Against the extermination of hard games

Exclusivity begets inclusivity

Whenever FromSoftware releases a new game, a deluge of articles pour down demanding for an easy mode to be implemented.¹ While, ostensibly, these articles are about FromSoft games, most of their arguments apply to any game. Furthermore, in none of these articles is it argued to implement easy modes only in certain types of games. Therefore, in this article, I will argue against the notion that every game should have an easy mode. Of course, I am not the first to do so. Youtuber Ratatoskr has, in my opinion, the best arguments against implementing easy modes in every game and I will draw in part from his work. However, I believe that his videos still don’t sufficiently express just how utterly wrong, egoistic, and exclusionary those are, who aim to exterminate hard games by arguing in favor of easy modes in all games. With “hard games” I mean games that are difficult to finish even for a seasoned player on the easiest available difficulty. In particular, I focus on the subset of games that have a unique and hard level of difficulty.

All articles arguing in favor of easy modes base their thesis on one central argument, which I dub the “narrow liberal argument”.²

The narrow liberal argument

Implementing an easy mode does not hurt those who still wish to play at a harder difficulty level because the harder difficulty levels are still available. Nobody is taking anything away from you when implementing an easy mode and there are absolutely no downsides to it.

If this argument was true, the discussion would be essentially over. Unfortunately, it is completely wrong and disrespectful.

Why is it wrong?

Even a single, small benefit of a unique difficulty setting is enough to prove the narrow liberal argument wrong. Here are some benefits that a unique difficulty setting provides, and that an easy mode would undermine:

1. It provides a sense of meaning to your struggles. When beating a challenge in a game like Sekiro, the reward is that you are able to progress through the game. Overcoming the difficulty has meaning because if you didn’t overcome the challenge, you could not have moved on. Conversely, if there was an easy mode, beating the challenge on “normal” only means that you did not have to lower the difficulty in order to overcome the challenge. It, thus, lowers the meaningfulness of your victory.

2. It provides a sense of unity and comradery. In Dark Souls you can literally see other peoples’ struggles against the exact same challenges that you face. This engenders a feeling of comradery against a common foe, which would be weakened if you couldn’t be sure that they aren’t facing a lesser challenge.

3. It provides a sense of identity for the game. It is no coincidence that discussions about difficulty always pop up around the release of FromSoft games. The unique difficulty setting has helped to create the identity of FromSoft games as “hard games”. Think of other “hard games”. How many of them have an easy mode? Having a strong identity, in turn, makes it easier for people to understand whether a game caters to their tastes. Everyone knows what to expect from the next FromSoft game. In some cases, the difficulty is the entire point of the game. For example, I wanna be the guy, QWOP, and getting over it are specifically designed to frustrate the player.

4. It provides a sense of pride when beating the game. The fact that some people cannot beat the game but you can, is a potential source of pride. If you enable everyone to beat the game, it is gone.

5. It saves on development time spent on balancing the game, which can be used on other areas. If the developers care about properly balancing all difficulty levels, this time save can be significant. If they don’t, which seems to be the usual case, the idea of implementing multiple difficulties is flawed in the first place. In the usual case of “easy/normal/hard”, normal is easy but hard means bullet sponge enemies and difficulty spikes. In some cases, it even ruins the game economy. I started out playing “ELEX” on ultra difficulty as an archer but had to quickly realize that killing enemies wasn’t worth it because I simply couldn’t afford the arrows to kill their bloated health totals. Thus, the difficulty setting didn’t provide a challenge for skilled players, it turned the game into a broken, unbalanced mess. There is no way this would have happened, had the developers balanced the difficulty around skilled players from the start.

6. It allows developers to generate their intended atmosphere more accurately. Some parts of games are meant to be hard to create an oppressive atmosphere. Others are meant to be easy to create a cathartic feeling in players. If there are multiple difficulty levels, a player may increase the level when the game is “too easy” and decrease it when it is “too hard”, thus undermining the developers intended atmosphere.

7. It provides commitment to a challenge. Hard games are oftentimes not that enjoyable to play in the moment but they provide more satisfaction when you finally beat them:

   

   However, humans are impatient creatures who are prone to depriving themselves of long-term satisfaction for short-term enjoyment, e.g. by lowering the difficulty below what it needs to be. If you only have one difficulty setting available in the first place, this is impossible.³

8. It provides peace of mind. In the beginning of a game with difficulty settings, you need to choose a setting without really knowing which one will be best for you. Maybe “hard” is good, maybe enemies are just bullet sponges. Don’t ask me what to pick, I’m here to play the game, not to design it! During the game, you are always faced with the choice of lowering or increasing the difficulty. With a unique difficulty setting, you don’t have to think in the back of your head that you could always lower the difficulty when struggling against a difficult boss. You simply have to…

9. …git gud. git gud means that there are some challenges that don’t scale to your level and that can’t be side-stepped. It represents the struggle of man to overcome his own limitations against all odds. Failing to git gud means to fail the archetypical struggle of humanity. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, it doesn’t matter that others are more privileged than you are. This is your challenge and you need to conquer it. However, if there is an easy mode, you no longer have to git gud. No longer gitting gud means that we lose a part of humanity itself. If you do not instinctively get what I am alluding to, you lack an essential aspect of humanity, sorry. Games are one of the last areas where git gud still applies in the West (another is love) and it does so with relatively low stakes. In the words of one our time’s foremost philosophers Fetusberry ‘Ass Bastard’ Crunch:

   

Oddly enough, many of the hard game exterminationists admit to the validity of one or more of these points. Surprisingly, they nevertheless maintain the narrow liberal argument. For example, take this WIRED article

“Many people believe the difficulty in Elden Ring is crucial to the gameplay, and that it creates a community around these incredibly hard experiences. I respect that—especially anything that creates a nontoxic community, because that can be hard to find.”

And then a few sentences later

“The issue lies with a certain coterie of “fans” who find exclusion and gatekeeping vital to their experience. Including an easy mode doesn’t take anything away from the people who find satisfaction in a very difficult game. It’s not as if that mode will disappear. Yet they argue continually that wide appeal and playability options will somehow diminish their experience. It won’t.”

This isn’t even coherent. The author admits that some players find exclusion and gatekeeping vital to their experience but getting rid of that exclusion somehow doesn’t diminish their experience. Because, according to the author, they should not derive value from exclusion, they do not? Or does she know better than them what their actual feelings are? Does she simply disregard their preferences because she doesn’t like them?

A sense of community and pride due to overcoming an obstacle is more likely to form when a) everyone faces a similar obstacle and b) the obstacle is difficult, i.e., not everyone is able to overcome it. Overcoming an obstacle is meaningful precisely because someone else, or a weaker version of yourself, would not have managed to overcome it. Take the example of two soldiers who go to war together. Do you think the bond between them is stronger if both had to fight on the frontline or if only one of them did? Difficult video games are a very, very low stakes approximation of the same thing. Introducing easier difficulty modes can, therefore, undermine this community building aspect.

Why is it disrespectful?

All of the arguments I made above are superfluous. To counter the claim that adding an easy difficulty mode has no cost, it is sufficient to find a single person who claims that it does for him. There are more than enough who have done so. Maintaining the narrow liberal argument means disrespecting what they are saying about their own preferences. As the narrow liberal argument implicitly assumes that everyone’s preferences ought to be respected, it is self-defeating. After all, if we can disregard the preferences of those who wish to play with a single difficulty setting, what stops us from disregarding those who wish to have an easy option?

Accessibility does not trump enjoyability

Recently it has become en vogue to argue in favor of easy modes by invoking accessibility concerns.⁴ Kotaku describes accessibility as follows.

“In video games, accessibility focuses on avoiding unnecessary mismatches between a player’s capability and a barrier.”

The basic idea is that everyone has different innate capabilities and, as such, the same barrier can lead to different levels of difficulty. By offering different settings, or more granular difficulty related choices, everyone can adjust the game to the level that delivers the “correct” amount of challenge for them. Dr. Chris Power, vice president of AbleGamers, states

“…sometimes there is a need to tune the challenges of the game to an individual, to move the impossible to possible, not easy. For example, in our Challenge patterns we find many of the features discussed by Matt Thorson of Celeste, came with options to Slow it Down by adjusting the combat speed, or providing a Helping Hand via things like increased numbers of resurrections. When these types of things are available, more players can have the type of experience that the designers want them to have, in the end increasing the reach of the creators’ vision.”

This is certainly true for some players of some games. But so what? Again, the article relies on the narrow liberal argument.⁵

Some people have chosen to believe that having the option to make the game “easier” will ruin the game entirely. Although it’s easy to see why people who enjoy a videogame like Sekiro bond over having defeated a very difficult experience, it would not affect people who don’t use the accessibility options. For those who don’t need any accessibility and wish to have the experience developers recommend, leaving settings on default will yield the same experience as if the options didn’t exist.

I have already explained why this is wrong. The “accessibility options” he refers to are simply a more granular form of an easy mode, so the same reasoning applies as before.⁶ An alternative argument could be to say that even though there may be some drawbacks from different difficulty settings, accessibility always trumps enjoyability of a game. As an anonymous twitter user suggests:

Your lack of self control shouldn't mean that I have literally zero chance of ever completing the game.

On first sight, this seems reasonable. However, understanding accessibility as fundamentally different from, and of categorically superior importance to, the ability to enjoy a game, does not make sense. In a strict sense, nobody is unable to “access” a game. If you can double click the desktop icon and press start, you can access the game. What people actually mean by “accessibility”, or a lack thereof, is highly varied. In the vast majority of cases, it simply means that certain design features make the game less enjoyable to play for a certain group of players. Usually, it is not about being able to finish the game, despite your greatest efforts. For example, here is a guy beating Sekiro without being able to use his hands:

If he can do that, probably most people can do it too if they invest the necessary amount of effort. Thus, we compare the enjoyability of less able players with the enjoyability of more able players. I’m not arguing that playing the game isn’t less enjoyable for some people compared to having an easy mode available. However, it begs the question why the enjoyment of the lesser able player should always outweigh the enjoyment of the more able players. I see no reason why we should categorically privilege the former over the latter.

A minority of a minority players are so disabled that despite the implementation of accessibility options that do not harm anyone (e.g. colorblind mode), and despite their best efforts, they still can’t beat a particular game. Does accessibility trump enjoyability in this case? Still, no, because the value of accessibility is downstream from enjoyability. If you don’t enjoy a game, there is no problem with not having access to it. For example, I don’t enjoy modern day slop. I hate the generic and mundane Skinner Box gameplay of following quest markers in most modern RPGs and Ubisoft titles. I hate the preachy, disrespectful, and cringe-inducing writing of modern AAA story-driven games. If my PC refused to even start these titles, nothing of value would be lost because I didn’t want to play them in the first place. Thus, the value I receive from being able to access games is simply the enjoyment I get out of the games, and the loss from not being able to access a game is simply the forgone enjoyment I could have had, had I been able to access the game. Consequently, there is no good reason to categorically privilege accessibility over enjoyment.

Okay, accessibility is not categorically more important than enjoyability but including difficulty settings into any particular game may still be good on balance. Broadening the player base at the cost of some enjoyability for some players is a good thing for any individual game. Right?

The bigger picture

Consider the space of all video games. Wanting all games to feature multiple difficulty modes is both egoistic and exclusionary. It disregards the revealed preferences of millions of people and excludes us from playing games that specifically cater to our preferences. Why can’t we have some games that cater to our tastes and some games that are as accessible as possible? What exactly is the point of a priori limiting the space of possible games? The existence of a difficult game has never hurt anyone.

If you survey the current state of video games, you will notice that it’s not the 90’s anymore. Most games, especially high-profile games, aren’t difficult. Rather, if you play on the “normal” setting, most seasoned players can trivially beat most modern games.⁷ There are a few exceptions to this, that specifically cater to experienced players who want a fixed challenge, e.g. FromSoft titles, Outward, some other Soulslikes, some Roguelikes, Cuphead, a few Japanese titles⁸, and umm… let me know in the comments!⁹ It’s not surprising that this genre is sparse. Through the market, companies already have an incentive to broaden their appeal because $60 from someone who barely likes your game are just as valuable as $60 from someone who loves your game. Clearly, the incentive is to maximize the number of people who at least barely buy your game.

The games I mentioned above are flowers in a field of weeds. They deserve to be protected and cherished. The absolute last thing we need is a bunch of game journalists trying to trample them to death. These games are on the precipice of Yoko Taro’s “invisible wall”. The invisible wall is a set of artificial restrictions we place on video games that limit what types of video games are produced. For example, think about a game that no human player can beat. This game is, by definition, as “inaccessible” as possible. Still, I find it a very interesting idea that should be explored, rather than shut down.

In general, I would much prefer a set of games of which I hate most, but a few are completely tailored to my particular tastes, than a large set of games that I can mildly enjoy. In opposition to the narrow liberal argument, let me state the broad liberal argument.

Games should be allowed and encouraged to be as unique and focused as possible because this maximizes the probability that everyone finds some games that exactly cater to their particular tastes.

There exist an almost infinite number of games, making each individual game almost meaningless.¹⁰ Therefore, it is much more important to ensure that as many unique tastes as possible are catered to. A way to achieve this is to focus on particular groups of players. This, in many cases, necessitates to be exclusionary in a narrow sense because the tastes of different groups of players are in conflict with each other. To perfectly cater to those who seek a linear game, you have to exclude open-world fans. To perfectly cater to those who seek action-oriented gameplay, you have to exclude those who seek puzzles. To perfectly cater to those who seek a fixed, tough challenge, you have to exclude those who seek a lesser challenge. However, by being exclusionary in a narrow sense, we can be inclusive in a broad sense.

Metapolitical implications

The narrow and the broad approach can be applied to many different settings. How do we know when to use which? For example, should we force individual bakeries to bake gay cake? Should we force utility companies to serve all customers? Should all countries open their borders and amalgamate the different cultures into one or should they exclude certain groups to enhance their uniqueness?

I believe that the answer to these questions mainly depends on three factors: 1. How many different alternatives are there? 2. How easy is it to switch between them? 3. How good of a substitute are the alternatives for each other? For example, there is an endless supply of highly similar bakeries out there, so we should not force any particular bakery to bake any particular cake, i.e. to be inclusive. Here, the broad principle applies. On the other hand, utility companies often have a local monopoly making it difficult to switch to another. They should be forced to contract with any customer, i.e. to be inclusive. Here, the narrow principle applies.

1. Since the new Elden Ring DLC releases soon, I may as well get ahead of the crowd.

2. I will argue later in the text why this argument is “narrow liberal” rather than fully liberal.

3. Fun fact: When I struggled to beat Ornstein & Smough during my first playthrough, I murdered Solaire. I like to pretend that I did this to prevent me from using him as a crutch in a modern Odyssean way.

4. This argument seems to be so strong that some dare not even voice disagreement with it for fear of being “a dickhead”. Luckily, I have no such weakness.

5. For some accessibility features, the narrow liberal argument is true. For example, the availability of a colorblind mode, subtitles, scalable text, alternative controller support, etc. do not substantially alter the gaming experience of those who do not need to use them because they don’t make the game easier per se. As such, I see no reason why they should not be used in pretty much every game. I have also never seen anyone argue that they should not be used.

6. Though I do concede that granular difficulty options hidden in some accessibility menu are better than difficulty modes that are all presented as equally valid.

7. Note that I am not arguing that most games are accessible. Many games lack “innocuous” accessibility features. Also, some games that already feature easy modes could improve accessibility by making them more granular like in Celeste. All of this is compatible with my argument. What I am arguing against is the exterminationism against unique, hard games.

8. I wonder if this is due to cultural differences. In the West, we value the expression of our individuality through our choices. I would guess that maybe in Japan you have more respect for the vision of the creator and either take it or leave it?

9. Even Elden Ring (and to a lesser extend DS 1-3) barely qualifies in this list because it gives the player a myriad of ways to trivialize its challenges. From the FromSoft titles only Sekiro gave me the feeling that I needed to actually master the game, and couldn’t just grind or cheese my way through it.

10. The only real argument against this is that there isn’t a precise copy of, say, Elden Ring with an easy mode. So the next best game is maybe only a 90% substitute, rather than a 100% substitute, implying that you are minorly hurt by not enjoying it as much. I would guess that, overall, it is still better to cater to as many tastes as possible in principle. If there was some huge demand for “Elden Ring with an easy mode”, it would probably be produced.