Do games really need to be difficult?

I have kind of a weird fascination with playing games, it’s something that has been a part of my life for so long, back from sitting in the back of the car when we’re on a long drive looking into the pea-soup green on green screen of the old gameboy. I’ve played games, so many games, but it’s not that often that I actually get around to finish them. It’s that weird thing about games, that you get to play around with them, test out theories, theory-craft and so on, it’s a place for the brain to get to think about things that are fun to think about, and try them out more or less in real time.

The reason I have played so many games, but finished relatively few of them is that I’m not really that good at them, it’s something that I’ve realised in later years and actually done something with, lowering the difficulty to easy mode when I start something, because even though it usually makes the start annoyingly simple, I’m much more likely to finish something when I can actaully do it.

I might be weird but I’m not sure if a game becoming more difficult as you play it actually is a good thing, I mean sure, give the person playing more tools, and more toys to play with as they go along, but at least for me the reason why I enjoy reading so much is that I will be able to finish a book, no matter what, it’s just contiuing on and you will get the whole story, not so much with games, I have so many stories in my head that just don’t have an end, either because I tired of the game and didn’t have fun with it, or because it got so hard that I didn’t get to finish it.

That really makes me ask the question, does getting to the end of a game have to be difficult? For many people I would say no, sure some people play to get challenged, but I think that’s probably more a smaller part than the amounts of games that get released. Some of the fast growing genres in at least the indie scene of games lately are things like bullet heavens (vampire survivors likes), cozy games, incremental games and even visual novels, all games that are kind of the opposite of difficult, and where you get to have fun with the game even if you haven’t mastered the timing and 30-50 tries to defeat a boss.

I played Hollow Knight: Silksong for 60 hours or so, but I never finished it, I had fun, but ended up with having most of the upgrades, and having two enemy gauntlets blocking my way that I didn’t manage to get through, I was pretty close to the second act boss, but never got to finish the game since it put one part that I wasn’t good at at all as a blocker for all the paths where I could progress, basically just making sure that I couldn’t finish a game that I’d had a lot of fun with until then.

What then drives the fun if not difficulty?

There are a load of things that can drive the fun in a game, even though it’s not something that is hard to get through or needs skill, everything from a mystery, like in a book, something that 1000XRESIST did really well for me, or having some possibility of gaining enough experience and in game progression that makes a game less punishing, something Hades did okay with, but not perfect with its god-mode, the problem with godmode is that you couldn’t lower the help slowly as you got there, once you turn it on, it will at some time get up to the maximum amount of help with 80% of blocked damage, even if 70% would be the sweet spot where the game is just the right amount of challenge for you.

So many modern games also tends to make things difficult more than feeling fun to play, yeah sure it might look stunning, and have that “git gud” thing going, but does that really matter if playing it doesn’t feel good, and most people aren’t even going to see more than half of what it is that made the game?

Often too it feels like difficulty is just some way of artificially extending a game, rather than having a 10 hour game that is fun to play through, that I would probably play a couple of times, they artificially extended it by making it hard, which ends up in me not playing more than the 10 hours anyway and end up with a disappointed sad feeling to the game, rather than what it could be.

But what about people getting bored without the challenge?

Well I mean I don’t say to not have things like challenges later on after the normal ending of the game, special bosses and so on, sure there is no problem with things like that existing, but why make the story, or important parts of it be blocked behind these things, if you have special challenges like that isn’t beating the challenge enough of a reward for managing it? Why block people off by hiding the “real ending” behind something most people are never going to find?

There are also other ways of creating variety without necessarily making the game itself harder, things that let people create their own challenges or difficulty, like the rpg’s thing about grinding, and seeing how long you can go on before the next save point, or like shovel knight’s checkpoints that you can break, to risk more is great, they are challenges you can opt into if you want to, to make things have more stakes, and create your own challenge if you want to have that.

I’m not against difficulty per se, but I would want something that I could opt into going along, not something that tells you, no, you can’t continue having fun with this thing, because you’re not able to execute these specifically timed keypresses in the right order.

Something having a known solution is what sets play apart from work.

I often play games to get away from a hard day of thinking at work, and the nice thing about playing a game is that I know there is a solution that I can find with the tools that I have at hand, having to go to a wiki or a walkthrough to figure it out is making it just feel too much like work for me. There is something to be said about having reduced complexity, and some times that’s just what one need, there is a reason why solving a sudoku or a nonogram is always enjoyable, even though it’s not necessarily having a good curve of difficulty, it’s just that the process of going through it, seeing the knot slowly unravel that just feels great.

As someone who has been told now multiple times by people I know well that they think I’m on the autism spectrum, and recognise myself in the descriptions of people like that, interpreting things, finding hidden meanings that are hinted to in conversations and so on is not that easy, I struggle enough with it in daily life, either thinking about something I said that nobody took seriously, but I felt so bad about, or not understanding something said between the lines, some times puzzle hints just don’t work well for me, I go through things trying to fit them logically in, and then it wasn’t really meant to be that logical in the first place. I have enough stress with that in real life, it’s not something I want to struggle with in my play time as well.

The feeling of never really being finished with things.

Which brings me to the point that so often in games, it feels like I get robbed by being able to conclude some things, sure it’s something I put myself up to. But it’s nice to have something done, I did it, and it’s concluded, it’s something that makes me look back fondly at 1000XRESIST and Eeastward while looking back to Final Fantasy VII with kind of sour taste in my mouth, even though I really enjoyed 90% of the game, the end boss was just bullshit, and I had to cheat my way through it to manage which just wasn’t fun, the difficulty spike just kind of made me not enjoy the rest of the game retroactively.

When I buy a game, I buy a toy-box, and I kind of find it annoying when the one creating the toy box decide that I’m not “good enough” to play with my toys any more and just take them away from me, rather than letting me play with the toys that I got to relax.

Does this have a point?

I’m not sure, I won’t change anything by ranting here, but it feels nice having gotten out a bit of my thoughts of the matter, the rise of genres that by their nature are not that hard like the aforementioned cozy games and bullet heavens is nice, and is maybe an example that there are more people like me, who don’t really need something to be difficult and that one has to win, not having to keep seeing the toxic masculine “git gud” around, just having a set of toys to enjoy playing with, that’s what a game is anyway isn’t it, it should be fun, and we get them to have fun with them, not to manage to reach some arbitrary level of achievement from?