That one small time Youtube funny game man who described “git gud” as “become great.” I feel that is such an empowering message to send to someone.
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I also feel like consumption patterns around games don’t help. Plenty of stuff that gets easier once you’ve slept on it but streaming & gamer culture encourage grindset which can just lead 2 so much aggravation.
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There is a really major subcultural issue surrounding this whole thing which ends up conflating diifculty/challenge, personal enjoyment/interest, and accessibility when arguably they are separate but related concepts. I don’t think ‘super easy modes’ are the answer but it raises a really complex discussion that I think many people miss the details of.
I have to do this kind of control scheme analysis for every game I want to play now to determine if I can even play it (it has nothing to do with difficulty - purely motor ability). However, some people tend to assume that what I am talking about is a difficulty of learning or that I am whining about needing an easy mode. I think having options and flexibility built into any design is a good thing but I am not looking for games to be made easier for me personally. What I would like is for the challenge of those games to be made accessible.
I kind of wanted to play Metroid Dread (personal interest), the challenge of the game doesn’t bother me as a prospect, however the fact that the game doesn’t allow me to remap controls or even automate certain things such as mashing fire means I have no choice in the matter - I cannot play the game without great ‘difficulty’.
There is no real reason to exclude people from basically accessing the game but that doesn’t mean that challenge has to be reduced to nothing. So many games fail to give players a safe space to actually train up skills they need to learn how to play the game. Many are also just actively hostile in terms of denying the player options or presenting core mechanics in a confusing or obfuscatory way. Even worse they may simply silo respective players into a training wheels purgatory they will never escape (auto-modes in fighting games for example).
Souls games get brought up in this discussion a lot despite elements of the game mitigating challenge (or contradicting traditional notions of what is challenging) to begin with:
- auto saving
- easily exploitable AI behaviour
- visually ambiguous hitboxes
- comparatively simple combat controls and options
- player can grind
- player can usually run through most encounters
- spells are extremely powerful
- summoning
I think Souls games are just horrendous at giving the player a reasonable clue to some helpful heuristics at times. Also too many people mistake janky circumstance or ‘oops you die now’ level design for sacred authorial intent and then defend any attempt to even suggest one part of it could be more approachable to a player.
I don’t think beating games is the concern of people facing the initial uphill struggle. It is literally can I even access this, do I have a meaningful choice as to whether I can even begin this thing, especially if I am interested. Can I actually access the ‘gitting gud’ stage of a game?
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there’s a weird thing in programmer spaces where to be able to program, and to enjoy programming, are often held up as the same thing - if you enjoy it it’s because you get it, if you don’t enjoy it it’s because you still fundamentally don’t get it, even if you’re technically still some level of proficient. in this scenario programming is an intrinsic good that can’t be disagreed with, only misrecognized.
i think videogames can end up doing something similar and it feels to me like this is due to the awkward discrepancy between the universalist world-conquering commercial rhetoric that surrounds this form and the traditionally rather niche and specific interests it’s actually catering to. it’s as though crossword puzzles were to be held up as The Next Generation Of Interactive Entertainment and so everyone had to pretend there was some intrinsic mystical significance in solving crossword puzzles. open the third eye… ascend to the godhood within yourself. solve the crossword puzzle.
in practice i feel like it’s not a conflation that works out well for anybody: people who genuinely have no interest in this kind of challenge (whose interests are elsewhere in this weirdly fertile medium) still have to put up with it as a kind of security check to prove that their interests are genuine. and meanwhile people who really do get a kick out of that stuff have to deal with it being constantly watered down or mutilated in the effort to appeal to the first group. speaking personally, as someone who always historically played things on easy and has been pushing myself in the last few years to always pick at least “average” out of a sense of obligation - i feel like it was a mistake, and that my time would have been better spent downloading gameshark codes instead.
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As someone who enjoys understanding games in a mechanical way, but hates grinding 90 percent of the time, my only real contribution is I usually want an “I get it” button. Like, if I understand your game but can’t carry it out in the exact way you want, I just want to smash that button and move on.
That’s why cheat codes and gamesharks rule. I would never have seen the last 30 percent of Plok, for example, if I hadn’t just cheated my way through it. And it was neat! I had a good experience understanding the mechanics, but eventually just saying “I get it” and turning on invincibility via game genie code
I don’t have anything super smart to say, just that difficulty is complicated and trying to cater to everyone is generally a mistake imo, but I would definitely love more games that let me just skip shit.
Accessibility is a completely different thing though, as @captainlove pointed out. I hate how they get conflated.
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Because of the difficulty in untangling accessibility from designed challenge, as @captainlove gets into, much of the conversation in the new game accessibility space (and the attached game accessibility consultant space) has taken the assumption that ‘seeing content’ is the measure of accessibility. That the problem can be reframed from, “do players have the tools to make the game accessible for themselves”, to “can all players access all Content Bites”, which asserts very specific values about the nature of games and reduces them to linear cinematic content breadcrumbs.
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this goofball conversation often gets stuck in the back of my head too, despite my efforts
it’s always “everyone should be able to enjoy videogames” but it seems to actually mean “everybody should be able to see all the assets and watch all the cutscenes no matter what.” and if you start following that to its conclusion it quickly becomes absurd, like should dark souls let you walk through all the graphics while the soundtrack plays? should there be a button that lets you fly invincibly forever in every platformer anybody ever makes? should there be an option in tetris to clear all the blocks whenever you want so you can see the score go higher if you can’t get there without it? and it seems like the answer is “well who would that hurt” and it’s like, yeah i guess, but what the fuck are we even talking about anymore
it’s a shame too because actual videogame accessibility stuff is like hugely rich and interesting on its own but now for a bunch of people all it means is fromsoft easy mode or whatever
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it ain’t great!
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One of the cooler accessibility things to me (that goes beyond the basics that fucken everything should have like remappable controls) is just being able to slow down the game at will. It’s a great way to still be able to engage with the mechanics of a game but reduce the physical demands imo
Also thinking a lot about my relationship with finishing games, which is to say I rarely do and absolutely do not value finishing games as a goal in itself. Again, once I “get” a game to my satisfaction I’m more than happy to quit playing it and just look up how the story ends or whatever.
I think the closest analogue with other media is when I really, really like a movie then I’ll think about it for weeks, research it, watch it again, watch related films, etc. That’s the same as me finishing a (long) game, it’s rare but really valuable and cool.
Anyway, half formed thoughts
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Now that I think about it, this might be the reason I consider DKC2 to be one of the best platformers. My computer at the time was just low spec enough that I could incrementally slow down the game in zsnes on demand by reducing frameskip.
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I saw this happening in my classes last week when we were talking about a couple strange books of poetry. We had people saying it was hard to understand, and thus inaccessible. And then someone with a history of concussions which caused subsequent cognition difficulties also said the style was producing an inaccessible text for them to read, and everyone else didn’t catch the two different articulations of difficulty here. Kind of a bummer situation to see people totally not appreciate disability issues live like that. In the recent games discourse about this stuff I think it’s been really gross for me to see the parts where people are essentially using Disability and Accessibility as cheap rhetoric without caring or knowing much about those issues except when they’re made to feel insecure when someone told them Dark Souls 1 is AkShuALly the easiest of the trilogy.
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just echoing (to clarify my initial post) that the co-option of disability-accessibility language by non-disabled consumerist types with no actual investment in any of the features that would make games/texts/classes/spaces etc. more materially accessible to disabled people is extremely frustrating and insulting, and likewise that many works casting themselves as consumer-friendly don’t actually prioritize those metrics of functional accessibility
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And from my experience, even with the best of intentions it’s difficult to clarify scope for what accessibility features entail. Everything is design, after all.
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Something semi-related;
I don’t always feel like I need to try and finish a game I like.
It doesn’t even have to be an especially hard game.
I like Darkwing Duck GB/NES.
It doesn’t seem hard. I have never made any serious effort to try and finish it.
I usually play two of the first three levels and then turn it off.
I know the first three levels well, and don’t know the next three well because I rarely ever play them.
I don’t even know if there’s more than six levels or not.
That said, “a button that lets you fly invincibly forever” sounds great to me.
The unlimited continues in most arcade shooters (especially their home ports) is pretty much that.
Ironically most games literally had that in the form of a debug mode, at some point in their development and sometimes accidentally released to the public
Personally I used the “fly invincibly forever” as a training mode in Celeste to practice the hardest part of some stages without wasting time reaching it over and over. And this reminds me that the training mode in some fighting games, with its programmable opponents and detailed HUD overlays, has a remarkable resemblance to debug modes
I feel like there’s something important in this interrelation between accessibility, learning and debugging. It’s adjacent to values like Right-To-Repair and Free Software that were so motivating to people in the 80s and 90s, but we’ve half-forgotten about as we’ve developed learned helplessness. Quake for instance embodied those values with its programmable console that could be used to control any aspect of the game
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My favorite debug secret was Tenchu.
It let you replace the grappling hook with teleportation and also shoot lightning bolts.
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Right! It’s not about whether certain rulesets break the game, it’s about whether the player can construct their own rulesets that the game can then enforce. There’s an enormous difference, I think, between free savestates, player-imposed no-savescumming policies, and explicit game modes to set up ‘ironman’ modes.
And to a certain extent, adhering to values of openness makes all this work better. If the source data isn’t locked down and encrypted, users are more able to mod and adjust the game to suit their needs. If communication is working properly with users and development can be reactive, you tend to see much more effective work on accessibility and options. Of course, this style of development also pushes work towards a very recognizable type of audience-pleasing and live-service…
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the tenchu debug menu was one of the alltime best videogame secrets. it had all kinds of stuff!
you could use every enemy weapon and power (the teleportation was a power used by the final boss, and it’s also a jojo reference, since it’s listed as THE WORLD)!
plus you could summon enemies, change their ai settings, make them controlled by controller 2 for a semi-functional 2 player mode, or controller one, so you were controlling a whole crowd of people. (you could also use this to do weird pointless things like having your character be followed around by a bunch of rats and cats or turn yourself into a cutscene character who just glides around because they have no animations)
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Great point. And speaking of Quake, one of my biggest gripes with that era of shooters is the ambiguity around the intended use of their general-purpose savestates if I want to have the best experience. Even within a single game 90s FPSes could slide unconsciously between philosophies on saving, from pistol-start-friendly early levels to save-scum-almost-mandatory late levels. Given the power to control time and ambiguity about how best to use it, I invariably succumbed to akrasia and started reloading my save after smaller and smaller setbacks.
Your comment advanced my nebulous thoughts on this quite a bit. Players ought to be provided control, but it needs to be principles-based, long-termist and community-enabling, not just ad-hoc, immediately gratifying and individualistic. Quake’s mod scene realized the best of software freedom’s potential, whereas Quake’s console and save system had both pros and cons and didn’t remain a standard feature of every game for good reason.
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