The Unique Magic Of The Difficult

And Why It’s Okay To Not Be Able To Appreciate Everything.

Modern art, prog metal, James Joyce’s Ulysses, David Lynch’s filmography, FromSoftware’s gamography. Art, in all its forms, can be difficult to interpret. Difficulty is not inherent to a great piece of art, but it can undeniably be a bi-product of it.

Videogame difficulty has been a discourse for as long as videogames have existed. Unlike most other forms of art, videogames are malleable and ever-changing. They can be patched, settings can be changed by players searching for their preferred experience, so it is only logical that we expect the same when it comes to difficulty. Should we, though?

Here’s why difficulty settings should never become mandatory in videogames, and why it is okay to not be able to appreciate everything.

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This article was inspired by and is a direct response to this wonderful piece published by Cat on her Controller Corner: What Does Difficulty Accessibility Really Mean?

Read it now if you haven’t yet, and come back to this one after.

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Complex tasks make our brain react differently than simple ones do. While you might’ve not known this, you have previously experienced it. Doing something new and difficult is extremely engaging. Doing it again after you’ve completely mastered it will come with diminishing returns in most cases, even if the engagement isn’t entirely gone.

The tricky part about it is that there is a fine line between “extremely engaging” and “frustrating”. When we do something difficult successfully, our brain can literally change in reaction to it. Attempting too difficult of a task, though, will lead to frustration and, eventually, quitting. So the ideal piece of art is one that challenges us enough to keep us engaged, ideally more than we’re used to being, but not so complex to understand that we get frustrated and give up on it.

Videogames are in the enviable position of giving players some leeway when it comes to finding the right balance. Historically, games have often shipped with three difficulty settings: easy, medium, hard. Sometimes, medium was instead described as Normal, implying that this was the “correct” difficulty.

While choice is excellent, it is not inherently good. The reasoning for this is two-fold: we do not always know what we want. If you give players a sandbox game with no specific task, most of them will bounce off of it because they will not be able to make a decision on what to do.

While we tend to assume that more choice is a good thing, research has shown that, in many cases, we have a harder time choosing from a larger array of options.

Three choices is not exactly a “large array of options”, but it is a lot more than none.

The second reason is that it is impossible to perfectly tailor three different experiences, let alone the nearly infinite possibilities brought by games with slide bars allowing you to customise most aspects of their difficulty. When creating a videogame, developers obviously have an intended experience in mind. I argue that all games have a difficulty in which they’re “meant to be played”, even if not all of them spell it out.

Of course, the intended experience will not be a perfect fit for everyone. The developers making that decision are human, and humans are inherently subjective when making such decisions. The intended difficult will be perfect for the developers, too easy for player X, and way too hard for player Y. Yet that is the nature of how humans work.

With that in mind, difficulty settings still seem to be the obvious choice. Why not let players tailor their own experience, even if it doesn’t end up being the “intended” one? Difficulty choices are not inherently bad, but they aren’t inherently good, either.

Avoiding the memefied Dark Souls example, let’s take a look at the Super Mario franchise. Nintendo is famous for following the “art is for everyone” take that Cat highlights in her article. Their games appeal to kids and adults, hardcore and casual gamers, they’re for nearly everyone. Super Mario, Nintendo’s most successful franchise, is incredibly easy to get into. Yet, it does not have difficulty settings.

Super Mario Wonder, the latest game in the franchise, is rated PEGI 3, so it is meant to be played by anyone over 3 years old. Yet it does not have difficulty settings. It does feature characters which make parts of the game easier, but so does every game in existence, including the ones most criticised for not having them:

• Souls games have builds which are overpowered and make the game easier and players can be summoned.

• Hollow Knight also has inherently stronger builds which can make the game considerably less challenging.

What decisions like this one allow games like Super Mario Wonder to do is to polish an experience to perfection. Most levels will be trivial for the majority of gamers, but they become harder if you try to grab all the collectibles. Super Mario 3D World has the infamous Champion’s Road level which is incredibly difficult to complete, yet most levels are, like in every other Mario game, trivial to complete.

My argument boils down to seeing the game industry as you see Super Mario games. Champion’s Road is there to tackle, but it isn’t mandatory. If you find it so hard that it becomes frustrating, don’t play it. In that same vein, if you find Elden Ring offensively difficult, there are thousands of games released every year. Why do all of them have to fit to your personal preferences?

We argue that making art accessible for everyone is inherently good, but is it? Would James Joyce’s Ulysses remain a masterpiece if it was as accessible to read as a YA novel? Would we talk about Lynch’s movies decades after they released if they were as easily interpreted as the latest Marvel movie?

There is nothing wrong with accessible art, neither is there anything wrong with art that is hard to access. Our lives are not long enough to experience everything that was made with people like us in mind, so why do we waste time complaining about the few things aren’t made accessible to us?

James Joyce wrote Ulysses the way he did for a reason. David Lynch’s movies are structured the way they are for a reason. FromSoftware games lack difficulty settings for a reason. You might not understand or agree with it, but it is not up to the artist to change that. It is up to you to decide: will you accept it and engage with the art they created, or will you move on to one with which you can engage?

Expecting a third option in which all art pieces in the world have to be adapted to fit everyone’s demands is preposterous. So why does it stop being so when it comes to videogames?

The Unique Magic Of The Difficult

My personal take is the one which gave me the title: the unique magic of the difficult. I do not have a problem with casual gamers at all, they are the majority of the industry’s audience and, therefore, its life and blood. Yet I am one of those masochists who enjoys difficult games. I also enjoy trying to watch movies I don’t understand, or failing to read James Joyce’s Ulysses—I’ll get back to it, eventually.

Dark Souls II, my beloved.

Some of my most cherished memories in games come after overcoming a difficult challenge. I’ll never forget the moment I managed to progress through the start of Dark Souls II after I found it impossible. I yelped in joy after completing the Champion’s Road with a powerless Mario after two weeks of failures. I love when games make my palms sweat, when my breath is caught in my throat, when I’m convinced that something is impossible to do right before finally being able to do it.

You would argue that I can still get this experience if I crank a game’s difficult to the maximum, but the problem is that difficulty settings are rarely done correctly. Cranking damage dealt and taken or enemy health up is easy to do, but is rarely fun or engaging, Yet it remains as one of the most universal descriptions of difficult modes in videogames.

The best experiences I’ve had with difficult moments in games happened in ones with no difficulty settings. That could be a coincidence, of course, but I’ll selfishly attribute it to the fact that I was playing something which was polished to perfection because the developers weren’t thinking about how to adjust it to be easier or harder.

You don’t have to appreciate Modern Art, read Joyce, watch Lynch, or play FromSoftware, neither do you have to enjoy the unique magic of the difficult. They’re there for those of us who want it.