#game difficulty discourse

[tgraywrites]

Making the case for difficulty modes for video games from a slightly different angle. That, because everyone is coming to games with different skill levels, it's the only way to actually deliver the same experience - the same creator's vision - for everyone.

[gremlingirlsmell]

i dont think there's ever a reason for a game to have Less accessibility options.

and the discussion around 'hard' games and 'easy modes' is so weird sometimes. what difficulty even means varies from game to game. you don't have to sacrifice the "vision" of your game, you just gotta figure out what fits it best. some examples:

a puzzle game could implement a hint system, or make progression nonlinear so you don't have to solve every puzzle, or even give you solutions once you're stuck.

a platformer could implement various options to make the platforming itself easier, like the option to change how fast time moves, changing the physics of the game or enabling more movement options (celeste does an amazing job with this actually)

any game with like combat and hp systems can implement a "scaling" option, adjusting how much damage you deal and take and/or adjusting how much damage enemies deal and take depending on how you're doing, and still keep it being challenging to the player (hades II has a very simple version of this with God Mode where you'll take less damage the more you die, and it's very transparent about how it does this)

and for almost every kind of game, an option to enable quick save/load or rewinding time can help a lot (shoutouts to emulators)

and i simply don't believe there's a game where having More accessibility options makes the game Less good. it just makes it playable to more people.

[thewispsoftime]

Regarding Game Difficulty and Accessibility

Seen some people talking about this and I have Thoughts to add.

First and foremost: No one is entitled to all art. Full stop. There is always going to be art that you cannot engage with, either because of complexity, your level of cultural knowledge, your ability to perceive and understand it, or even just stuff like language barriers. Even subtitles necessarily leave lingual and cultural context on the cutting room floor, no translation is ever truly perfect, there will always be something missing, something different. You cannot experience and engage with everything.

Now, that said, should art strive towards allowing as many people to engage with it as possible? I would say yes, but with an important condition, as long as it does not fundamentally change the art. Alternatively, if it does change the art, it needs to come with an acknowledgement that you are not engaging with the same piece of art, but an altered copy.

Now, what does that mean?

Let's look at the common occurrence of attempting to widen the audience towards younger kids. Specifically lets look at Yu-Gi-Oh. Ostensibly the original show and the dub are the same work of art. Same characters, same plotline, same premise, same visuals. However, in the shift from Japanese to English, things were changed. Most notably, several characters who were killed in the Japanese version were instead famously sent to The Shadow Realm, in an effort to make the content more kid-friendly in the states. This is, ultimately, a move towards accessibility. However, this change does affect the underlying tone of the show, and many specific moments within it. The change from a concrete risk of death to a more nebulous idea of having the character go away forever makes a different impact on the audience. It says something different with the art.

This is a fundamental change that happened from accessibility.

On the flip-side, there are plenty of things that do not fundamentally change the art in the push for accessibility. Moving towards games, we have options like Colorblind settings, controller remapping, 3D audio settings, and more. These things do change the way we interact with the art but they don't fundamentally change what the art is saying. It is still saying the same things, just slightly differently.

Difficulty is a different and more nebulous beast, however. Difficulty is in and of itself a piece of the art. People's reactions to difficulty is part of the art's intended purpose. Whether you get frustrated, engaged, you try seeking out alternative paths, you master the systems presented to you, or you simply give up, all of these things fundamentally change your relationship to the art, and in turn the art itself.

A conflict in a game may be suddenly much more difficult as an indication of saying that you're not ready for it yet. That you're not supposed to be doing this, or that you're missing something. Think of fights you're supposed to lose in RPGs.

An action in the game may be difficult in order to prevent it from being done more often, while also giving benefits to those who can strive through and beat the difficulty. Think of games like Cook, Serve, Delicious or Speedrun focused games like Neon White.

A difficulty in core gameplay may be there to simulate the difficulty of it in reality, to bring the game's story closer in alignment to your perspective of the real world. Think of games like Pathologic or puzzle games like Opus Magnum.

In all of these cases, and so many more, changing the difficulty would fundamentally change these pieces of art. They would be different, and the art that exists now would be lost. That is something I am not and will never be okay with.