Game difficulty is a tricky thing to talk about. I want to look back at my formative years and think to myself that I had it harder than those that followed me. That the games I played were tough and a symbol of how much better I am than the generations of gamers that followed. Of course this is the same thing that people have been doing for generations now. Everyone’s always had it harder than anyone else. I get it.
Now, assume that I understand this viewpoint bias. And let’s talk about game difficulty.
I’m inspired to talk about this by this forum post I found on reddit. It’s a relatively well thought out post saying that games have become easier, but that it’s not a bad thing.Have games become easier?
Defining Hard
Games seem easier from my perspective, but is that really an absolute truth? I suppose we would need a concrete scale on which to determine difficulty. But the problem with defining a scale for difficulty is apparent once you try and discuss it with another person.
Difficult to one person is easy to another. Some games merely require a photographic memory to avoid obstacles, something I really don’t have. Other games need split second reactions, which I only have when a mouse is involved. There are those freaks out there that possess all the skills necessary to reduce any game to a pile of pulverized bits and pixels.
To me the difficulty of a game depends on how many different skills the game requires to make them easy to you. Crossing a grid that contains unseen traps that you must memorize is one kind of difficult. Crossing that same grid but requiring the player to play a music minigame while doing so makes it more difficult. Multitasking is the true difficulty.
A platformer can be made infinitely harder when you have to think several steps ahead. Those sections where you can’t stop are always the most challenging, because you can’t take them at your own pace. If you could slow things down to a crawl imagine just how good you could be at Super Mario Bros. 3. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, people already have videos of it. (Spoilers: they cheated)
To be totally honest, I was tempted, as I’m sure many of you are, to use number of deaths or lose screens to represent difficulty. The reasoning behind this is sound, an average of deaths would produce a compelling and official sounding difficulty rating. I only avoided it because that might make the scale based on frustration more than anything.
Next: Past to Present: Has difficulty changed?
