Whats difficult for you is impossible for others. Difficulty options are accessibility features and nothing will ever convince me otherwise
Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves
Goodeye8@piefed.social 6 hours agoI disagree with the idea that every game should have a difficulty option. If the difficulty is there just for the sake of challenge, then difficulty options should be there because in that case it’s not all that different than setting self-imposed rules for additional difficulty. But when difficulty serves a bigger purpose I can absolutely understand keeping a level difficulty experience.
For example in ARC raiders the ARC are so dangerous that they’ve pushed people underground and going topside is this risky endeavor. But if the ARC were pushovers you get this narrative dissonance where the enemy is supposed to be so dangerous that humans can’t thrive but when you fight them they die instantly so why can’t humans thrive? ARC also pose as a balancing act to the game because if the ARC weren’t dangerous the game would just be PVP with looting. You have to take ARC seriously even if you know how to deal with them because of how easily the script can be flipped on you. ARC raiders obviously doesn’t really have difficulty options because of its multiplayer nature but it does show that difficulty can have a narrative impact and difficulty can impact how you approach the game. If the game was easier it would arguably end up as a worse experience.
And difficulty can also be used to make you feel a certain way. This is why I’ve argued against Dark Souls needing difficulty options (and to be clear, I’m talking about ONLY Dark Souls 1). There’s a reason some people call Dark Souls a cathartic experience, because that’s what the game is going for. Lordran is a world in despair. The end of an era is coming and the world has been plunged into decay. The denizens of Lordran have fallen into despair, given up and hollowed. And Dark Souls wants you to feel that. Dark Souls wants you to feel the despair and find the will to continue despite that despair, lest you become one of the hollowed people of Lordran. The game is challenging specifically to make you feel like you’re being treated unfairly, like you’re against impossible odds, like you’re supposed to fail, like there’s no point playing and just give up and never play again. Because when you eventually overcome that unfair and impossible scenario you’ve failed a dozen times all the emotional tension gets released and you achieve catharsis. If you don’t feel the failure you can’t feel the catharsis thus by making the game easier the game loses a part of what it is.
Dark Souls is not a game, Dark Souls is a piece of art. We give other art the respect to be their own thing. People accept Kafka novels are hard to read. People accept The Downward Spiral is hard to listen. People accept Requiem for a dream is hard to watch. But when Dark Souls is hard to play we complain? I say let art be art. If we want to treat games as art then every game can’t have difficulty options. Some games can, will and do use difficulty in a way that elevates their artistic vision. In my eyes denying games the tool of difficulty is to deny that games can be art.
BryceBassitt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 hours ago
And not everything is for everyone. Do you think (former) drug addicts would be comfortable watching Requiem for a dream? Would you argue the movie needs a cut that is suitable for addicts?
paraplu@piefed.social 1 hour ago
If you have a specific trigger you may want to research the movie ahead of time for content. Resources like does the dog die help. Depending on your exact needs you may be able to use other tactics like watching with a friend.
With games this is different in a couple big ways.
* Difficulty is tuneable after the fact. The developer had to make choices about the numbers and implementing them in a way they can be scaled isn’t necessarily more work. Lazy scale the number difficulties are still more accessible than single difficulty.
* Games are often too long to reasonably ask a friend to help you re-edit it by dealing with a specific mechanic every time. It’s also likely that a friend may not enjoy waiting around for their time to shine.With movies, there are still accessibility things that people do rightly complain about, like the sound mixing. Whispery actors mixed purely for movie theaters is an accessibility problem, even if it’s not typically framed that way.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 18 minutes ago
If you have a specific trigger you may want to research the movie ahead of time for content. Resources like does the dog die help. Depending on your exact needs you may be able to use other tactics like watching with a friend.
And if people don’t want a challenging game they can research beforehand and decide not to play it. Or they can get a friend to help or they can find mods for the game or they can watch a playthrough. But with games instead of working around the vision (like you’ve suggested with movies) we decide that developers should compromise their vision.
Difficulty is tuneable after the fact. The developer had to make choices about the numbers and implementing them in a way they can be scaled isn’t necessarily more work. Lazy scale the number difficulties are still more accessible than single difficulty.
I think you’re mixing up difficulty for the sake of difficulty with difficulty for the purpose of something else. You can tune difficulty for the sake of difficulty and I don’t an issue there. I don’t think you can tune difficulty that’s designed to evoke a specific feeling or guide the player in a specific way. Take the Asylum demon from Dark Souls. It’s supposed to be near-impossible to beat the first time you see it because the game is telling you to do something different. If you turn the difficulty down and it becomes beatable then you’re actually skipping the rest of the tutorial the game designed for you. And of course environmental difficulties are even harder to tune. You can make Sens Fortress deal less damage but if you can’t avoid the traps you’re still going to end up knocked off and have to start again.
BryceBassitt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
Get outta here strawman
Goodeye8@piefed.social 1 hour ago
How is that a strawman? It’s literally my point translated to the movie medium. If it’s okay to demand easier options for games that deliberately use difficulty for artistic purposes why wouldn’t it be okay to make similar demands in other mediums?
dukemirage@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Dark Souls is a game though. That’s just the word for the medium.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 hours ago
Thank you for completely missing my point with this pedantic response.
dukemirage@lemmy.world 50 minutes ago
I got your point, but you’re welcome anyway.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 8 minutes ago
I’m sure you think you did.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 3 hours ago
Games can be art even with adjustable difficulty.
Again, difficulty is subjective. The art of gaming is in its storytelling, not it’s arbitrary mechanics that gate access to that story experience
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 hours ago
The art of gaming is in its storytelling, not it’s arbitrary mechanics that gate access to that story experience
What kind of storytelling? Because if we’re talking about just the story it might as well be a movie or a book. It needs to have interactivity and that interactivity needs to support the story. So if the story is about hardship how can the player feel that when nothing is hard? To come back to the ARC example. How would it make sense that ARC have pushed humans underground when you as the player don’t fear ARC?
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 2 hours ago
It doesn’t have to make sense. Gameplay mechanics and the in game world are two different things.
Again, difficulty is subjective. What is “hard” for one is easy for another. So let the player decide how hard they want their experience of the story to be.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 1 hour ago
It doesn’t have to make sense. Gameplay mechanics and the in game world and story are two different things.
Why are you even playing games if it doesn’t have to make sense? Clearly you care about the story but don’t care whether the gameplay supports the story? So if the gameplay adds nothing to the story why not just watch a youtube playthrough instead of playing it yourself?
Again, difficulty is subjective. What is “hard” for one is easy for another. So let the player decide how hard they want their experience of the story to be.
Difficulty is subjective but it has to be consistent if you’re trying to use difficulty to evoke an emotion. Imagine there’s a game that wants you to feel like you’ve overcome a serious challenge. How can the game do that when on the first sight of challenge you turn it into easy mode and skip the process of making you feel that way?
GrantUsEyes@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
You are failing to see that people with some sort of disability are already against impossible odds, not only in the game but in life. They already know that feeling you talk about, why not let them partake in this piece of art? It will still be a challenge.
If your worry is that normies would exploit this and not “earn” their victory, it also does not affect your experience of the game at all. Just like nobody is going to force you to do a SL1 run - that’s a choice-, why not have that the other way arround? :)
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 hours ago
That is just opening up a whole other can of worms. Would you argue sim racing games should cater to people with disabilities? Should puzzle games cater to people who don’t have the capacity to solve puzzles?
I love how you instantly assume the kind of person I am. Yeah, it would be my choice to do a SL1 run, the game isn’t designed around doing SL1 runs. The game is designed around evoking a specific emotion that requires people to be challenged enough to feel like they’re overcoming a challenge. How do you feel like you’ve overcome a challenge when you just turn off the challenge when it gets too tough?
GrantUsEyes@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
Not everything is for everyone, of course. But I argue that everything, any game genre should be accesible for anyone who wants to try, and like with anything else, people will filter themselves out if it’s not for them.
I love soulslikes, I love the struggle. but I also happen to be intimately familiar with disability, and I know that disabilities and people with disabilities are all different. A blanket accesibility solution like difficulty opions would just level the barrier of entry for some people with a disability. That’s what I’m arguing should exist. So more people get to experience this piece of art. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ that’s just my take.
Also, I’m not assuming you to be any kind of person, it’s just the most used argument against difficulty options I’ve seen.