss you mignt get groped.

Don't rape messaging isn't going to reach the criminals perpetrating these acts. But if you're correct in that is about avoiding putting blame on the victims, it is clearly still needed.

It's in quotes because it's not victim blaming. The idea that any argument other than the one that men need to be taught not to rape is essentially victim blaming i.e. accusing women of inviting rape upon themselves is dishonest and nonsensical. Yes, you should not have to be vigilant about getting roofied. There should be no social context where that is advisable. But there still is.

And why is feminist messaging clearly needed when it's not reaching the rapists? I'm all ears.

How about walking through the park or on the subway? Not much you can do about that unless escorted by bodyguards at all times. I guess i don't get your message here. Yes telling men not to rape is stupid, anyone willing to listen is already not going to rape. I get that part.

You go on to make claims about agency and the true message being not to victim blame, if that is the case then it isn't stupid and probably a message that still needs to get out there.

if that is the case then it isn't stupid and probably a message that still needs to get out there.

Unfortunately feminists instantly shout down even the mildest, most sympathetic form of this message as "victim blaming". I've seen it happen many times. The idea that one should take any steps to try to avoid being a rape victim is very much taboo in the public discourse.

The notion that average women are routinely mansplained by mainstream society that walking in busy parks in broad daylight is to be avoided is preposterous. If, however, the argument is generally about the potential threat posed by mentally ill / drug-addicted aggressive homeless and vagrants, then I'd say that's a different kettle of fish, with all the political baggage that entails.

I think there is good and bad victim blaming. Victim blaming means that there is some sort of self-protective behavior that you need to engage in, otherwise people will have less sympathy for your situation. It is bad if this self-protective behavior is unreasonable (walking through a park at daytime, taking the subway, never going out to party, taking self-defense classes, wearing a burka,...) or ineffective (drawing a blank here, is there any victim blaming that is entirely ineffective?).

It is good if the self-protective behavior can be expected and is effective. "Don't get blackout drunk.", "Don't lead a guy on, then deny him at the end.", "Don't go out to party alone.", "Don't go home with a guy you have just met, especially when you are drunk.", etc. These are all perfectly reasonable things that we can expect from anyone without restricting their freedom much. If they don't follow these rules, they are probably not mature enough to be drinking or having sex in the first place. Even under the best of circumstances, you should follow these rules because there are always bad people around.

Then there is another category of advice that isn't tied to victim blaming. It's just good advice like "Communicate openly what you consent to and what not", "If someone does something sexual you don't want, verbally and physically fight back, don't freeze up." Here, it would not necessarily reduce my sympathy for someone, who didn't follow this advice, but it's still good advice.

I don't think it's "blaming" to tell people they need to take responsibility to ensure negative things don't happen to them in their lives, to the extent that they can control those negative events. Some might say a better term than "victim blaming" would be "prevention". I shouldn't have to lock my house when I leave town for a week. But if I did that, would that really be wise? Why are we not teaching robbers not to rob, instead of teaching people to lock their doors?

Why is "victim blaming" in quotes? You're actually blaming the victim. This is the second post I've seen this morning asking women to have more agency over being raped or assaulted.

Either it's not victim blaming because we tell other people in similar situations (e.g. leaving a car unlocked in a bad neighborhood) to take preventative measures without that label. Or it is but it's a specific thing where we don't apply the same logic to other places, which raises questions.

Either way, I can get people putting it in quotes.

Because at some levels of obliviousness/recklessness it is on the victim. Especially when the fate has thrown her a warning or two. Like a girl going to a bar where you have warned her is junkies watering hole and then she follows one of the said junkies while he was high to his apartment when you pleaded her not to, and then she calls you panicked two hours lately while she is locked in the bathroom after attempted rape. Thankfully i got there in time and she got away from the whole ordeal with only a big scare.

Life is like a horror movie - after you ignore the side character, commons sense and pure luck's warning to turn back - whatever happens after you open the dark door and enter inside is on you.

Because at some levels of obliviousness/recklessness it is on the victim.

This but for continuing to make racist/sexist comments at your job or on social media. If you get canceled for this stuff, it's not like you can say you had no warning.

  • -13

Even here, very few people have a problem with this when it really is "continuing to". I think even some of the overt racists would see that as a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". It's when you get in shit for doing it once five years ago in a completely unrelated context that people start taking issue.

There must be some distinction to be drawn between "victim blaming" and "victim warning" though right? If a woman is raped, it would be victim blaming to tell her "well that's too bad, maybe you shouldn't have walked through the park", but the idea that teaching women to avoid walking alone in a park in a bad part of town is victim blaming and must be avoided at all costs just seems like an overextension of the concept to me.

There are signs all over San Francisco warning people not to leave valuables inside their cars, but this is never presented as some awful example of victim blaming. The only time this over-extension of the concept seems to take place is when anyone is asking women to have any agency over their own safety.

Crime can typically be thought of as a supply and demand problem and the best way to prevent crime is to attack both sides of the problem.

Yeah, the difference between victim blaming and victim warning is whether you think public policy and social norms should be shaped to protect victims as much as possible.

You can want that and also warn victims, or you can 'warn' victims as an alternative to doing that.

OP seems to be pretty explicitly saying that those things should be shaped to protect victims less, and place the burden of self-defense on the victims instead. That's not 'warning.'

Yeah, the difference between victim blaming and victim warning is whether you think public policy and social norms should be shaped to protect victims as much as possible.

I'm not sure I understand your view here. Warning victims seems like it would fall pretty squarely under protecting victims as much as possible, even if it isn't the only thing that would fall under that heading.

Maybe this is an example of two movies on one screen, but I didn't get that impression from the OP at all. OP isn't saying that public policy and social norms shouldn't be shaped to protect victims, but rather that the current attempts to do that are not very effective and are needlessly narrow in scope.

IANAL, but I think in legal terms I would be referring to mens rea.

Basically, you cannot distinguish whether or not someone is victim blaming from the simple fact of 'they mentioned something women could do to be safer'; that is an act that both victim-blamers and victim-defenders might do. What determines it is how that warning falls into their larger worldview on the topic, and what they are intending to accomplish with the warning.

If your view is 'society as a whole needs to do everything it can to protect potential victims, and giving them important knowledge about how to avoid danger is one part of that effort', you're not a victim-blamer and your warnings are fine and good.

If your view is 'people need to take individual responsibility for their own safety, we should educate them about the dangers but if they don't protect themselves after that then it's on their own heads,' then you are a victim-blamer, and your warnings are kind of sinister and instrumentally harmful.

Is it confusing that the same action can be good or bad depending on the intent behind it and the larger framework it is embedded in? Yeah, it sure confuses the shit out of me all the time! But that's unfortunately just true sometimes in the highly complicated realms of society and culture and politics, and us high-decouplers just have to acknowledge that reality and do the hard work of thinking about it.

But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.

You could do this while admitting that rape is disproportionately carried out by Dark Triad types (especially when society has already been trying for decades to grab all of the low-hanging fruit of "normal men who just think this is okay") and not harangue Robin Hanson types as well. From what I recall from my early internet days when Jezebel was strong, feminists were insistent on rejecting this sort of point.

There's an element of class guilt that is also useful.

Also, if you believe rape is about power or some patriarchal ideology not sex, I suppose "teach men not to rape" sounds more appealing as an actual solution and not just a cynical messaging tactic.

it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place

This is asserted a lot in spaces like this with a kind of nerd-smugness but I don’t think it’s true. Why would one expect the proverbially socially adept frat bro who never heard of /ssc/ to have worse social awareness than the only-rarely-interacts-with-women loser who receives this messaging? My Bay Area female friends/fwbs/hookups/etc have showed me plenty of receipts from respectable seeming nerds who very clearly need some social education.

My Bay Area female friends/fwbs/hookups/etc have showed me plenty of receipts from respectable seeming nerds who very clearly need some social education.

They are not raping her. They are revealing their interest in her without being sufficiently attractive themselves, which is a big difference.

Fortunately none of them were raped, but it goes way beyond the MRA strawman of “trying to flirt while being unattractive.”

Being autistic is very literally not rape. Saying creepy shit out of social awkwardness is worth discouraging, but it's not an indication that a man is about to commit rape.

Why would one expect the proverbially socially adept frat bro who never heard of /ssc/ to have worse social awareness than the only-rarely-interacts-with-women loser who receives this messaging?

I don't think the OP was talking about "social awareness" so much as "understanding of what does and doesn't constitute rape, and commitment not to committing it". The fact that nerdy men often say things that women find weird or creepy doesn't make them rapists. The fact that sexually promiscuous men are far more likely to face prosecution for rape than non-promiscuous men seems strong evidence in favour of the theory that nerdy incels have already been successfully "taught not to rape".

The fact that sexually promiscuous men are far more likely to face prosecution for rape than non-promiscuous men seems strong evidence in favour of the theory that nerdy incels have already been successfully "taught not to rape".

Not sure it is strong evidence. It's possible in theory that suppose the lowest SV occurs at average number lifetime number of sex partner (which is about six) and grows at extremes.

Solving rape by teaching men not to rape has the same kind of energy as solving inflation by teaching men not to print money. You actually need to target rapists and central bankers.

Do you not think that having a financially literate public who understands a little bit about how inflation works will help us combat it in the long run?

I....don't think that follows?

Inflation happens due to collective action. It doesn't matter what you teach a given man; there's nothing in it for him personally. Central bankers (or the politicians who appoint them) are much more insulated from their actual decision.

My thoughts meandered to a financial analogy, prompted by the phrase "zero lower bound". One sees the phrase "zero lower bound" in the context of macroeconomics and interest rates. Governments like to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, but once they are cut to zero, they cannot go any lower. They have reached the zero lower bound.

Ordinary men have a similar problem with reducing the amount of rape they do. They are on board with the message "Don't rape" and would like to help women by raping less, but they are already at the zero lower bound. To do less, they would have to find a way to go negative and unrape. Ordinary men just aren't in charge and cannot actually do anything, just like ordinary men dislike money printing and inflation, but aren't consulted and cannot say "No!".

Okay, but the margin is what matters.

Every man, woman and child starts out at the zero lower bound. Some of them will get the opportunity to divert and take a nonzero policy. It’s reasonable to “teach” those specific people whether doing so is a good idea, even though their current decision is the zero bound.

“Teach men not to inflate” is silly not because of the lower bound, but because of the upper. Most men will never have the opportunity to steer the Federal Reserve. “Teach economists not to inflate” is more defensible, and “teach (or tell) the chairman not to inflate” is just normal politics.

Most men will have the opportunity to commit a rape. They won’t, because they’ve been taught that it’s immoral and/or will be punished. That seems like the correct mechanism to me.

Besides, most men will have the opportunity to shame, discourage, mock or halt rape. "Teaching men not to rape" also includes "teaching men to teach men not to rape", and I'd wager the impact of that second-order teaching is higher.

I think you’ve got to look at it this way- feminism is a class interest movement for college educated liberal urbanites. It is not, and hasn’t been for years, about women qua women. You’ll notice feminists are typically very concerned about rape on college campuses and blissfully ignorant of rape in the military, any guesses as to which one actually happens at above average rates? It’s because the type of women(and it is mostly but not entirely women) feminism represents pretty much all go to college and very rarely spend time in the military.

So with that in mind, ‘teach men not to rape’ is about generating assabiyah within the cohort. It’s a form of indoctrination into class interest through a universal right of passage for the group feminism is intended to represent. It’s not really about rape prevention; liberal sexual norms and substances can’t really be combined without having a rape problem(and I am not claiming that that’s the only way you have a rape problem- see the military, above. I’m claiming that it’s probably impossible to reduce the incidence of rape in heavily feminist-influenced strata below where it already is because of it, and the low hanging fruit has mostly been picked).

Now that being said, there’s probably men somewhere who could be influenced not to rape by consent-based sex Ed. Picture a fresh off the boat afghani migrant, for example- this guy probably literally doesn’t know that a girl walking down Main Street unescorted with her hair showing isn’t a hooker. It’s just not what consent based sex Ed is aimed at doing.

Since you bring up Afghanistan, I keep coming back to this article. Ignorance is not sufficient, malice is involved: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506?nopaging=1

Let’s leave aside the reprehensibility of this conduct for the moment and focus instead on its logic or lack thereof. Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought—or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here? And why, why, why the Afghans? According to Austrian police statistics, Syrian refugees cause fewer than 10 percent of sexual assault cases. Afghans, whose numbers are comparable, are responsible for a stunning half of all cases.

Others are merely baffling. Public swimming pools are confronted with epidemics of young Afghan men who think it a good idea to expose themselves, whipping off their pants and standing there until tackled by the lifeguards and removed from the premises with orders to never return. Let’s be charitable: let’s assume that at some point, one or two of these young men might have heard stories of nudist beaches and thought to join in. But that’s hardly an explanation. Seriously; in a foreign country where your legal standing is tenuous, wouldn’t you cast a quick glance around to ensure that you are not the first and only man thus flaunting his ornamentation, before engaging in conduct that your entire upbringing has taught you to consider unthinkable? Come on!

Consent-based sex ed is not sufficient for cases like these, we should take a leaf from the Taliban's book (the leading authority in the field of governing Afghans) and publicly execute the above kind of rapists. Not the 'couldn't consent due to being too drunk' kind but the 'run out and assault women with their babies' kind.

This is what I think is going on:

  • like all women, feminists want to be 100% safe at all time
  • yet they want to partake in fornication, which is a very unsafe activity
  • additionally, they are not interested in men who follow feminist principles, ie constantly asking for consent is not something they associate with an attractive man

So perhaps what we can deduce from these observations is that the 'don't rape' seminaries are in fact shit tests (Usually unconscious effort by a woman to test man's worthiness and social status).

They do want the men that they are not attracted to not to make any kind of conventional romantic gesture (ie 'rapey' attitude or 'pre-rape' or what not), which is completely understandable.

They also expect the men that they are attracted to to be bold enough to push past these rules. After all, 50 shades of Grey is a best-seller.

In essence, the 'Hello HR?' meme, institutionalized. Plus it's a nice grift.

The men smart enough to fall for the training will eventually find out that successful men disregard it as needed, that's not gonna help with the I.N.C.E.L. terrorism, such as ;

More women report being randomly attacked while walking in New York City

You're missing at least one thing that's going on - some rapes (or at least rape-adjacent behavior) are genuinely dissimilar to other crimes in the lack of mens rea from the perpetrator. The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party. Sure, you can provide the admonishment that she shouldn't have gotten so drunk in the first place and you're going to be correct, but it's also plausible that it's feasible to shift the culture around hooking up with very drunk girls from it being funny to it being socially unacceptable. You're not going to convince Ted Bundy to not rape with a social awareness campaign, but you might convince some men that it would be a bad thing to take advantage of a girl that doesn't have her wits about her.

There are many objections to the above that can be offered, but my impression is that this is the type of thing that "teach men not to rape" is referring to.

You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.

Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.

Hooking up with a girl who's too drunk to say no is, in fact, very bad behavior.

I agree. But it's not rape.

'Rape' isn't a natural category. It's a term for having sex with a woman who doesn't or shouldn't want it in a way that's sufficiently bad. That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially despite generally not referring to any use of force.

So this is really an argument about whether hooking up with a drunk out of her mind girl is bad enough to be considered rape. Now, I presume that we agree that giving a girl valium to hook up with her is bad enough to be justifiably called rape, just because most people do in our culture- there's a specific word for that kind of it. I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.

So is the difference the idea that getting taken advantage of is a natural consequence of sufficient public drunkenness? Because although there's a sense in which it obviously is, it also seems to be sufficiently horrendous that using the term rape is at least founded, if non-central, and if referring to it that way reduces the incidence thereof(which is entirely possible) then I'm all for it.

This is very simple. If you consent (no matter how ill founded the consent is), then it's not rape. I similarly think that statutory rape is very much not rape, and that the only reason it's called such is because people torture the meaning of words to try to give something moral weight.

One of the problems of American culture (or perhaps even human culture in general) is that people try to make everything maximally bad as a rhetorical tactic. They aren't willing to say "this is bad but not (really bad thing)". Well I'm willing to bite that bullet. If you have sex with someone too drunk to effectively say no, even if you were feeding them drinks to achieve that, it's not rape as long as they consented. We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.

Jesus dude...

  • -20

statutory rape is very much not rape

To be clear, are you espousing the belief that an adult (e.g. a 30 year old man) is in no way morally transgressing to have sex with an enthusiastic twelve year old? Nine year old? Toddler?

  • -13

The point of the comment is that not all immoral sexual acts should be called "rape". I can imagine a framework where the 30-year-old has sex with a "consenting" 9-year-old, and then is prosecuted, not for "statutory rape", but for fraud—because he falsely stated or implied that there was little or no chance that the sex would result in physical harm to the 9-year-old, and the 9-year-old was too ignorant to know otherwise.

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We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.

Reading him as charitably as I can I'd say he's advocating something like what the French had before they brought in age of consent laws a few years ago. You still got sent to prison for having sex with a minor but it wasn't called rape, and you got sent to prison for much longer if your case satisfied the coercive bar needed for a rape conviction.

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No, of course not. I frankly am surprised you think I said that, because I was very clear that we should punish someone who gets a girl drunk just to have sex with her. Just because something isn't rape doesn't mean it's morally permissible.

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Bob puts a gun to the head of Alice and says you either consent to sex with me right now or I shoot. Alice, who wants to live, makes a rational decision and says yes and then Bob has sex with her. According to your definition what just happened wasn't rape. However most people would absolutely say that it was.

It's an interesting point, but I don't think that edge cases existing mean that the definition is wrong. Sure, if we wanted to we could spend probably hours to hammer out a definition which solves all the edge cases. But that's true of any definition.

That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially

This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)

I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.

We absolutely do not agree on this. First off, we would have to ask a number of very important questions which you hand-wave away. Does the man know she’s 18, rather than 21? (If he met her in a bar, the answer is almost certainly “no”.) Does he know that she “doesn’t know her limits”? Why would he assume that a grown adult is unable to exercise basic agency over her own decisionmaking?

Your scenario doesn’t mention anything about misdirection, subterfuge, etc. (i.e. spiking a drink without her knowledge) He’s just offering her drinks, and she’s willingly accepting those drinks.

And once she’s finished all of those drinks, how “visibly drunk” is she, actually? Surely you are aware that there is a wide spectrum of intoxication; someone can be buzzed or tipsy without being genuinely unable to exercise basic control over his or her faculties. Someone can be drunk enough to make decisions which one would not make if stone-cold sober, and in some cases that’s the whole point of drinking in the first place. (“Liquid courage” is a term for a reason.)

And an observer cannot always reliably detect, based on observing outwardly-obvious behavior, a person’s internal level of confusion/inebriation. Nor can simply knowing how many drinks she has had reliably tell you the extent to which she has lost control of her faculties. I know plenty of people who can down five shots of tequila and still maintain quite a bit of mental acuity and functionality; I also know plenty of people who will have one mixed drink and then be a stumbling mess.

You are requiring this man to be able to accurately gauge everything about this situation, at penalty of going to prison for a substantial chunk of his life, and having a permanent felony record, if he misjudges any of it. I thought I was one of the more authoritarian and pro-law-and-order posters here, but apparently you put me to shame.

All of this would, of course, be quite different if we lived in a culture in which it was widely understood to be extremely aberrant behavior for a woman to consume alcohol and then have sex with a man she just met, or barely knows. If we lived in a culture where the vast majority of women were chaste, monogamous, and averse to the mere thought of having casual hook-ups, then in the rare scenarios when a woman does do that, we could at least assume that foul play and predatory behavior on the man’s part may be involved.

However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.

I am strongly in favor of a sea change in cultural morality toward a far more sexually-conservative set of cultural norms. However, that whole suite of norms would have to develop basically simultaneously, with all parties involved holding up their respective ends of the bargain. In the meantime, you’re asking far too much agency from men and none at all from women, with predictably disastrous consequences.

But women do have massively less agency than men. They're called the meme gender for a reason and that goes both ways. There is a reason that for all 5,000 years of recorded history men have led and women, with very rare exceptions, followed- that's just the way it shakes out. Again, that goes both ways- insisting on women's empowerment is usually dumb, but so is counting on women's agency to get anything done.

Making plans on the basis of 'women will have agency to change cultural morality' is a bad plan. Particularly around sexual norms; do you think women are initiating these encounters at a rate that even cracks the high single digits?

That's even ignoring that open and liberal sexual norms aren't particularly what women want anyways. They're something that's mostly desired by men, for biological reasons.

However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.

This is an inherently hazardous activity and my sympathy for such men is limited. If they get it wrong they deserve to pay the price because there's a high chance of getting it wrong and that seems generally foreseeable and known.

And

This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)

One can recognize the need for some sort of line to draw without thinking that every particular line is obvious rather than arbitrary. Almost nobody thinks that an adult should be allowed to have sex with a 13 year old. On the other hand, having sex with a 17 year old doesn’t seem any different from having sex with an 18 year old. But having sex with a 16 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 17 year old and having sex with a 15 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 16 year old and having sex with a 14 year old…

At some point ‘if a=b and b=c then a=c’ breaks down. This point is necessarily arbitrary, but it does exist, so the important thing is to find a common point to draw the line.

Okay fine, again, I’d be very happy with a return to traditional sexual morality, in which a man is guilty of criminal seduction if he has sex with a woman before getting to know her family and asking her father for permission to marry her. However, that world is very far away from the world we live in now. You are, for practical purposes, proposing a world in which women have exactly the same degree of recognized agency as they do right now in every single aspect of life except for sex. (If not, how do we get from here to a world in which women lose all of this agency they’ve accrued?) This is obviously insane and unsustainable, and I hope you would understand why so many men would vociferously object.

I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.

The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.

FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.

controversial

I don't think the moral importance of age of consent in general is controversial even on here. Don't get me wrong, I'd welcome any interesting discussion you'd like to have here.

But, I think the fact on the ground is that while posters would disagree on exact ages, allowances across cultures, etc, most people think there should be some age and/or age-gap that makes it definitionally impossible to consent.

This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)

In Bahrain, a man who violently rapes a woman can escape all legal culpability if he agrees to marry her. The fact that Bahrainis "disagree substantially about the validity of the framing" (namely, that rape is a heinous and despicable crime, and not just because it may be harder for the victim to find a husband) does not give me cause to update my views on rape or reject the conventional western framing.

getting taken advantage of

I think a key detail here is that alcohol is a helluva drug. It's quite easy, especially as a smaller, younger woman to overestimate your tolerance. Either of you also might not know what's in the punch exactly, or how long you hit the keg.

So, the ethical thing is to look at the person as you're getting to bed and ask "ok, but really, is it OK to have sex here?" I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no. If in the heat of the moment and a bit buzzed, she'd probably have said yes, you're at least in grey territory, potentially fine, depending on the details.

I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no.

How am I supposed to know this? What does even mean? She’s at a bar/club/house party - a milieu where everyone is aware that at least some number of people there are interested in meeting prospective sexual partners. She’s unaccompanied by a man, so I have no reason to believe she’s spoken for. She’s talking to me and hasn’t wandered off or thrown a drink in my face or whatever, so clearly she’s at the very least not actively repulsed by me. So why would I assume she would “never in a million years” have sex with me?

If you have to ask, the answer is no. I.e., I think the moral thing is to view the default as "no consent" and require positive evidence to move to "consent." If you can't count to ten, you can't give that evidence. I don't even think that's overdone liberal nonsense, of which there's a lot on this subject.

Concretely, if she's so much drunker than me and hotter than me that I can not picture her feeling less than grossly violated tomorrow, then the sex feels very rapey. If I think we're both buzzed and we might both feel a little gross about it tomorrow, then shrug, she made her choices.

I in practice solve these complex moral dilemmas by being old, boring and sober. It's remarkable how much complex modern feminist 'BUT WHAT IS CONSENT EXACTLY' goes away if you allow the answer to be even as serious as "a thing two people who are multiple dates do while sober".

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There's a word for a guy who consistently engages in that sort of reasoning (not just in this particular case, but in general) and that word is "virgin". It's very easy for a certain sort of guy (think Scott Aaronson) to convince himself that any particular woman is out of his league. The kinds of guys who think they're God's gift to women aren't going to engage in that sort of reasoning, and if they did, they'd always answer "it's fine". So all this sort of rule does is ratify turning the self-abasing into volcels.

Plus, of course, the guy in this situation has probably also been drinking.

Plus, of course, the guy in this situation has probably also been drinking.

The hypothetical as I am thinking about it is that the man is knowingly much less drunk. If everyone is very drunk, I think that's less of rape and more of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" all around.

There's a word for a guy who consistently engages in that sort of reasoning (not just in this particular case, but in general) and that word is "virgin"

I think your point stands for a smallish group of those you're describing, "white knight" types, who should yes in fact move in the drunker/less-rigidly-consent-requiring direction.

But, in general, I prefer the word "adult." I found dating got exponentially easier as I started advertising being a ~sober, boring, responsible adult instead of being maximally able to consume booze/etc.

In most other situations "I made a bad decision because I had too much to drink" does not carry much legal weight. Assuming the women in your scenarios do in fact consent "in the moment", how can you invalidate this consent without also invalidating (for example) a woman's decision to go driving while in such a state?

ie. 'drunk woman decides to drive and crashes into a pole' --> prosecute her (I think?); but 'drunk woman decides to sleep with some gross nerd' --> prosecute him (?!)

Your framework seems to be denying women significant agency; seems a bit patriarchal to me.

The key difference is that only in the rape story has anything been done to her by someone else.

When driving, the damage is to the pole. Heck, let's say she ("S") kills someone else ("E"). S has violated E's rights, so S should be prosecuted for murder (or property damage to the pole). No one did anything to S, except insomuch as S did it to herself, so no one should be prosecuted (or held morally responsible) for anything that happened to S.

When S is raped, the damage is entirely to S. This was done to her by someone ("R"[apist]), who should be prosecuted. Debateably, S did something to herself too, but undebateably (well, it is themotte, but I feel pretty good about this one), there is the key difference that something was done to S in this one.

Further, in my version of the setup, she really hasn't decided to sleep with the nerd ("can't count to ten"). Past some level of drunk, you're on autopilot, and anyone who steers you transgresses. So yes, I absolutely do deny people agency once they are blackout drunk. I put that agency in the hands of society/morality to protect them. Enormously practical? No, so go be monogamous and sober, but still better than a free-for-all on drunk coeds.

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This is a fully semantic argument, and in a semantic argument there's not a much stronger rebuttal than 'no one else is using the word that way, so if you do you're just failing to communicate.'

Also: if you agree it's bad behavior and that some people might do it without realizing that, do you agree they should be taught not to do that?

If so, you agree with the feminist message of 'teach men not to rape' in substance, and just have a semantic disagreement about one word.

So if you drug someone and have sex with them that isn't rape?

Assuming they can consent, no. It's very bad and should wind you in prison for a long time. But it's not rape, because that word means something specific. "Rape" is not a catch all term for "any evil behavior involving sex".

This is a special place.

  • -15

So if you drug someone and have sex with them that isn't rape?

Assuming they can consent, no.

...Speak plainly. What's your actual disagreement with the above?

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If you can't decouple your sense of moral outrage at bad acts from a discussion over what words mean, you're going to have a real bad time on this forum. My position here isn't even that spicy. We have a guy who literally argues for pedophilia being OK, we have people who think that the Jews are to blame for everything, etc. Saying "I think x act is immoral but it doesn't fall under the definition of y" doesn't even register compare to some of the arguments here.

Assuming they can consent, no.

The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.

I took "too drunk to say no" as "they will say yes to anything because their inhibitions are lowered", not "they're so drunk they can't even respond". The latter case would be rape, but the former isn't.

Drugging someone so they can't meaningfully resist has been a central example of rape for as long as I can remember, and I seem to be on the older end of this forum. I definitely agree with the complaint that modern feminism has expanded the definition beyond reasonable limits, as the "social justice" crowd is prone to doing with all sorts of terms, but this is not an example of it. The solution to revisionist history is not revisionist history in the opposite direction.

If she's "too drunk to count to ten" let alone passed out, it strikes me as very similarly morally to rape-at-knifepoint. Not quite as bad, but not "obnoxious liberal word expansion" levels of different.

I'm curious, to any older commenters especially: does usage like this of "rape" strike you as euphemism treadmill, or is this just the natural range of the word? I suspect it's the latter, but maybe I'm young(ish). I'd think to use "rape" for the above and knife-point when that detail isn't central, and say "violent rape" when the knife (/threat/etc) is central to the discussion.

Say a man runs through someone else's house with a bulldozer. Everything in it is crushed, the walls collapse, the whole thing is completely destroyed. When people find out, they start calling the man an arsonist, who committed 'cold arson.' After all, destroying someone's home is a terrible thing to do. Does that make it arson?

No, but I don't think the analogy tells us much. They are certainly both destruction of property, even if only one is arson-y; similarly in the rape side of the analogy both are rape, even if only one is violent-y.

(There's a weaker argument I could add that both forms of rape are violent, but that's sufficiently far into repurposing words that I won't stand by it real strongly.)

Would it be rape to have sex with someone who was asleep? Comatose? Sedated? I think almost everyone would say yes.

Yes, because they didn't consent.

And if a girl is so drunk that she's drifting in and out of consciousness, how can she consent?

How often is that the case? How is your rule distinguishing between incapacitation and "might not make the same decision while sober, or uses that as an excuse to dodge shaming afterwards"?

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That's certainly an edge case. But I don't think it invalidates my position.

What does "too drunk to say no" actually mean? Obviously the motte you're trying to imply with that phrasing is "passed out or literally too drunk to slur out a 'nooo'," but that's not what happens in 99% of cases. The bailey is "Jake was DRUNK, Josie was DRUNK, Josie could NOT consent!", or the "if you think she's out of your league it's rape" thing lagrangian is pushing below.

Unless you can actually phrase your rule in a sensible way that people will understand how the legal system will interpret a given situation, vague social conservatism is just providing cover for California style "yes means yes except when yes means no, and isn't there someone you forgot to ask?"

I think everyone agrees with that. But there's a wide spectrum from sex with someone physically unable to say no, i.e. passed out, to a guy who's had a few beers hooking up with a girl who's had a glass of wine. The culture war as it relates to this issue seems to be about what "too drunk to say no" means, from those who say that situations like the latter are fine, and those who say that having any amount of alcohol whatsoever renders a women unable to consent. I imagine it's the possibility of society being at the point where something like the latter situation is viewed as SA/rape that @haroldbkny is referring to when he says that people are just going to be less likely to hook up.

that people are just going to be less likely to hook up.

I am entirely OK with a little gender discrimination as the price to pay for this outcome.

At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.

It is common to focus on the most extreme and most rare version of a problem as a rhetorical tactic to avoid addressing the most commons forms of the problem that actually affect the most people.

15 years ago no one though Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein were committing 'real' rape, so why bother raising a fuss over it? And AFAIK (IANAL), what we now call marital rape was legal across the country until the 1970s.

The expanding definition is a necessary step in actually confronting and preventing bad behavior.

I am also a high-decoupler (ie autist) who likes words to have crisp, unambiguous, and unchanging definitions. But I also acknowledge that words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want, and these type of shifting and ambiguous definitions are very often a result of someone tuning the language to accomplish something important and valuable.

Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.

I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.

Yup, those are absolutely some of the very strong and important reasons for not doing that.

In this case, one of the countervailing reasons for doing it is, in theory, preventing or getting justice for very very large numbers of sexual assaults.

That's the tough reality of being a consequentialist, you can't just give one persuasive reason why something is bad and therefore decide not to do it, you have to actually ask what the full positive and negative consequences are and try to make a balanced judgement.

I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case, I'm just saying an argument that doesn't weigh the intended benefits against the expected costs isn't really saying anything.

That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.

Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.

I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case

So I agree that if we lived in a perfectly rational world where no one ever did linguistic maneuvers like this ever and instead all language was maximally precise and informative, because having perfectly accurate information is what let everyone engage in sophisticated and dispassionate object-level debates about the empirical outcomes of different policy proposals to find the utilitarian optimal approach, then the first person to do something like this would be breaking a sacred trust and destroying a public good and committing a grave sin.

But we very, very, very, very, very... ... very, very, very, very much do not live in a world like that.

So given the fallen world we already live in, it's not clear how much marginal damage the 92,252nd instance of that happening does past the marginal damage done by the 92,251st instance.

It would certainly be better if everyone did it less, and I am actually an active proponent of doing it less in many contexts.

But it's not obviously clear that the utilitarian optimal policy is to be an extremist about never doing it ever, when it's already a standard tactic that everyone uses and not using it puts the other things you value at a severe rhetorical disadvantage, and when the marginal damage of one more case is mitigated by all the other case.

It's certainly not right to be a selective extremist about it, where you notice and call out whenever your opponents do it, but turn a blind eye when your side does it ('abortion is murder' much?).

As for 'the people doing it would object to the other side doing it'.... yeah, obviously. That's exactly what an isolated demand for rigor is, people do it all the time to fight their opponents, that's exactly what this instance of calling it out and objecting to it is. That's kind of my point.

words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want

This might be the best summary I've ever seen of a particular engagement style, thank you. I have a long post in the works about how to handle an ongoing discussion where people are using different and mutually contradictory forms of engagement, and was struggling to find a phrase to explain this particular one.

At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.

This definition changed more like 150 years ago than 15. Webster's dictionary lists rape as "In law, the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will" in 1828, but as "Sexual connection with a woman without her consent." in 1913.

I do think it's a better policy in general to make up a new word when you need one, rather than overloading an old one... but more than a century?! At some point thou movest on.

Whether or not the 1913 definition means what you're implying it to mean probably depends on exactly how you define consent, and how you define the boundaries of consent. Suffice it to say, based on what I was exposed to growing up in the late 20th century, it was my impression that rape referred to a violent brutal crime, and I'm sure that most others of my generation and geographic location would agree with me. Ymmv, perhaps

The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party

Intercourse with drunk women should just be illegal.

Either be 100% confident that the woman in question is not going to report you or abstain.

Then if we have a conviction of a rape of a drunk woman, we can also charge the bartender who poured the drinks.

Talk to actual high school students from not-very-well-educated areas about what does or doesn't count as rape or consent some day. 'If you paid for a nice meal doesn't she kind of owe you at least a blowjob' is far from the most troubling thing you will hear. Don't even ask about drugs and alcohol.

It's easy for well-educated affluent adults to think that 'teach men not to rape' sounds absurd, and must be some kind of dumb metaphorical power-grab in the culture war over where to place societal blame. But it is very much an extremely literal statement that is reasonably commensurate with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country.

'If you paid for a nice meal doesn't she kind of owe you at least a blowjob' is far from the most troubling thing you will hear.

The distaff counterpart being "if you regretted it afterwards isn't that kind of at least not consensual"; but maybe that doesn't count since it's not the poorly-educated that most often claim this.

and must be some kind of dumb metaphorical power-grab in the culture war over where to place societal blame

The main population repeating this line are well-educated affluent women, generally used as a stick to beat over the head of the [well-educated affluent] men who weren't the problem in the first place. It's trivially true this is a power grab.

with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country

A lack of education is not the cause of that problem (and "bad sex education" is more just a refusal to teach basic biological facts and hype up risks that don't exist; father-placating/traditionalist "if you have sex you'll die of turbo AIDS" sex ed is stupid and harmful just like mother-placating/progressive "sex is rape by default also if you aren't on puberty blockers by 12 you'll die of suicide" sex ed is). A lack of conscientiousness is, but that's true of anti-social behavior by default anyway.

I understand you’re going for hyperbole, but try to avoid caricaturing the positions you’re arguing against.

with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country

You mean "what cultural attitudes about consent to sex look like". I guarantee you these kids are not getting their ideas from sex ed, and I guarantee you that if sex ed addresses consent these kids don't listen to it.

Look, I went through fairly high budget abstinence+ sex ed. It didn't work on the kids that it wasn't going to work on- as it turns out, schools actually do a remarkably bad job of changing social attitudes. You can't educate teenaged boys out of what rap songs educate them in to, at least not in an institutional setting. In person mentorship maybe, but nobody with feminist attitudes wants to do it.

I guarantee you these kids are not getting their ideas from sex ed,

Yes, that is what I am referring to by 'how bad sex education is'.

and I guarantee you that if sex ed addresses consent these kids don't listen to it.

Strong disagree. You do have to hit them younger before the culture has fully established other ideas, but if the curriculum is handled well and it's the first time they're hearing about it in a realistic setting with enough detail, you can form their first impressions on the topic, or heavily influence their existing impressions.

Isn't sex education, whether it's done efficiently or not, mainly about 1. contraceptives 2. pregnancy 3. periods 4. STDs? Covering just those four subjects is enough of a daunting task in itself, I'm sure. This notion that sex education needs to mostly focus on proper norms of consent has to be a rather recent phenomenon, mostly confined to feminist activist circles.

Such attitudes are broadly predictable in a society that normalizes both drug use and premarital sex, and where the proportion of women engaging in casual sex reaches a critical mass, so to speak.

Are you saying that you expect such attitudes to be more common in a society that allows for frequent sex and drugs?

I'm like 98% confident that they are way more common in societies that vilify those things, since in those cases anyone engaged in them is 'clearly' already a criminal/demon/idiot/slut/etc and therefore can't really be a victim/deserves what they get/must secretly want it/etc.

Having society disapprove of sex and drugs doesn't mean no one does sex or drugs, it just means there's no societal narrative about how to do it ethically or safely. I'm pretty confident you could go to almost any repressive society and find worse attitudes about this stuff.

Are you saying that you expect such attitudes to be more common in a society that allows for frequent sex and drugs?

Yes. In a society where drug use isn't normalized/tolerated, it's not a common pastime to ply women with drugs in order to manipulate them into sex. It will only remain a rare, isolated occurrence. The same applies to binge-drinking. Also, in a society where extramarital sex is not normalized/tolerated, the general consensus among men will be that only a small minority of women are available for casual sex, so pressuring/manipulating them into having casual sex will not be a common pastime.

You're confusing between acts and attitudes here, I think.

Unless your claim is that when acts are rare, no one will bother to form attitudes about them. But I think that's hugely wrong, people form attitudes and opinions about everything, and attitudes towards rare and taboo things are ussually more extreme and dangerous.

It's true that the men who are most receptive to feminist messaging are overwhelmingly those who already know exactly what the term "rape" entails and would never dream of committing it. It's equally true that feminists are not tilting at windmills when they talk about the importance of teaching men not to rape. There really are men (and boys) who believe that a woman who dresses provocatively is "asking for it", that a man taking advantage of a woman who's so drunk that she's drifting in and out of consciousness doesn't constitute rape, that married men are entitled to have sex with their wives whenever they damn well please. These attitudes may not be as common as they used to be, they may be far more common among "men of colour" and working-class men than among the middle- to upper-class white men who seem to attract so much ire from feminists - but they do exist. The people who hold them may be weak men, but they are not straw men.

On a more general note, "the people paying attention to the message are the people who don't need to hear it" is probably a problem common to essentially all political activism in democratic societies.

On a more general note, "the people paying attention to the message are the people who don't need to hear it" is probably a problem common to essentially all political activism in democratic societies.

Indeed, so much so Scott wrote an article about it a decade ago.

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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Achievement is always zero-sum. We only respect and feel the power of things that other people cannot or will not do. The magnitude of an achievement is directly proportional to the number of people who have failed.

What the people whining for easy mode are trying to do is co-opt the social cachet of the skill required to beat a hard game at a lower investment in time/ability.

I don't agree with this psychoanalysis. Cuphead has an easy mode, Devil May Cry games have an easy mode, Touhou games have an easy mode. In none of those games' communities does anyone boast of completing the game on easy mode. If there's any chase for social cachet, you're essentially calling those people very delusional because there is no cachet in beating ezmodo. Instead, the normal mode or higher (depending on how sweaty normal mode is) becomes the socially accepted "real completion".

Some people just want to experience [some fraction of] the game's mechanics and beat the final boss and not watch it on Youtube. There isn't any more social aspect in that than idly swiping gems in a 3 in a row game on the train.

I can confirm this is definitely the case for Touhou. Not just normal, but also only 1 credit clears of the game are considered "real completion". I have done 1cc on some of the games but only on easy.

And I never once heard from anyone in the Touhou community that "it would feel more rewarding to complete normal/hard/lunatic 1cc if lower difficulty modes/continues weren't available".

Possibly true, but even dumber if it is.

What's dumb? Wanting to enjoy a game's mechanics without being forced to compete in big sweaty boy league?

Is it not better to have a clear win condition, so you don't even need to have the argument about what counts as winning?

Yes, I realize that some people consider using ashes in Elden Ring as cheating. Clarity is a matter of degree. I have, for example, never heard anyone complaining about beating Sekiro in any semi-normal way as cheating. Btw. the Cuphead easy mode doesn't count because it doesn't let you advance in the game. That's why I put it into the list of "hard games".

You don't have to have the argument. I haven't noticed any argument, certainly. There is a clear win condition, and different strata of Touhou players value different tiers of victory differently. I observe that the majority consider normal 1cc and upwards to be "real".

(There are usually different endings in Touhou games and the ones granted for easy mode or multiple continues are the "bad endings", but it's just a few lines of text.)

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.

Mostly because I find the word very funny. But you are right, I shortened it to just "slop".

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.

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.

goyslop

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.

But you fuck one goat...

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

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”.

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.

Ironically, that would make the choice of words less bizarre.

not only derails the conversation with an isolated need for rigor,

What is isolated about this demand? For that matter, what does it have to do with 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”.

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.

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.

Can we please have a moratorium on word policing?

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.

The very thing that makes videogames stand out from other mediums is the difficulty. The dialogue between designer and player; as a player you are challenging an opponent who has made all of their moves in advance and is daring you to find a way through them.

Removing difficulty, or even removing fail states altogether, completely undermines what makes videogames a unique medium in the first place. The difficulty IS the point; if you just want to experience the story, watch a Let's Play or go watch a movie. Walking Simulators don't deserve the title of game for the fact that they have no gameplay; at least no more than watching a DVD while periodically pausing it, flinging the remote across the room and retrieving it before continuing does.

Difficulty is a way of telling a story in and of itself; we know Malenia is hard as nails because she's fucking hard as nails. Radahn dropping on you from outer space hits home as a gameplay mechanic in a way that simply showing it in a cutscene wouldn't. It's the difference between "wow, that was cool" and "holy FUCK that would've oneshot me if it hit, wouldn't it?"

I think your perspective is skewed. Why the focus on fixed difficulty? Rather than looking at how some people want to make games easier, you should look at the ways a lot of games allow you to scale difficulty higher.

Recently Balatro came out, and it's pretty fun, and the first win isn't that hard, but to win on the higher difficulties isn't that easy. There's plenty of other games with the same mechanic. Slay the Spire is probably the best example, it has 20 ascension levels, and the highest level is basically impossible to winstreak on. There's tons of other roguelites with similar mechanics. AI Wars is an RTS that has tons of difficulties where again, the highest one is basically designed for you to lose on.

Gunfire Reborn & Roboquest are FPS roguelites and they both have scaling difficulty. You mentioned Ubisoft games too. Tom Clancy Wildlands also has a scaling difficulty setting.

All in all, there's tons of games that are out now that have scaling difficulty, either built in or through mods. Is all of that just meaningless because it's not fixed?

It seems like the bulk of the post is just focused on gaming journalists who barely games in the first place.

The problem is, you are dealing with, I believe, clinical narcissist. Twitter addicted, attention seeking game journos/activists. It's a raw, bleeding, narcissistic wound that there is anything that "cool kids" like which they can't participate in. That there might be any experience other people enjoy which is inaccessible to them. Begging them to leave something alone, lest they ruin it, simply means nothing to them. If they don't get to join the club, the club shouldn't be allowed to exist, and damn all the people who derive enjoyment or community from the shared experience of overcoming a challenge. There is literally nobody, no organic groundswell what so ever, clamoring for "accessible" FromSoft games.

I'm simply amazed that conversations like this even occur. If a game is too hard, I just don't play it. I don't need every game to be for me. Probably the majority of popular games I don't play. I attempted to play Demon's Soul once upon a time, and got my poop pushed in so hard a few bosses in I gave up. Never tried another FromSoft game, I don't care. There are literally tens of thousands of games out there. Play any one of those and get over yourself.

While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.

I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.

Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.

Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.

And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.

Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.

Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:

  1. The controls are better and thus the difficulty has gradually shifted from wrestling with controls to actually making the game hard.
  2. There's more competitive multiplayer. It is impossible for the average competitive multiplayer game to give the average player a win rate greater than 50% in the long run, making it inherently difficult compared to single-player games.
  3. Developers are free to add more difficulty because they know players have access to better online resources on how to overcome said difficulty.
  4. There are more layers of conventions that developers expect you to understand. Even relatively handholdy games often have broad swaths of unexplained mechanics due to being more complicated.
  5. You were just younger. Go back, play them, smash them over your knee.

Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.

Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:

  1. The controls are better and thus the difficulty has gradually shifted from wrestling with controls to actually making the game hard.
  1. There's more competitive multiplayer. It is impossible for the average competitive multiplayer game to give the average player a win rate greater than 50% in the long run, making it inherently difficult compared to single-player games.
  2. Developers are free to add more difficulty because they know players have access to better online resources on how to overcome said difficulty.
  3. There are more layers of conventions that developers expect you to understand. Even relatively handholdy games often have broad swaths of unexplained mechanics due to being more complicated.
  4. You were just younger. Go back, play them, smash them over your knee.

Well, this challenges a lot of my preconceptions. I'm kind of 50/50 on it. Like, if I take Doom for instance, the original on standard difficulty, with modern ASWD and mouselook controls, is trivially easy. When I was a kid, playing with the default controls that practically had you moving like a tank, I think holding the alt key to strafe, it was borderline impossible. I exclusively played with cheats I found it so punishing at 10 years old.

With the original Warcraft, most of the difficulty IMHO came from the primitive controls. Warcraft II improved on them enough that I didn't find it too severe a challenge with respect to that at least. Starting with Starcraft, despite the group size being limited to 12 units, it's fine IMHO. On recent playthroughs, I did notice that the campaign in Warcraft II seems like more of a challenge, and I found myself actually running out of resources, and not really getting 2nd or 3rd tries if an assault failed. Starcraft by comparison had a campaign that was relatively easier, with more plentiful resources and a less aggressive AI, that seemed willing to let you recover from mistakes until you got it.

But I don't think you can directly compare multiplayer games. How "hard" a competitive game is will always be contingent on the players involved. Likewise, I'm not sure I consider the sort of "difficulty" that hinges on whether you have access to a wiki or not actual difficulty. Looking up what OP strategy works on a boss isn't that much different from the sorts of moon logic puzzles that eventually killed point and click adventure games, and which most gamers rejected as being artificial "difficulty". It's not difficulty, it's just bad design.

That said, there are hard games from back then which still hold up. I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did. Lately I've been stretching outside of my gaming comfort zone and throwing a credit into the original arcade Gradius from time to time. It felt like a big achievement when I was able to semi-reliably get to level 3.

I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did.

NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.

TV Tropes becomes helpful here.

Old games were full of this stuff.

I think the hardest aspect of Dark Souls is "figuring out what to do to make it easy". Rarely is the wise thing to do to mash your head against a wall, at least until you start getting near the end. Early on, there are almost always alternate avenues you can explore that make things a lot easier. I think you could chalk this up to "challenge" as well, knowing where and how to seek out better opportunities. But it also introduces an element of luck. Someone who gets it in their head that they've figured the game out while missing key details about kindling and stats and weapon upgrades will have a really rough time.

In that particular case, this is only another argument against difficulty-setting. The tools are there, you just have to know when to go do other stuff. Sucks if you miss an ember though.

Sekiro, on the other hand, almost never offers these kinds of pathways or any opportunities for confusion, and really is quite challenging no matter what you do.

Someone who gets it in their head that they've figured the game out while missing key details about kindling and stats and weapon upgrades will have a really rough time.

This seems to be my time to keep recommending Viva La Dirt League videos on the topic 😁

Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title.

That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills. It might not be true for journalists, especially the sort of woman who writes gaming journalism feminism articles.

I was watching a livestreamer recently, and she was trying to beat one of the old mario games. And just was dying, over and over again, on what seemed to be pretty simple stages. She didn't seem to learn or improve, she just kept making the same mistakes and only progressed by random luck. So at first I was tempted to feel smug. But then I thought, she's doing something I could never do- she's got a big crowd of people watching her, she's somehow connecting with them, and convincing them to give her money. That's a much more powerful skill than making mario jump onto platforms! But people really are different.

That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills. It might not be true for journalists, especially the sort of woman who writes gaming journalism feminism articles.

It's still a 6 or a 7, she's just unable to beat anything that's higher than a 2.

But then I thought, she's doing something I could never do- she's got a big crowd of people watching her, she's somehow connecting with them, and convincing them to give her money.

Set the goals in advance, otherwise they're meaningless. She may be winning at the game of fame and fortune, she still sucks at Mario.

That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills.

Yes, and a game that's an 8 or 9 on the scale is still even harder than dark souls for journalists too. There's no point cramming most of gaming into the top 3 points on 10 point scale just because the average Journalist is performing at a 3/10 level.

Also, for what it's worth, my visual reaction speeds aren't particularly great. I am terrible at fighting games and fast-paced shooters. Sim Racing is something I'm good at because reaction speeds matter a lot less than you'd expect, precision and repetition is more important, and we get the advantage of force feedback.

I was watching a livestreamer recently, and she was trying to beat one of the old mario games. And just was dying, over and over again

I have previously heard a variety streamer describe why they sometimes seem like inattentive amateurs on stream even if they're good at their go-to games. Their mental capacity is focused more on audience interaction than getting to grips with a new game.

Old games are rarely hard.

Have you ever finished Battletoads? Or Ninja Gaiden NES?

(Of course you did say "rarely", but those are very well known games.)

Battletoads (which I mentioned) and Ninja Gaiden are the exceptions that prove the rule. And still, if you were to task someone with completing Battletoads and completing Guitar Hero III, I know which one I'm betting on being finished first.

Assuming you're not asking for expert difficulty, I'll happily take the other side of that bet. Even if you are, I'll still probably take it - Through the Fire and the Flames is not a required song to beat the game. I think you're underselling the difficulty of older games, and I'm somebody who has cleared TtFatF on expert (barely - Rock Band 3 has much tighter timing and sells the song as DLC I can't do it there, so I'm not a god or anything). Battletoads is mean. Turbo Tunnel is called out as impossible even though it really doesn't take more than 10 minutes of practice if that (the final stretch literally just alternates up and down rapidly), but it gets so much worse later.

I'm highly confident that the average difficulty of reaching the end credits without modifying difficulty settings of a popular game from the 90s was higher than the same in the 2010s, though I can't find any studies saying so.

Some games I remember as at least reasonably difficult (>=6/10): Ninja Gaiden series, Castlevania series, Mega Man series, early Zelda titles, early Mario titles, Mickey Mania, Gothic I-II(NotR), Mafia, System Shock 2. These are all proper games without an insane amount of artificial difficulty. It feels like most modern games on "normal" are like 3/10 at most. I think you are missing one important reason for why games are less difficult today: The market is much broader, implying that the average skill level is much lower.

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.

This is, to be blunt, a character flaw and not a good argument against difficulty settings. If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.

I find your other arguments flawed as well (though I don't want to go point by point because I find that kind of obnoxious). I think that the "it doesn't affect you" argument for lower difficulty settings is correct, and that your arguments don't really counter it.

This is, to be blunt, a character flaw and not a good argument against difficulty settings. If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.

Not sure about that. Unbounded arrogance is a flaw, but people recognizing their own strong points is something that shouldn't vilify people if they find a way not to be obnoxious about it. I feel like these efforts are trying to enforce a Harrison Bergeron-esque experience for video games. If someone's a chess grandmaster, I expect him to feel some pride about it, otherwise it's just kind of sad.

I think there are at least two different mindsets here: one is the person who is competitive and wants to measure themselves against others. For them, having peers is important, because how else will they judge their own performance and ability save by striving against the best? Thus, including an easy mode is, for them, the equivalent of letting slobs who can barely waddle traverse ten steps of ground, then say they 'completed' and 'won' the same way as if they were running against Usain Bolt in the 100m.

The second mindset is doing it for fun, and not caring about anyone else's result. That view is okay, us slobs will waddle our ten steps over here, you get to race Usain over there, what's the big deal? I'm not stepping on your toes, you're not stepping on mine. I'm not competing with you, I'm not competing with anyone, I don't care if I rank first or ten thousandth on some leaderboard of game scores.

I'm not going to say either mindset is superior to the other, though as a waddling slob of course I'm more sympathetic to the second view.

I have still not seen a satisfactory answer to "so how do the slobs stop you from competing against your peers, anyway?". Right now, slobs can actually waddle ten meters and say they won. Why does that not "ruin" running for Usains but ezmodo ruins games?

I'm not convinced by OP's arguments either, mainly because as others have pointed out it's trivial for the community to define a bar that earns respect regardless of what settings the game allows. But this is going too far. It's reasonable and inevitable to seek a more objective lens on an achievement that feels substantial to you by comparing it to what others can do / have done. It's easy to say "measure yourself by yourself - if you sink 200 hours into beating easy mode because your thumbs just won't cooperate like a normal person's then you can be just as proud of that". But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.

But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.

That, too, is a character flaw. It's honestly not that hard to set reasonable standards for yourself which are genuinely challenging to you. If someone is lacking in character such that they aren't willing to do that, then there's nothing you, I, or anyone can do to help them.

This is, to be blunt, a character flaw

Not only is it not a flaw, it's a virtue! The fundamental axiom of all value is that it is destroyed by abundance. Ensuring that this knowledge is able to take root and flower in every mind that provides suitable soil for it is of vital importance.

No one, despite the great amount of effort exerted, ever got so much as a footnote in a history book for being born, having children, feeling great love or anger or jealousy, spinning out an entire hidden inner universe with the utmost uniqueness and specificity, being ground into ashes by implacable anxiety, or dying - experiences that are if not common to all lives then at least common to a great many of them. We do, however, give great honors to star NFL quarterbacks, and rightly so. Not many people can throw a ball like that.

We aren't talking about economic value here. We're talking about the virtue of overcoming challenges, which is not limited, and in no way requires an external reference.

We aren't talking about economic value here. We're talking about the virtue of overcoming challenges

I know.

Then I think your argument isn't very good because virtue is not lessened by lack of scarcity. Almost nobody murders people, but that doesn't mean it's not valuable to refrain from killing. And if someone really struggled with anger issues such that it was a real struggle for them to not get violent with people, I would say they should be proud at their success even though most people find it easy.

Hey, is it me who gets to be the C.S. Lewis quote poster today? I can't believe it.

This popped into my head from Mere Christianity:

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

Lewis is talking about God's judgment, but you can really substitute your moral framework here; he's talking about external actions vs internal choices, which is a cross-cultural theme. And I do think there's a tremendous difference between the two.

Are the achievements of NFL quarterbacks diminished by the existence of beer league sports?

No, but they might be if you forced the NFL to sponsor beer league sports and give a bunch of time/resources to them.

At the very least, the prestige of the term "NFL player" would drop significantly. To bring this back to the original point, the prestige of being a player who beat *insert game* is significantly lower with games that have easy modes. You can be part of the group that beat *insert game* on hard mode, but human beings aren't great at modifiers, and I could see it dropping total prestige.

If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.

This is a ridiculous stance. Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.

Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.

No it isn't. A person of good character strives to excel because excellence is its own reward, not because they can beat others.

Yes, some people are better than others because of natural talents or gifts. But boasting about being good at video games? Yeah, OP could beat me because I have the hand-eye co-ordination of a turtle. Well done you, this is like Usain Bolt getting in a race with me and bragging that he beat an old, fat, out-of-shape, arthritic Irishwoman. At that point, people tend to think you're not so great after all.

If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.

Can you give me an example of something that you are proud of, that everyone else can also do? The only stuff I can think of would be a depressed person managing to get out of bed in the morning and cleaning their trash or something. But what about everyone else?

Pride doesn't, or at least needn't, depend on your position relative to other people. English is a widely spoken language that doesn't require any special intelligence to learn. I learned it effortlessly as a child. But someone who becomes fluent in English as an adult put in a lot of work and has something to be proud of. To someone who is learning to ski, getting down a black diamond run for the first time without falling is a major accomplishment worthy of pride. Someone who skis regularly might do ten black diamond runs in a day and think nothing of it.

Becoming fluent in another language as an adult is an achievement that not everyone can do though. On the other hand, nobody is proud of learning their mother language because it's expected. It seems to me that this supports my argument. I am not arguing that pride comes solely from comparison with others, just that if basically everyone can do something, it's hard to be proud of doing that thing.

My point is that it's based on one's own situation, not others. You gave an example in your post of a depressed person doing basic tasks. Another example might be someone who had a stroke learning how to move their right index finger, something almost everyone can do. It is worthy of pride because it's an accomplishment for that person. By contrast, doing something that almost no one can do may not be worthy of pride. If Usain Bolt runs a race faster than 99% of the population could, he still may be quite disappointed with his time and feel no pride at all.

If basically everyone can do something, it's hard to be proud of doing that thing.

But you can do that thing well, or badly, which I think is part of the point you want to make. Learning to read and speak fluently your native language is an achievement, even if you can get by perfectly well with a level that is ordinary speech.

What your position comes across as is demanding that everyone should speak at the level of a university degree in literature, or else they're just loser time-wasters, and moreover they are devaluing your achievement in attaining fluency. But if everyone can play and win in hard mode, then what is the achievement to be proud of there? You need the lower-level players to contrast yourself with, otherwise "I won on hard mode" becomes the same "so what, are you also boasting about being able to cook a frozen pizza?".

Cooking. It's not hard to do, almost everyone can cook to some extent. But when I cook a dish that is challenging (for me), I'm proud of it no matter how easy it would be for most people.

I don't think most people can cook that well. Everyone can put a frozen pizza in the oven or cook Ramen. But you wouldn't be proud of that. Are you sure that your sense of pride is completely independent of your environment? I would guess that you would feel somewhat less proud if everyone else was a 3* chief. Then, being proud of what would be considered a moderately complex dish today would be equivalent to being proud of cooking Ramen.

Are you sure that your sense of pride is completely independent of your environment?

Yes, of course I'm sure. The pride is in the challenge I overcame, not because it makes me better than anyone else.

But you wouldn't be proud of that.

Dude, I can manage to burn frozen pizza by getting distracted and forgetting how long I've had it in the oven. Not burning it is legit a source of pride for me. I think you're operating off a different level of how you value achievement; a lot of people just do things for fun, and easy mode on games is one of those fun things. After all, it's just a bloody video game, it's not like curing cancer or brain surgery.

There are games I'd never be able to play, because I'm not good enough, have not been playing for long enough and don't know the etiquette, as it were, and have nowhere near the hand-eye co-ordination needed (particularly as I'm getting older and the first traces of arthritis in the joints are appearing). That's fine, I'm never going to try playing those games anyway. But mass-market games? Why not an easy mode for those who just want to have fun, or who won't be able to get to complete the game without help? What are you losing? You still beat it on Ultra Hardcore Suicide Massacre Mode, you achieved that, you are the champion.

I'm one of those people who like story mode because I'm playing the game to find out the lore and explore the world and wander around (maybe I like plucking all those flowers for the herb garden for the villager side-quest) rather than the grind of following a guide to get the maximum build to power through the maps with the most slaughter. I'm not interested in the body count I rack up! So you enjoy yourself running through like a blazing meteor of death, I'll be pootering around chasing rabbits, and we can both have fun with the game.

If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.

Nonsensical. Are you proud of breathing? No, because everyone can do it. Are you proud of knowing how to swim? No, because it's extremely common to be able to swim. Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?

I'll tell you why: The value of something is directly proportionate to how rare it is and how much effort it takes to produce. This is as true for achievements as it is for physical goods.

Are you proud of breathing? No, because everyone can do it.

No, it's because it isn't challenging for me. Whether other people can do it doesn't factor in.

Are you proud of knowing how to swim? No, because it's extremely common to be able to swim.

I am in fact mildly proud of knowing how to swim, because it was challenging for me to learn. Less proud because I haven't swam in years and so I've lost the skill somewhat, but I still have reason to be proud of the effort I made.

This is as true for achievements as it is for physical goods.

It's not at all true for achievements.

Are you proud of knowing how to swim?

In fact, I am. Not being great at it makes me even prouder, because I can still do it despite being not that great. I never had any ambitions of being a Channel swimmer or Olympic medalist, but stick me in a swimming pool or the ocean, and I won't drown. Go me! Not everybody can swim even that much.

The fact that people like Michael Phelps exist and make me look like a rock doesn't matter one bit to me, and if Michael Phelps derived his sense of self-worth from "I'm way better than FarNear", I'd actually be kinda sorry for him. I'm so far below his level, him complaining that I was allowed in the same pool as he swims in would be less "I am a champion" and more "I am a dickwad up my own arse about how Great I am".

Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?

This is the wrong comparison. You can feel pride in getting a doctorate degree, but does that mean nobody should be able to get a master's or bachelor's degree?

Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense. The fact that people can get bachelor's degrees doesn't invalidate your doctorate degree at all. Everyone understands that getting a doctorate degree is a bigger accomplishment than getting a master's or bachelor's degree. Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?

Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense.

No, it's saying "we should not lower the difficulty of getting a doctorate to the level of graduating high school so that everyone can feel the accomplishment of getting a doctorate"

Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?

I'm not. They can go play other, easier, lesser games just fine.

No, it's saying "we should not lower the difficulty of getting a doctorate to the level of graduating high school so that everyone can feel the accomplishment of getting a doctorate"

No one is getting "the doctorate" (the hard mode completion) by "graduating high school" (completing easy mode). Besides, of course, blatant game state editing (cheats/hacks/mods).

I'm not. They can go play other, easier, lesser games just fine.

It might as well be a whole other game.

There are no devalue fields being emanated by easy mode players that can somehow affect your experience of beating hard mode against your will.

how much effort it takes to produce

This has nothing to do with how many other people can do it. It's reasonable for, for instance, someone with some physical disability to be as proud at completing a comparatively short run as someone else is at finishing an ultra-marathon, if equal effort was demanded of them. If swimming suddenly and totally fell out of fashion as a thing to learn recreationally, such that fewer people could swim at all than had a PhD, that would not then imply that if I went off and learnt to swim to a bronze certificate standard it would be an achievement to be proud of.

if I went off and learnt to swim to a bronze certificate standard it would be an achievement to be proud of.

Why wouldn't it? If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do, then being able to swim to certificate standard when that is rarer than having a PhD is something relatively few people can do, and so is something to be proud of.

If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?

If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do

The cachet of a PhD might be that, but that doesn't mean that's why one ought to be proud of it. It's only correlated. You should be proud of it because it's hard, and not many people can do it because it is hard. But you shouldn't be proud of it because not many people do it, that's getting the chain of causation the wrong way round. Hence;

If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?

No, but not because everyone has one, but because you didn't have to do anything to get it. Which again are correlated - everyone has one because it comes with their cornflakes - but not the same thing.

Here's a perhaps clearer example. If I decided to learn to a very basic level some conversational phrases in an ultra-obscure language for a couple of hours, that would already get me to a level of knowledge rarer in the the general population than having a PhD. But that obviously doesn't mean that I should be prouder of the former than the latter, if for instance I had both.

The near future is going to be strange, computers and robotics will be superior to humans in every endeavor. Will you still take pride in beating other humans? People that play chess do, even though a computer can win easily at this point. Will you be proud of a PhD when an AI has made your PhD worthless as a possible contributor? How about when a human can be augmented to do anything at the best "human augment" level?

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.

Sometimes I worry about what effect that has on kids. What does it do to someone, who has invested hundreds of hours into perfecting their skills at a video game, just so they can brag about beating it? And it's not even a multiplayer game, they're just memorizing patterns against a fixed bot. And then they go and play other games, making video games their main hobby and only source of pride, because they're bad at all things in the real world, because they're not practicing anything real... I don't know. I'm not saying these games should be illegal or anything, but I think people need to be more aware of how addictive they are. Most of us wouldn't casually sign up to watch a 300 hour long movie, or the same 3-hour movie 100 times, but we download these video games without a second thought.

I can't speak for everyone, and I can't speak for all games. But I played a lot of video games as a kid. You learn a lot more than just how to press buttons in a pattern.

It taught me how not to get ruffled by failure, a skill that came in quite handy during my amateur martial arts career at tournaments. To say nothing of less intense situations like debugging frustrating code, or dealing with a cut in woodworking going wonky.

It taught me to be methodical, as a lot of success in difficult games comes from thinking about the problem you are stuck at, and working backwards. If you constantly die in a certain corner, don't get stuck in that corner. If you can only beat a boss with a certain item, make sure you've collected that item going in. And once again, this methodical approach to problem solving has paid dividends in my professional life, and my hobbies.

This last one, I donno. I want to say intense gaming sessions taught me to focus. But there is a fine line between compulsion and focus. I wouldn't say anyone is "focused" at the slot machine for 3 hours. But I'm willing to bet the kid who beat tetris was focuses as fuck.

You could make the same argument for football and chess. Games are a good way to practice useful skills, which is why they exist and are encouraged or tolerated, and the failure modes are well known: if your entire life starts to revolve around this inconsequential thing or if you contract behavioral addiction, it's time to stop.

I've never really been convinced by the idea that video games are more addictive than other types of games. People do spend hours upon hours playing various other things or marathoning TV shows and movies.

What you seem to be missing is that interactive media inherently contains more possible interaction. It's less boring because it contains more experiences. A completionist playthrough of Elden Ring isn't equivalent to watching the same dark fantasy movie on a loop, it's comparable to watching a complete anthology of a bunch of different fantasy movies.

What does it do to someone, who has invested hundreds of hours into perfecting their skills at a video game, just so they can brag about beating it?

...Improves their hand-eye coordination and reaction times? Gives them a healthy sense of competitiveness?

But its not actually competitive. Theyre not doing esports, theyre just following some how-to guide and following its directions, or screwing around until they find somethat works against pre-programmed monsters. I think there is value in competition, but i dont see the value in these solitary time-sinks.

This doesn't seem that different from rock climbing or archery or even footraces. These are all intrinsically solitary activities of man vs a static environment, but by doing them together, people can build communities, and by comparing performances, people can compete. I do think there's something about overcoming video game challenges that is intrinsically... not worthless, but perhaps worth quite a lot less than other endeavors, but I see that more as a video game thing.

I agree that part of the problem is them being videogames. Its the combination i think?

  • no physical exercise
  • extra screen time
  • solitary and isolating. You cant even meet up to play 2p like kids used to do for mario
  • difficult enough to tire out your brain, but not difficult to be a really serious challenge
  • Utterly pointless. It doesnt even look cool to win, because we can all see the endings without effort and most video game endings arent that great

This combination applies just as well to "reading a book" as it does to playing Dark Souls, and you're making a lot of assumptions when you say "difficult enough to tire out your brain, but not difficult to be a really serious challenge".

or screwing around until they find somethat works against pre-programmed monsters

I mean, that's how I got into software engineering (doubly so if we consider windows 98 to be one of the monsters).

Most of us wouldn't casually sign up to watch a 300 hour long movie, or the same 3-hour movie 100 times, but we download these video games without a second thought.

300 hours is nothing... Get on my level, I have 3,000+ hours in just Dota.

Oh, ive also wasted tons of time on videogames. Most of it before steam thiugh, so i dont know the exact value. It is shocking to see that hiur count go uo though.

Meta: I dislike giant bold text. Is there a setting to disable this, custom CSS or something? Super not a frontend person...

This CSS should work: h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:inherit;}

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:inherit;}

Literally less legible than assembly. Thanks.

I agree that the game itself is better when it enforces stakes. Now I’m much more and RPG gal, and what frustrated me quite often with sandbox rpgs is that because the game was designed around a “anyone can be anything and even switch mid game “ ethos a lots of skills became basically useless. Being good at speaking and charisma was a waste of time because basically, there’s no place you could use it where it wouldn’t be easier to simply kill your way to victory. Even within places where you’d expect it, the game would let you win a quest that’s supposed to be about magic or stealth even if your skills in that area were somewhere around pathetic when you’re supposedly a master of those skills.

I think a lot of this is simply a fear that the first failure someone has in a game is when he’s going to quit and go do something else. Worse, it might hurt the chances that person will buy the next game in the series.

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.

If you're deriving pride from beating the game on normal then how does the fact that everybody can beat the game on story mode take away from that?

Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.

Basically any game can be made much more difficult through challenge runs or speedruns, and they'd confer just as much intrinsic pride for beating them as a Fromsoft title would at equivalent difficulty. But those challenges would lose the extrinsic motivator of one being able to pretentiously lord their gaming superiority over others, since e.g. saying "I completed [game] in the any% hitless category in under 14 minutes" is a lot less legible to people who don't play it themselves. Conversely, plenty of people know about the reputation of the Souls series.

Even if you personally enjoy that extrinsic motivator, it's undeniable that it creates other problems. Discussions of the game become worse in a lot of ways, with plenty of obnoxious policing on how you're "supposed" to play the game (e.g. "you didn't really beat Elden Ring if you used Ash Summons" or "you didn't really beat DS if you used ranged/magic"). Then there's the people who are so overprotective of difficulty that they'd say any change that would make the game better but also slightly easier is automatically bad. Think the game craps the bed when fighting 2+ enemies? Git gud. Do you think enemies attacking through walls when the player can't should be fixed? Git gud. Think the terrible grab hitboxes should be adjusted to more closely match the enemy model? Git gud. Fromsoft games are the only series I've seen people unironically defend framerate drops as something that shouldn't be fixed since they "add to the difficulty and atmosphere of blighttown".

Apart from the peripheral issues, the core of the game itself is degrading as From runs along the difficulty treadmill, trying to make ever more difficult enemies that are almost certainly made as hard as they are to preserve the series' reputation for difficulty as opposed to any compelling gameplay reasons. The later bosses in Elden Ring are a good example of this, and are something that Joseph Anderson has gone into at length here.

As for the easy mode discussion itself, I propose a hypothetical to you. Say the challenge runners and speedrunners took control of the development of the series and decided to massively increase the difficulty so it appealed to them personally, but you were now excluded. Your first instinct would probably be to retort with "I'd just get better, adapt to the challenge, and enjoy the game even more!" But let's say this wasn't an option. Say you were either hard-limited on your skill such that you couldn't progress, or that the amount of time it would take you would be so high as to be unreasonable. You'd now effectively be locked out of a series you had greatly enjoyed up until this point. An optional easy mode could fix this and allow you to enjoy the games, but oh wait the speedrunners have decided they don't want to do this. They give some half-hearted excuse answers about "developer vision" as to why they say they don't want it, but you know that at least a big part of the reason is because if they implemented an easy mode, then they couldn't be quite as smug when they say they've beaten the game on discussion forums.

I find it odd that you have a very similar ranking of the FromSoft titles with Sekiro on top, yet you still disagree with my point. In my view, Sekiro is the best title in part because it is so tight. There is a limited amount you can do in terms of grinding to defeat the bosses. So you just have to... uh... git gud. In contrast, in Elden Ring you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want by using ashes or meta builds. This makes the game more accessible in the same way that a dedicated easy mode would have made it more accessible. At the same time, it creates the risk of having overtuned bosses like Malenia. You couldn't have a Malenia type boss in Sekiro because almost nobody would beat it. So it is exactly the tightness, that a bounded difficulty level brings, that may have made Sekiro the better game.

Full agreement on the second paragraph. Comparison with others is part of the enjoyment for some people.

Sure, the flanderization of Dark Souls is bad. Sure, some people have dumb opinions and justify it with git gud. I wouldn't blame it on the lack of easy mode though.

I am generally against taking an established franchise to a completely new direction that alienates many of it's old fans, whether that be adding an easy mode or making it insanely hard. Therefore, I would reject it on these grounds. A better example would be creating a new franchise that is so hard that I can't beat it. I am perfectly fine with this shrug

I am generally against taking an established franchise to a completely new direction that alienates many of it's old fans, whether that be adding an easy mode or making it insanely hard.

I do understand that, but I think what the established fans forget is that when the game first came out, they were new players and it wasn't developed to the point it is now after several years. Now new players are coming in at the level of the established players, not the level at which the game was first brought out, and that's a lot of the disjunction between "this is too damn hard" "well just git gud, noob".

I personally liked Sekiro because it doubled down on what the Souls games did well while removing most of the crap. One of my biggest pet peeves, the instadeath pits, were removed. This is something that had bugged me since the janky platforming of DS1, but people always defended that garbage with the nonsense elitist difficulty argument. Unfortunately the pits returned in ER, and are actually a pretty big issue in that game despite its dedicated jump button. Sekiro compensated with higher base boss difficulty, but those bosses also felt a lot tighter at the higher levels of play as well. I can pretty consistently do Genichiro, Owl Father, and Inner Isshin damageless, and doing them gives a great sense of mastery. I never got the same feeling with Malenia. ER bosses feel like I'm cheesing an algorithm rather than dueling, and Malenia in particular never felt good even after a bit of practice.

Sure, some people have dumb opinions and justify it with git gud. I wouldn't blame it on the lack of easy mode though.

It definitely doesn't help, as it helps to entrench the series as unwelcoming to players who can't adapt to the arbitrary difficulty. That's the elitism people are defending.

I am generally against taking an established franchise to a completely new direction that alienates many of it's old fans, whether that be adding an easy mode or making it insanely hard.

"It shouldn't have an easy mode because it didn't have one before" is a goofy argument. Further, I feel like you just ignored the point of my hypothetical, i.e. the arbitrary exclusion, rather than addressing it.

I've never played the Souls games, so I'll take your word for it that they're not good. But if so, why are they occupy such a large cultural space? Obviously, because they are difficult - that extra challenge is clearly adding something that other actions RPGs just lack. I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.

I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.

I haven't played a Souls game, but having played Bloodborne, Sekiro, and probably half of Elden Ring, I believe this is actually the opposite. The challenges in these games tend to be very fair, even the sucker punches and surprises are ones that could have been prepared for. Which is to say, when you're in a boxing ring facing against an opponent, there's no such thing as a sucker punch, just poor attentiveness. These games have their share of surprise encounters, but every one of them could have been anticipated just by looking around a corner before stepping in - it's just that looking around each and every corner in a large, complex game world with tons of enemies is tough to do and can be quite stressful.

And it's that sense of fairness that makes these games so well-regarded in contrast to the generic difficult action game. They're not perfect and so exceptions do exist, but by and large, they telegraph to the player very well exactly how to react to any challenge to overcome it; they just demand great attentiveness and consistent execution while under pressure. The reputation for difficulty tends to come from how few mistakes a player is allowed to make before their character dies (most regular enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits most of the time). The fact that healing locks your character into a vulnerable animation and thus needs to be strategically used based on one's knowledge of the enemy's behavior also plays into this.

The challenges in these games tend to be very fair

Categorically not true. Enemies can attack through walls while you can't. Enemies can attack through each other while you almost never get allies in the first place (at least prior to ER). Grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible. DS2 has a large emphasis on groups of enemies which is the literal definition of unfair.

Then there's traps like the infamous dragon bridge in DS1 that is just terrible game design. Absolutely no indication that the bridge is a trap other than scorch marks (like somehow fire in the past means a dragon is about to attack you in the present). It also comes right after a difficult boss and could easily make people think they're supposed to go somewhere else when you're actually supposed to dodge around the dragon.

Categorically not true. Enemies can attack through walls while you can't. Enemies can attack through each other while you almost never get allies in the first place (at least prior to ER). Grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible. DS2 has a large emphasis on groups of enemies which is the literal definition of unfair.

First of all, when people say "fair" in the context of single player games where it's player vs AI, that doesn't mean having the exact same mechanics available to the player and AI or having the exact same number of enemies as the player (i.e. 1 on 1). The point of fairness in these games isn't to put each entity on equal footing, but rather to have the player experience a challenge where failure is the result of their own mistakes. DMC games are generally regarded as very fair, and the vast majority of the non-boss gameplay is centered around defeating large groups of enemies. All 3 From Soft games I've played have their moments of unfairness, but all have tended to be far better at fairness than most similar games of similar genres.

Second, it's simply not true that you can't attack through walls. I've cheesed enemies in Bloodborne and Elden Ring by attacking them through walls. Your weapon swings sometimes bounce off the wall in both games, but not always.

I actually was going to agree that grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible, but the only ones that really stick out to me are Genichiro's running grab and the Guardian Ape's leaping grab. For most grabs, I'd say it's the tracking that's complete BS, such as with Emma's. I can't speak to the latter half bosses in Elden Ring (I've just gotten to the royal city, having defeated Godrick, Rennala, and Radahn as the main big bosses), but I can't recall a single grab that struck me as being off compared to their character model. Godrick's grab was really frustrating to me, as was the Fallingstar Beast's (rather well-telegraphed) one, but both matched their character models quite well, especially for Godrick where I could just step back a foot and punish the grab by slashing his arm.

Absolutely no indication that the bridge is a trap other than scorch marks (like somehow fire in the past means a dragon is about to attack you in the present).

I have to admit, that bit makes me laugh. That's the kind of sneaky "well eff them but right, technically in hindsight they did give me a clue" move that would have me both screaming in anger and laughing at the sheer brass neck of the devs. Though I'm never going to even attempt Dark Souls, so I imagine the level of frustration already engendered makes it hard to see the humour, from the outside.

It's more frustrating because many in the community refuse to accept that it's bad. The dragon bridge is a frequent flashpoint on the game, and the scorch marks are one of the goofy defenses that DS stans frequently offer in retort. It's dumb because it's such a massive leap in logic. You can put on the heaviest armor in the game and essentially bodyslam a thin bridge that's just two thin planks, but they won't break because the game generally does not expect you to make big leaps of logic when reading the environment.

I wouldn't say they're bad games per se, but they're certainly overrated on their own merits barring Sekiro.

Obviously, because they are difficult

Nonsense, they occupy a large cultural space because they're needlessly exclusionary, which appeals to a lot of elitists. Difficulty isn't hard to find, just try any challenge runs or speedruns for games you already enjoy. But there's a reason why speedrunning is incredibly niche while the Souls games aren't. People like to watch speedrunners but not to actually do it themselves, while the Souls games sell millions of copies, and it's mainly because of the elitist snobbery the Souls games have wrapped themselves in.

Clearly, that exclusionary element is not needless - it serves a purpose or satisfies some desire. I think that desire is the desire for competition, just channelled into a single player game. I also think it's wrong to write off that very natural drive as snobbery.

There's a big difference between the drive for completing a tough challenge, and being pretentious for having done so. I get that the smug superiority people get is part of the reward for doing the challenge, but it's best not to make that the central premise. For FromSoft titles it very much is.

I think this take and your favorite Soulslike being Sekiro are entirely at odds, which is what I don't get.

Souls, and to the greatest extent Elden Ring, allow you to use the game's systems, content and options to make the game as difficult or as easy as you want. Even in Demon's Souls, you could essentially powermax your character through repetitive soul farming until you trivialized a lot of the content, serving as a sort of soft difficulty modification depending on how the player wanted to play. There are options in the game that can make the majority of bosses a joke, and the oneshot magic spell is a meme in the Elden Ring community.

Sekiro is not like that. You either have reflexes or you don't. If you don't parry, you're dead. People who don't have the reflexes to accurately do so are never going to be able to complete Sekiro by design.

One of the sillier parts of debating the possible inclusion of an easy mode is this exact line of reasoning. "The devs must not include an easy mode as that would ruin the game... except oh wait they already did! It's [any playstyle I think is too easy]!" My response would be to question why easy playstyles are fine, but an easy mode is perceived as such a sacrilege?

The effect of levelling is overstated. It has its biggest impact at the lowest levels, but even there it doesn't make much of a difference beyond giving maybe 1 or 2 more hits of leeway before you're flattened into a pancake. Weapon upgrades follow a similar path of the lower levels everyone will get being pretty impactful, but there's quite diminishing returns after that. The oneshot magic spell (I'm assuming you're talking about the big beam thing?) is good for Twitter clips and YT clickbait but is way too inconsistent to rely on in any capacity for a first playthrough.

You're not wrong about the general point though. There are definitely things you can do to trivialize the game. Using magic in DS1 feels like you're the only character in the game with a gun, and Ash Spirits trivialize every boss in ER (although in a really boring way, the Joseph Anderson critique I linked above goes into that more).

You don't have to play Sekiro using parries. I did hit-and-run tactics for most of my first playthrough, which is low risk and low reward. It's definitely not the best way to play the game and had I not grinded the bosses after beating the game I probably never would have noticed how well-designed most of them are, but it's certainly possible to do. Heck, new players probably gravitate towards it if they've played other Souls games before.

Also, I don't really understand how that is connected to the overall point. Sekiro is the tighter game overall, but it would still be fine if it had an easy mode.

I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.

To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.

Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.

The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.

Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke.

Even if you never valued at all any gifts you have got at birthday or some other occasion, it does not mean that it is universal.

treasured heirloom

ironically, heirlooms are quite universally in this category

what is the purpose of the game?

The purpose of a game is to be fun. Difficulty is a big part of that. Something too hard is frustrating, while something too easy is boring. Skill differences between players are wide, which is why the vast majority of games include difficulty options.

The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.

For most games this is true, but FromSoft has found a niche where alienating less skilled players is worthwhile for them to prop up the series' reputation for difficulty, which appeals to smug elitists. "Developer vision" arguments are vacuous nonsense that essentially boil down to "you can't criticize any design choices, ever".

Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.

I don't understand this perspective at all. That is, I don't see how the high difficulty in these games is arbitrary. I haven't played a single Souls game, but I've spent probably 500+ hours collectively on Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I'm about 50 hours into Elden Ring right now. Bloodborne is my favorite, though Elden Ring is challenging its place at the top while being by far the easiest of the 3, while Sekiro is a close 3rd despite also being by far the hardest of the 3. And in all of these, the difficulty, or perhaps more precisely the challenge, is one of the core elements that make them fun. And it's not that there's some extrinsic motivation in bragging about accomplishing things other people haven't; out of those 3, Elden Ring is likely the most popular and most well-loved, but, again, it's also by far the easiest and most accessible (Bloodborne being a PS4/PS5 exclusive plays a factor here though, admittedly).

It's generally how quickly and mercilessly they punish you that people consider them of high difficulty. To be honest, the main thing that makes these games tougher than the typical game of the same genre is the scaling on enemy damage; in most games, even bosses can hit you 10+ times before you die, whereas in these games, most regular mobs can kill you in 2 or 3 hits. But this is only one piece of the combat design in these games that make them so fun; the counter to this is that, often enough, the player can kill the enemies very quickly just by playing well. Sekiro exemplifies this perfectly with how every miniboss in the game that has 2 lives can have 1 of those lives taken out immediately before the fight begins, essentially halving their HP.

And furthermore, because enemies are so punishing, it forces the devs to design them to be fair. I consistently marvel at how well designed the enemies are in these games in terms of their attack patterns and animations which clearly convey to the player exactly what they need to do in order to avoid damage and to counterattack safely; the tough part is actually executing them consistently while under pressure from a very intimidating-looking enemy (furthermore, the execution is often not particularly difficult due to the slow pacing of these games; the timing precision and reflexes required for even Sekiro are basically nothing in comparison to something like a Devil May Cry). I've watched players with little experience in Souls games take down tricky bosses like the Guardian Ape in Sekiro - a sort of "twist" boss which took me over a dozen tries on my 1st go-around - on their 1st try, merely because they were smarter than me about analyzing their moves and experimenting safely with counters.

I'm also of the opinion that these games would be strictly better if they had easy modes. Beyond the challenge of the games, I'd say the From Soft games I've played are top of the industry in terms of level design for exploration and lore/world building. These are things that any player who doesn't care about the combat could enjoy and appreciate.

For your first two paragraphs, I agree challenge can be fun, but I strongly disagree that the challenge I would face would be diminished if other players could opt for an easy mode. That's the crux of the debate here. From your last paragraph I feel like we probably agree on this point. An easy mode would allow more people to experience the games if the difficulty would have otherwise precluded them, and it would smash the elitist snobbery surrounding the games to a good degree.

And furthermore, because enemies are so punishing, it forces the devs to design them to be fair.

Definitely not. I've already responded to your other comment on how these games aren't fair in general. A better lens the "fair" would be "predictable and preventable" that Joseph Anderson has detailed in his video essays on the series. Games like Sekiro nail that concept, while the later bosses of Elden Ring fail horribly. Again, watch the JA critique I linked above for examples of how they do so. Elden Ring is proof that in at least some instances, FromSoft values the elitist snobbery over good game design.

For your first two paragraphs, I agree challenge can be fun, but I strongly disagree that the challenge I would face would be diminished if other players could opt for an easy mode. That's the crux of the debate here. From your last paragraph I feel like we probably agree on this point. An easy mode would allow more people to experience the games if the difficulty would have otherwise precluded them, and it would smash the elitist snobbery surrounding the games to a good degree.

Yes, we agree that these games would be better with an Easy Mode - even moreso, my opinion is that all games would be strictly better with a Dev Mode where any and all cheats that developers use for debugging/testing their games can be toggled on and off at will, including the ability to hop into any place in the game at any time, and this should be unlocked from the very start. These are games, not exams; let me have my fun.

My point, though, is that, at least with Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, the high difficulty isn't arbitrary. The difficulty directly impacts the visceral thrill of playing and mastering these games. It's akin to the thrill of a boxing or MMA match, where no matter how well your favored fighter is doing, a single momentary error can mean getting KO'd. No matter how much you've mastered a boss and no matter how close you are to winning, knowing that you can lose it all from being careless for just a second makes the encounters much more fun and exciting. That the games tend to give you a ton of healing items but requires you to leave yourself vulnerable to use them plays into this high-volatility philosophy, since dying is often not about losing more HP than you have available to you (i.e. including healing items) but rather about making a bunch of mistakes in a row. This also means near-misses can happen fairly often, where you go down to 5% HP but then manage to find a healing opportunity to give you more slack for the rest of the fight, which you hopefully go on to win. There's something to be said about winning the World Series on a sweep, but there's greater thrill in winning in game 7 through a come-back walkoff.

I feel like we basically agree with each other.

You've mentioned "arbitrary" in both your comments so I assume you're reading into that word more than what I meant by it. I've never been opposed to players finding high difficulty enjoyable, I was opposed to them wanting to force that on others who may not want that if they'd also like to play the game, perhaps for other reasons like its lore or aesthetic.

If Alice only plays fire emblem on the most difficult mode available in classic style (permadeath) and Bob place on easy casual mode, who cares that Bob cruises to an easy playthrough on the first try? More people got to experience the journey and the cost of developing puzzles that challenge Alice get amortized to far more sales copies. Plus maybe Bob will try the more difficult challenge on a later playthrough and wouldn't have touched a git gud title.

The problem comes in the design phase of the game. The developers aim the game at “Bob”s in the customer base and then later add difficulty, usually by tweaking the HP, or maybe the hit boxes. Or they might lower the number of recharging drops. What they don’t do is create a hard game for Alice alongside an easy game for Bob. Alice no longer has a game designed ground up to be challenging in a thoughtful way. She gets the easy version gameplay - one that might well not really require strategic decisions or foresight or grinding. She just has to mash the attack button more often than Bob.

I'll admit that's a trend, especially in the AAA open world design space, but I don't see why things have to be that way. There are plenty of other games where they're still designed for Alice, then Bob is thrown a bone by cranking his modifiers up and his enemy's modifiers down until he can faceroll it.

If you still need the Bobs to think the game is designed for them since they're your biggest market segment, just do what Bungie did for Halo 3: design your game around the "Heroic" mode, then rename your "Easy" mode to "Normal" so the Bobs don't feel insulted.

For a slightly more recent example, that's how the Owlcat Pathfinder games work as well. "Core" / "Challenging" utilizes the actual rules for the system, while "Normal" gives the player a variety of cheats to smooth out the experience.

I don't feel insulted by "here's the baby hand-holding easy mode for you pathetic chumps what can't play properly" mode at all, since I am a pathetic chump what can't play properly 😀 I'm doing this for fun, not "I am so marvellous!" feelings, though I admit when I finally gave in, consulted a build guide for PoE, and managed to at last get past some of the later Act bosses, it was a great relief. Though even there, it wasn't "Yes, I killed the big boss, I'm so great!", it was "At last I can move on with the rest of the story".

Some people do want to have high kill rates, some people just want the story. I see no reason why there can't be separate modes to accommodate these. (Gosh, I'm really being all irenic and peace'n'love about this, unusual for me!)

More credit to you for it, but often the target audience for these games is teenaged boys who tend to be less comfortable choosing anything easier than Normal (speaking from my personal experience of having once been one). If shifting around how things are named allows devs to target a higher skilled audience with their design while still making money, I'm all for it.

Yeah, teenagers are sensitive around things like that, so if calling the easier mode "Normal" lets them preserve their amour-propre, I won't sneer at them (maybe smile tolerantly). I don't even mind if they invent a super-easy "granny mode" for the likes of me, so the kids can feel "well at least I'm not playing on that level".

'Git gud' can be dismissive of new players' struggles with a game which has been running for a long time and has over time become tilted more towards keeping the experienced players interested by ramping up difficulty. Viva La Dirt League did the one take on it that does make it less of a sneer at noobs and more actual advice, which ties in with what you're saying there about challenges.

Difficulty levels enable vastly greater challenge.

Any idiot can beat civ 4 on Settler. Noble isn't too hard. Monarch is quite difficult. Emperor requires advanced tactics and strong execution turn-by turn. Immortal and Deity are really hard, Deity in particular is astonishingly hard. You need hundreds if not thousands of hours of experience and really strong game knowledge to win. Apparently 37% of players beat Elden Ring, 15% beat Dark Souls 1, 30% beat Sekiro. I'd be surprised if 1% of civ4 players beat deity. I've played it for 15 years and I can only beat Immortal, sometimes. Only 3% of Civ 5 players have won on Deity and that's far, far easier since there's a reliable meta-build for it plus some cheese you can do in game setup to hamper the AI.

No game designer would release a game that was locked to a truly hard setting, the 'hard' games you play are pretty easy to finish and the statistics show it. People want to be able to finish games with a reasonable investment of effort. Difficulty levels allow for a real challenge worthy of real elitism.

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.

Sounds like a skill issue, you picked an uncompetitive build. That's real difficulty: the huge proliferation of strategies that used to be competitive narrow down to a few workable methods. Higher difficulties on civ 4 don't make the AI smarter, they just get huge bonuses to production and science. You have to overcome the cheating machines, turn them against eachother and outgrow them.

Any idiot can beat civ 4 on Settler.

This makes me want to take up the challenge to demonstrate that I am that idiot who can't 🤣

I can somewhat agree on one case where catering to a lower-skill strata really does take away from the experience of the higher-skill strata.

There are games where everyone, by definition, has to have the same content - the multiplayer games such as Dota 2. Same map, same heroes, same numbers. A complaint that the devs casualized some high-skill-floor hero like Invoker would be perfectly valid here, since the sweaters can't enjoy him afterwards.

Even then, provisions have been made such as Turbo Mode, which makes a match go faster through sped up progression and thus (arguably) less strategically deep.

In singleplayer games, the impulse to exclude the casuls from the game entirely is vastly misplaced, its logical conclusion would be that game completion recordings can't be uploaded to Youtube so that the gamer lords can truly feel like an exclusive elite. I don't buy the justification that "adding difficulty modes takes away from development time that could be used better". It's not that hard. It would take more development time to tweak the only difficulty level just so, in order to maximize sales and player satisfaction (and companies will want to do that because they want money, not a sense of pride and accomplishment).

I do not recall any examples of a non-videogame activity where participants specifically take pride that this activity is hard and impenetrable for casuals even at the lowest stakes where it still counts as the same activity. Sports, crafts, art, puzzles - they all have their little leagues, amateurs and easy modes. Still there is no small amount of pride and renown that is won by engaging into them at the highest level successfully.

Can you provide any examples to the contrary?

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.

I think the reason the "but u should git gud" thing tends to fall flat is because it's kind of missing the point a bit, or perhaps trying to answer the wrong question.

What is the point of difficulty? A lot of people forget that difficulty should be in service of fun, not simply an end in itself; otherwise game developers would just implement everything James Rolfe [rightfully] mocks and break sales records because of it.

But the point remains that I need to still continue to be motivated, to still think it's worth mastery of the game's systems. And if the game cannot do that, if I can't actually derive joy from playing it because it's too far up its own ass with "well just get better" (with not even a hint as to how, no incremental progress or that progress is too slow, or something one-shots you/you die to bullshit you can't forsee and it takes 5 minutes to get back to the place you can try again), then the game is not fit for purpose and thus not fit to play. It has failed the player as a servant fails its master- "flow state" is shorthand for/a simplification of this.

(It's probably worth noting most of the people making the "even though the game isn't fun -> worth mastering, git gud" argument are men, and most of the people arguing "I shouldn't have to do any work to win" are women. Both are missing the point that the game should set out and be designed to serve its player but at the same time resist being an unsatisfying pushover of an experience.)

And in the 30-40 year history of video game development, all sorts of things have been done to thread that needle, and the games that fail generally do so because their core mechanics work against any of those solutions. And they've had varying amounts of success, including but not limited to:

  • Overt "secret optional worlds for people who have mastered the game", which was how Nintendo did it for a time (and to a point, still does), usually in their Mario platformers
  • Special rewards for completing the game under more difficult constraints, like how finishing a Metroid game under a certain period of time gives a different ending; "100% completion" and the rewards for that being a subset of this
  • Simply mocking the player for choosing easier difficulties (the early '90s PC game way of doing it), which evolved into the modern practice of "if the designers believes players are in a place where they might be sick of this challenge to the point it's detracting from the fun, here's a powerup that trivializes it/does the level for you, but you won't get the rewards for completing the stage"
  • Subtly modifying the difficulty of the game if a player constantly dies in that section, which is what Resident Evil 4 does (also noteworthy in that that kind of difficulty tweak doesn't generally survive the Internet, where people "discover they've been lied to" about the challenge they overcame to beat the game
  • Giving players all the tools they'd need to beat the game on the hardest difficulty mode, and the game slowly gets harder as you master the systems such that by the time you're at the hardest point you need to use all the tools and play perfectly to win at the highest difficulty (Against the Storm is a good example of this)- if you don't want to have to balance winning against random bad luck you can just bring mostly-perfect play to lower difficulties
  • Being intentionally highly difficult with a persistent upgrade system that, combined with "player skill + randomness", creates a believable and relatively memorable experience with the inherent ability to blame "bad rolls" until your competence increases such that the amount of bad rolls you can withstand becomes greater than those the game deals you in a round (Roguelikes/Roguelites)
  • Making failure annoying but ensuring players aren't taken out very far from where the action was (action-adventure and FPS games generally handle death this way; Battle Royale games usually have a massive "downed = player instantly disconnects" problem unless they go out of their way to mitigate it, like Warzone did)
  • Just not doing it at all, and using the fact they don't do it as a marketing gimmick to sell an otherwise middling game (Fromsoft titles, Hollow Knight, Cuphead)
  • Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die
  • Just not doing it at all, because the game's mechanics don't lend themselves to more than one difficulty (Mirror's Edge, Outer Wilds)
  • Just not doing it at all, because even though mechanical skill will help you play the game faster, testing mechanical skill is not the main focus of the game (Sonic, Maxis games and their relatives/descendants, visual novels, etc.)

And those approaches are combined when and as appropriate. But it is very obvious when a game is designed with the difficulty in service of the fun, and when it is not, and when it is not it is just as unsatisfying and awful as it is when Bethesda or Ubisoft implements the brain-dead bullet-sponge difficulty, or when your default difficulty fails to be meaningfully challenging.

Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die

If you're talking about hentai games, some of those do have difficulty adjustments or at least aren't ball-bustingly hard--indeed, for some, you'd probably have to go out of your way to lose on purpose to see said scenes.

Hentai games do this most often for obvious reasons, but the fact that it does that (and all the other things that happen as you start to lose) suggests [to the player] that the difficulty has a slightly more casual relationship with the player even if the rest of the game is quite difficult, so the game designer gets a bit more leeway if the balance isn't otherwise struck just right.

Come to think of it, lots of different games do bad ends this way, and a slightly wider variety of them change substantially based on certain choices you make- for instance, playing the earlier Fallout games with 1 INT makes a lot of the dialogue in the game vastly different. Sure, you don't have to play it that way, and playing it that way makes it more difficult in certain ways (but less in others, at least you can max out STR), but the novelty is going to be worth at least another playthrough.

I couldn't disagree more, as someone who thinks From Soft's games are some of the best in the industry - Bloodborne and Sekiro are probably easily number 1 and 2 as the best games of the last 2 decades IMHO, though I'm about halfway through Elden Ring, and I'm pretty sure by the time I'm done, that will steal number 2 from Sekiro and possibly number 1 as well. The unique difficulty setting just doesn't add anything to these experiences, and they would be strictly better with an easy mode (Sekiro and Elden Ring both arguably have different difficulty modes, via the Demon Bell in the former and Fia's blessing in the latter both increasing the difficulty, so adding an easy mode wouldn't be much of a leap). I don't find your arguments compelling:

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.

There is no intrinsic meaning in moving on in a game. The meaning is only in what the player puts in it, because it's a game, rather than something of actual consequence. A player is free to place meaning in beating the game in Normal mode instead of dropping the difficulty to Easy, and if the player chooses to place less meaning in that compared to beating the only difficulty mode available without hacking the game, then that's a free choice by the player, not something imposed on them by the game.

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.

This is also something that's entirely by choice on the player. Furthermore, in games like, say, Devil May Cry which does have difficulty modes, you see no shortage of comradery between players who bond over beating the game in the hardest difficulty. Souls games themselves all have pseudo-difficulty modes other than the ones referenced above, through New Game+, which scales the difficulty through damage numbers bit by bit each iteration. There's already a stratification within these communities where people bond over specifically beating the various challenges at the highest New Game+ when the scaling caps out (e.g. Sekiro caps out at NG+7, i.e. after 8 playthroughs, the rest of the playthroughs have identical difficulty).

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.

This is one of the stronger arguments here, but it also has to be weighed against the experience of the player. I'm sure FromSoft gets marketing benefits out of their games having this unique-difficulty reputation, but I don't care about benefits to FromSoft, I care about the benefits to me, 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.

This is, again, a free choice that the player makes about comparing oneself to others. And, again, there's plenty of pride in communities for games that do have different difficulties, where the hardest difficulty is the one that brings the most pride. Again, this is even the case for From Soft's games, where some people don't consider you to have truly beaten the game unless you beat it in the highest NG+.

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.

This is also an arguably strong point, but frankly, Easy Mode is basically trivial to tack onto after the game is developed. Just scale the numbers by an order of magnitude or more. There's no need to make Easy Mode balanced in a fun way, because it still serves the purpose of accessibility. As well as offering experienced/good players a silly and light-hearted way to experience the game.

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.

What the developers intended isn't really important; the player has no responsibility to make sure that the devs that they handed money over to sees their artistic vision realized. The player is there to be entertained in exchange for their hard-earned money, and if that involves experiencing the game in a way that doesn't fit the intended atmosphere, then they ought to experience it that way.

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

This is the one that I disagree with the most. I've yet to play a hard game that I've liked which was not enjoyable to play in the moment. Again, I'm playing Elden Ring right now, and the boss that beat me the most was Margit the Fell Omen, (the first boss of the game for most people, I think), which took me 24 tries. I enjoyed each and every one of the 23 failed attempts that led up to the victorious 24th. Because the game's combat mechanics, the boss's movesets and AI, and the stakes of the fight that were built up from the game's lore all made the experience of tackling this challenge fun. There's no shortage of games that are even more difficult than From Soft's games, but also not fun. We just call those bad games that aren't worth playing.

Meta: can we please disallow H1 and H2 tags in posts? Or at least make them smaller in css? Having the ability to write all caps or bold is one thing, but on my device these headlines are really screaming at me.

You can customize css in your account settings: https://www.themotte.org/settings/css


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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