Something About Difficulty

Recently, a post on the InnerSpiral blog, titled "Difficulty Isn't Everything," made the rounds on social media. Frankly, it got under my skin, and has been on my mind for days. But part of the reason I have this blog is so that I can write stuff down to get it out of my head, so I'm going to try that here. I'm going to break down some of the problems with that post in an attempt to exorcise it from my brain.

Now, to be clear, InnerSpiral's article isn't all bad. The ostensible point is that it's okay to play Easy Mode (or to play games that are easy by default), and the author rightly cites that the concept of easy/variable games is nothing new in gaming history and should therefore not be viewed as some sort of new intrusion or corruption. I'm in full agreement with all that, and if that had been the entirety of the article, I'd have applauded it, maybe even saved it to deploy later as needed.

Unfortunately, that's not the whole article.

Instead, those good bits are mixed 50/50 with some pretty shitty stuff, ranging from the usual hijacking of disability justice language (very common, not gonna repeat the rebuttal here) to outright disinformation and hypocrisy driven by what I call "content-consumption brainrot" (the stuff I'm going to talk about here).

Misrepresenting the Cartridge Era

InnerSpiral speaks of the history of difficult games, starting with the quarter-devouring arcade cabinets (sure, we all know about that) but then going on to assert that home console games in the cartridge era only added challenge as a way to pad play time. She has a whole section on this, but to sum up in her own words: "On early consoles, difficulty was padding, making three hours of content stretch into thirty."

There is a lot to unpack with that assertion. For starters, thinking of games—especially their quality or worthiness—in terms of "hours of content" is an extremely modern mindset, one which InnerSpiral is projecting backwards onto what was actually a very different gaming culture. This is part of what I mean by content-consumption brainrot: the idea that the point of a game is to consume it (reach the end once) and that its quality is judged in part by how many hours it took to do so. That's not what the gaming landscape was like back then. You didn't have games releasing at a breakneck pace that left everyone jumping from one game to the next in their backlogs. You didn't talk about games as containing a finite number of hours that you deplete and then it's over. You largely didn't care how "full" a game was, because if it was any good you were going to replay it over and over and over again. Repetition was the norm. Hell, "replayability" was one of the categories that Nintendo Power magazine used to rate games (right alongside things like graphics and controls) because that was an important factor in how "good" a game was. You know what wasn't on that list of traits? Length.

So the idea that cartridge games were commonly "padding" their "content" (via challenge or otherwise) is completely false, a projection of one era's culture onto another. But there's another thing about this too: the idea that challenge was used to pad content presumes that challenge is some sort of additive, as though the default, natural state of all video games is to be easy, and the only reason one would be difficult is if you added difficulty on top of it for some outside reason. If capitalism had never existed, InnerSpiral seems to suggest, then video games would have all been easy—at least, until Dark Souls connected failure to worldbuilding, thereby inventing the first legitimate reason for difficulty in a video game, according to InnerSpiral.

But this is false too. Remember, video games didn't spring into being from nothing; they are the expansion into a digital medium of the physical games that have existed for nearly as long as human civilization. And guess what? The millennia of games that humans have played have not all been easy. Some have! Many have! But others have been difficult, and it's not just to collect quarters. Games are fundamentally human, and they have always come in all shapes and sizes, all types and varieties, and yes, all levels of difficulty. 

Hard games are normal. Easy games are normal. Different games having different levels of challenge has always been normal. It is good to acknowledge, as InnerSpiral does, that Easy Mode is not some new intrusion into gaming. It is bad to assert, as InnerSpiral also does, that Hard Mode is some new(ish) intrusion into gaming. 

Also Some Other Things

Okay, so I think that was the main bit that I needed to get out of my brain, but there's a couple of other points I want to hit, too. (Were you expecting good organization and pretty section headings? Like I said earlier, this is mainly a brain purge.)

I mentioned earlier the concept of content-consumption brainrot, and it's bigger than just the assumption that games should be measured in hours. It's also the way people think they're on a timeline—get the latest "content" (game, TV series, whatever), consume it as fast as possible, and hope you finish in time to join the hype on social media before everyone moves on to the next one. The brainrot tells you that you must be Part Of The Moment, consuming the same content at the same pace as everyone else, or you'll be some sort of isolated pariah with no community. That's what makes the extra-hard games stand out: some of the people who wanted to Be In The Group get stuck, fall behind the fast-completers, and feel left out. It's basically just FOMO. 

Of course, the correct response to that is to simply recognize that a million strangers all consuming the same content at the same time is not a "community" that you can be "part of" in any real way (that's half of why the HP fandom is Like That, for fucks' sake) and just focus on playing what you like playing and let the rest pass you by. When people can't make that mental shift, though, they have to find a reason that their FOMO anxiety is actually someone's wrongdoing, so they go to the old standby of stealing "accessibility" language to moralize it. If the most important part of video games to you is being able to tell other people who reached the credits that you too reached the credits, then you might actually just be obsessed with being seen as a winner.

Oh yeah, another thing:

I can't be the only one who noticed the hypocrisy, right? Like, this whole thing was ostensibly about how the Hard Moders tell the Easy Moders that they're not Real Gamers™ and that their preferred degree of challenge is illegitimate. Which, yeah, that's bad, they shouldn't do that, Easy Mode is legit. But then like... InnerSpiral doesn't specifically say the same thing back to the Hard Moders in the same words, but she does assert that challenge is pointless and hollow and if you like hard games it's only because you have unexamined nostalgia for a capitalistic exploitation engine. Are we really gonna pretend that's any different? It doesn't become not-shitty just because someone else did it to you first in the other direction, or just because you used different words to do it. Not to mention, neither Hard Moders nor Easy Moders are a monolith. No need to attack the entire concept of hard games and everyone who likes them just because a loud minority of them are shitty. Fucking hell.

Oh, and another thing:

That whole bit on the "artistic vision" argument? So you've got the idea that this-or-that game wouldn't be the same if the difficulty was reduced, so InnerSpiral points to examples like Celeste, a famously difficult game with powerful Easy Mode options, as proof that the whole argument is invalid. In other words, InnerSpiral asserts that if a couple of example games can keep their "artistic vision" while on Easy Mode, then every other game can too. Please tell me I don't need to explain how obviously stupid that type of argument is. You can see that yourself, right? Fuck.

So Anyway

Long story short:

Games are for everyone, but no game is for everyone. Enjoy the ones that are for you, and let the ones that are for other people go.