niftyniche

[niftyniche]

More thoughts (disappointments) on Dark Souls 3

Let me first say, that even if I think ds3 is the weakest souls game, it's still a souls game. Which means that it's still a great game, just that I think it handles some things poorly that its predecessors did better. I really do not like that one of the fewer things ds3 cribbed from 2 is the way it handles rings. Ds1 only allowed for 2 ring slots and the rings were incredibly important for defining your build. Some were too good (havels, favor and protection) but the thing was that just having 2 ring slots forced you to agonize about what was important for your build. Doubling the equipped ring count in 2 and 3 severely undermined this. Now you can have a ring that boosts equip load, health, grants extra exp, and boosts stamina recovery. The result of this is also that individual rings are less impactful than they were in ds1, and therefore less important. But as much as I dislike that, what I really hate is the +1 and +2 versions of the rings. I hated these in dks2 and I hate them in dks3. Partly I dislike them because they're the laziest kind of ng+ content, but mostly I hate them because they are one of the few times the game invalidates a piece of equipment by offering an objectively better alternative. Yes, as a result of balance issues or in the case of joke items (ladle, broken sword) there are other examples of this but those are either not intentional or clearly jokes. +1 rings are neither of these, they make previous versions of these rings worthless. And dks3 is even worse about this than 2 because it will offer you upgraded versions of rings that are normally not available as covenant rewards! Tl;dr: dark souls equipment system is great because it should offer you loads of choices that are not better or worse, but different. Unfortunately upgraded rings undermine this system (and so does the lack of poise in heavy armor, but I already covered that.)

[niftyniche]

The problem with Dark Souls 3's defensive non-option

I beat 3 last night. I think it might be the weakest entry in the series. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I want to talk about my primary issue with the game: you don't actually have a choice to make when it comes to defense/equipment load in this game. First, let us remember that this is an action RPG. A game where player choice and expression should be baked into the gameplay every chance we have. See, for the multitude of problems that 2 had, it did one thing VERY right. It gave you reasons to agonize over equipment's most minute details. Shaving a percent off your encumberance had an effect on your stamina. There were multiple roll tiers, and rolling vs blocking vs back stepping vs tanking a hit through poise were REAL micro decisions! I'm not gonna defend adaptabilities affect on iframes. Or sloppy hit boxes. But even from a defensive standpoint dark souls 2 made it clear there was no best option and building your character your way was a rewarding, nuanced process. None of that exists in Dark Souls 3. Poise does nothing. Stamina regen is constant regardless of equipment. Under 70% encumberance rolling has the exact same number of iframes, and only has 1 less from 70-100%! The end result is a game that no longer asks you "how do you want to build your character?" Instead the mechanics straight up tell you the best answer, and that's fucking boring. Sit at 29 or 69% encumberance. Don't worry about poise since it's literally turned off. Don't invest in vit since ring of steel protection does absorption better than armor. Dont worry about stamina recovery. Don't feel good about coming up with the perfect build for yourself, cuz we did that for you. When there is an obvious best answer to a problem, there is no choice at all, just the illusion of one.

[niftyniche]

Dying Light does so much right.

I am not a fan of the average AAA FPS experience. I’m also not a huge fan of most survival games. Dying Light is a little bit of both of these, but it also understands how to give a player an adventure through gameplay, and that’s saying something.

First off, my love of Dead Island’s combat system should not be news to anyone. I think that a lot of the criticism leveled at the spiritual predecessor of Dying Light is well deserved but the combat was second to none in terms of First Person Melee combat done right. Dying Light doesn’t fix what isn’t broken, but it does add some very weighty additions to the moveset of its character. The dropkick bomb gets lots of love but the ram and charge abilities are very satisfying in their own right.

So the new thing is of course parkour, and its inclusion feels oh-so-right. Because fundamentally the thing so many Action Rpg’s fail to understand is that running from a fight or simply traversing the environment should be as gripping and cathartic as fighting, and parkour does that. It’s pretty good too though you will occasionally be making jumps you hadn’t meant to (though its not nearly as godawful as Assassins Creeds sad excuse for the same thing).

My favorite design decision though is how Techland went about tackling an open and rural environment in the expansion. A lesser developer would probably have just never bothered exploring something so removed from the games core-philosophy of urban exploration, but The Following adds an entire extra skill system and fully customizable dune buggy (with loot and crafting of its own!) to do this, and my god does it work. As good as the parkour is in the city of Haran the outskirts dune buggy-ing is every bit as fun for totally different reasons.

See, in both these cases Techland is demonstrating an understanding that adventures and organic stories don’t come out of mindless combat repeated for hours on end, they're created by varying the options a player has to deal with the challenge presented. You don’t even need a lot of these options (Really your only choices in Dying Light are to run, fight, or sneak by covering yourself in zombie guts) they just need to stand on their own as strong examples of good gameplay.

Do you really enjoy walking around from encounter to encounter in Diablo3? Of course you don’t. Because it’s not fun. But it’s also goddamn ridiculous because of how repetitious it gets. Can you imagine a fantasy book written about the average exploits of a Diablo character? It would be 3000 pages describing the handful of ways tens of thousands of cannon fodder enemies were nearly-effortlessly murdered. And I mean, that’s okay, sure, Diablo 3 focuses on one kind of gameplay, but I actually have an adventure through the varied gameplay of Dying Light!

[niftyniche]

... I never implied you brought any moralism into this, the “bad” in my statement was shorthand for your opinion a game is critically bad without difficulty options. You’re the one that inferred that was a moralistic take on it.

“You shouldn’t need decades of videogame experience to play a game you enjoy, in my opinion. “- Here’s the thing, you don’t need that. Most games do have some form of difficulty setting but even for the ones that don’t, you just need a willingness to learn from your mistakes and get more skillful. That doesn’t take decades or even years, that takes patience, which isn’t an “exclusion”, because it’s not a disability, pr an impossibility. It’s a thing anyone can hone given enough reason, and if you don’t have that drive to do so in a game, that’s fine, but that’s not the art’s fault. It just means the art doesn’t get you passionate enough to do that. More importantly you don’t even have to have that patience because lots of games don’t focus on a singular difficulty, meaning they’re open to just about anyone.

Secondarily, video games as a medium are AMAZINGLY inclusive. I guarantee you that if you can think of a genre or theme for a game, that it exists, (probably for free!) on mobile devices. Mobile devices and the mobile gaming scene are available to and literally played by anyone. Most people don’t own mobile devices for games, they own them as miniature personal computers that opened a gateway to games. If your problem is “I want a fantasy RPG that isn’t hard like Dark Souls” or “I want a platformer that isn’t tough like Super Meatboy” you can literally find hundreds of them on the app store. That is the opposite of exclusivity, that is lowering the barrier for entry as far as it can possibly go without handing out smartphones for free, a solution that isn’t even possible for a game developer.

“ Why is only this one single way of playing allowed for some games? Because having more options defies the point of the game in your opinion? “

Yes! If an artist approaches their artwork with the intent to create a specific experience, in this case a hard one (though it could be an easy one, or a scary one, or really anything) then that is the point of the art being created, and modifying that means it’s no longer the artists work, it’s a compromised product built to be sold to as large a potential audience as possible (in other words, an entertainment product, not art primarily) and not the artists vision. As I’ve said before, in these cases the challenge IS the art, and inseparable from it.

You might as well ask for horror games to have options to not be scary for people that don’t like being scared. Would doing so be less “exclusive” in the sense less people would be opposed to it? Sure, it also completely undermines the intention of the work. If you want to make something that doesn’t potentially leave people out then I suggest you not make anything, because that’s not going to happen, and fundamentally making art for a specific purpose is something that most if not all art does.

In summation: Gaming as a medium is insanely inclusive, but individual games don’t need to be because trying to make a game for everyone ultimately means you make a game devoid of anything unique, and the fact is that whatever you don’t like about that game has probably been addressed in another title with similar elements. The artist, or in this case developer, can have a vision for an experience that is so tied to a specific kind of challenge that the game cannot be separated from that without compromising on the design.

I doubt anyone in the angry pitchfork crowd will read this but-

I want to have this post made to refer people to in the future.

That post I made about how “Games don’t need difficulty settings”?

It’s by far the most popular post I’ve ever made on this blog. Which is fine, I get it, controversy gets a lot of movement. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that it’s popular because people took my opinion of “Games don’t need difficulty settings” and turned it (and myself by extension) into this ridiculous boogeyman of “NO GAMES SHOULD HAVE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS EVER! HARDCORE GAMERS ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN PLAY GAMES. WE SHOULD REMOVE DIFFICULTY OPTIONS FROM GAMES THAT ALREADY EXIST EVEN!”

Which in the course of discussion with ManchesterGameMaker I repeatedly pointed out was not what I was asking for. But that would require people to read my posts and not have a knee-jerk reaction to a boogeyman they only perceived.

So let me make this as clear as possible:

Games don’t need difficulty settings, but having difficulty settings is not a bad thing.

It just so happens that sometimes a games difficulty is a very conscious decision on the part of the developer, and as a result, the experience being presented is inseparable from that difficulty, because it was designed with that experience in mind.

And here’s the crazy thing;

That concept goes both ways, for easy and hard games, a point I made in my last post of that discussion. Just as the hard experience presented in Dark Souls is inseparable from its difficulty, the easy experience presented in Animal Crossing is likewise inseparable from that game as well!

Now for games that aren’t like Dark Souls or Animal Crossing, sure, the middle-ground is full of titles that are either designed to be enjoyed by players of varying skill levels or designed in such a way that the difficult parts of the game are secondary to a greater focus, like how the combat in Mass Effect is secondary to its story and characters. These games don’t lose any artistic integrity for having multiple difficulty settings because the challenge is not the focus of the experience or integral to the art.

So to re-iterate:

Games don’t need difficulty settings. If they have them, it’s probably for a good reason, but if they don’t have them, then that’s okay too. Because not all art is made to be enjoyed by all people.

[niftyniche]

On a note that isn’t people telling me to die in pyrotechnic explosions, Dying Light is spectacular!

I’ll probably make a post here soon comparing/contrasting Dying Light and Far Cry 4. I played about 20 hours of Far Cry 4 and gave up on it for a lot of the reasons I think most people did, but chiefly I gave up because the games laundry-list approach to content is not only tedious but even worse completely removes any mystery from the game what-so-ever. I’ll try to get into that a little more most likely but the short version is that by listing all the rewards/challenges in a location it takes any of that “I wonder what’s inside this cave over here” mystery that makes RPG’s so enticing and throws it out the window.

Dying Light on the other hand has a much sparser map that tells you very little about the city you occupy and as a result stumbling on a rare chest in the middle of a home is a genuine treat! And the balls on this game! It has a randomized loot system (something I normally don’t much appreciate) that alleviates the issue of power-creep (mostly) with a permanent weapon-breaking system that doesn’t feel cheap or unfair. Mix that with some of the more meaningful and interesting skill-trees I’ve seen in a modern game along with the already fantastic first-person melee of Dead Island and you have a great game that feels really fresh despite containing the trappings of most modern FPS titles.

[niftyniche]

To distill 5 paragraphs to a point: “Creators vision doesn’t matter, experiences must be so accessible and have so many options that they can be accessed by anyone, and if you don’t do that it’s bad and you’re a bad artist.”

I mean, at a certain point that’s totally unfeasible, but more importantly, let’s take that logic and apply it to your earlier example: We should make horror games accessible for people that don’t like to be scared.

That’s pretty obviously ridiculous, but your reasoning is there. Some people don’t enjoy being scared. So that’s exclusionary!

Some people don’t enjoy competition between players. So we need to make PvP games accessible to people who don’t enjoy that!

Some people have no rhythm, so we need to make rhythm games accessible to them!

No. Like it or not good art has vision, and vision is the artists ideas being presented as-is to the viewer. What the viewer takes from that is their experience, that’s undeniable, but if that artists ideas focuses on a hard or easy difficulty that is inseparable from that idea, then that’s the experience.

If you don’t like being scared, you don’t play horror games. If you don’t like challenge, you don’t play difficult games. If you don’t like slow paced or simple affairs, you don’t play easy games. Because if you don’t like it, it’s not for you.

I doubt anyone in the angry pitchfork crowd will read this but-

I want to have this post made to refer people to in the future.

That post I made about how “Games don’t need difficulty settings”?

It’s by far the most popular post I’ve ever made on this blog. Which is fine, I get it, controversy gets a lot of movement. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that it’s popular because people took my opinion of “Games don’t need difficulty settings” and turned it (and myself by extension) into this ridiculous boogeyman of “NO GAMES SHOULD HAVE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS EVER! HARDCORE GAMERS ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN PLAY GAMES. WE SHOULD REMOVE DIFFICULTY OPTIONS FROM GAMES THAT ALREADY EXIST EVEN!”

Which in the course of discussion with ManchesterGameMaker I repeatedly pointed out was not what I was asking for. But that would require people to read my posts and not have a knee-jerk reaction to a boogeyman they only perceived.

So let me make this as clear as possible:

Games don’t need difficulty settings, but having difficulty settings is not a bad thing.

It just so happens that sometimes a games difficulty is a very conscious decision on the part of the developer, and as a result, the experience being presented is inseparable from that difficulty, because it was designed with that experience in mind.

And here’s the crazy thing;

That concept goes both ways, for easy and hard games, a point I made in my last post of that discussion. Just as the hard experience presented in Dark Souls is inseparable from its difficulty, the easy experience presented in Animal Crossing is likewise inseparable from that game as well!

Now for games that aren’t like Dark Souls or Animal Crossing, sure, the middle-ground is full of titles that are either designed to be enjoyed by players of varying skill levels or designed in such a way that the difficult parts of the game are secondary to a greater focus, like how the combat in Mass Effect is secondary to its story and characters. These games don’t lose any artistic integrity for having multiple difficulty settings because the challenge is not the focus of the experience or integral to the art.

So to re-iterate:

Games don’t need difficulty settings. If they have them, it’s probably for a good reason, but if they don’t have them, then that’s okay too. Because not all art is made to be enjoyed by all people.

[niftyniche]

I doubt anyone in the angry pitchfork crowd will read this but-

I want to have this post made to refer people to in the future.

That post I made about how “Games don’t need difficulty settings”?

It’s by far the most popular post I’ve ever made on this blog. Which is fine, I get it, controversy gets a lot of movement. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that it’s popular because people took my opinion of “Games don’t need difficulty settings” and turned it (and myself by extension) into this ridiculous boogeyman of “NO GAMES SHOULD HAVE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS EVER! HARDCORE GAMERS ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN PLAY GAMES. WE SHOULD REMOVE DIFFICULTY OPTIONS FROM GAMES THAT ALREADY EXIST EVEN!”

Which in the course of discussion with ManchesterGameMaker I repeatedly pointed out was not what I was asking for. But that would require people to read my posts and not have a knee-jerk reaction to a boogeyman they only perceived.

So let me make this as clear as possible:

Games don’t need difficulty settings, but having difficulty settings is not a bad thing.

It just so happens that sometimes a games difficulty is a very conscious decision on the part of the developer, and as a result, the experience being presented is inseparable from that difficulty, because it was designed with that experience in mind.

And here’s the crazy thing;

That concept goes both ways, for easy and hard games, a point I made in my last post of that discussion. Just as the hard experience presented in Dark Souls is inseparable from its difficulty, the easy experience presented in Animal Crossing is likewise inseparable from that game as well!

Now for games that aren’t like Dark Souls or Animal Crossing, sure, the middle-ground is full of titles that are either designed to be enjoyed by players of varying skill levels or designed in such a way that the difficult parts of the game are secondary to a greater focus, like how the combat in Mass Effect is secondary to its story and characters. These games don’t lose any artistic integrity for having multiple difficulty settings because the challenge is not the focus of the experience or integral to the art.

So to re-iterate:

Games don’t need difficulty settings. If they have them, it’s probably for a good reason, but if they don’t have them, then that’s okay too. Because not all art is made to be enjoyed by all people.

[niftyniche]

This might be taking things back a step, but I feel like seeing a reproduction of the Mona Lisa may be more akin to a Let's Play than lowering the difficulty level as an analogy. If the difficulty of a game is too much for you but you're into the story, finding an appropriate let's play lends some accessibility to even the hardest game. I will never play bloodborne myself probably, but for the story and the world, watching someone else play was great. I dig your stance if that wasn't clear :)

This is a really good point I keep meaning to bring up. If the argument is "I don't want to experience the gameplay, I just want the story, so therefore the gameplay should be made easy enough for me", then the obvious answer is to simply "experience" the story through a method that removes the gameplay for you. Note that I don't believe your getting the full experience then, and as I've mentioned in the case of souls/bloodborne the games lore and gameplay support one another, so your only getting part of the package, but the lets play outlet is there.

[niftyniche]

Skill checks are NOT necessarily different from making games accessible to those with disabilities. That's what you don't seem to get. Allowing people to bypass 'skill checks' actually makes it more disability friendly. Why are you so patronizing and gatekeeping?

A disability makes it impossible for someone to complete certain tasks. This is unavoidable.

A skill check can be bypassed by any able-bodied person willing to put in the time/work. Whether they care to is entirely their decision.

Some games rely heavily on skill in order to create challenging experiences. Not all, not most, some. Those games are not designed for the enjoyment of everyone, which is fine, because that’s true of all games for one reason or another. I’m pretty shit at fighting games, not just in terms of skill but also because I don't enjoy the kind of gameplay offered. I don’t expect fighting games to be redesigned for me to find them enjoyable, if anything I would expect myself to get better at them and approach them on their level in order to enjoy them, but I don’t expect the art to fall to its knees so I can enjoy it.

[niftyniche]

You're still ignoring differences in skill and accessibility issues, though. For example I might want to play a game like Mass Effect for the story, but I'm not a huge fan of difficult combat. Or a disabled person might have difficulty with difficult combat mechanics. Someone else might like the combat elements more. Having more options is never a problem. What about the different modes on Minecraft? Playing hardcore, survival and peaceful are all extremely different experiences.

Okay, skill-checks and accessibility for people with disabilities are different things. If you can make a game accessible to people with disabilities, good on ya, but that’s simply not possible for many devs and many disabilities. For instance, short of perfecting a controller that reads neural inputs, designing a fast paced fighting game for a quadriplegic is basically impossible. This is kind of a stupid thing to point out in my mind though as it goes without saying, but whatever, the point is that when you take that mindset far enough it just gets impossible for most AA dev’s to account for, not to even speak of indies. Sure, developing for the deaf, or colorblind is pretty easy to add in most times but there is a limit.

As for Mass Effect I get what you’re saying and agree. Combat/challenge is not the core component of Mass Effect that makes it what it is. The setting, the barely-branching storylines (a different issue I’ll save for another day) the characters, these are the primary aspects of ME that make it the game it is. Changing the challenge of that game does not significantly impact the experience it is putting forth.

But there are games where the experience is inseparable from the challenge. I’m gonna go ahead and invoke the franchise I’ve been avoiding thus far, but Dark Souls is the best example of this. The lore establishes an oppressively bleak and desperate world that both supports the oppressively punishing gameplay and is supported by it. Yet compartmentalizing those aspects is exactly what so many want, ignoring the fact that A.) the punishing gameplay and lore are only so effective together and B.) that if they don’t want that, then the game is simply not made for them. In the same way that I do not expect to enjoy rhythm games due to my lack of rhythm, I would not expect difficult games to be enjoyable to people that do not like difficulty.

[niftyniche]

If we're talking about a game as a form of art, then the countless people who made it are considered the artists, correct? Well, if the artists decided to put in different levels of difficulty, then it becomes part of the art. It provides a different experience that the artists have already built in.

I both agree with this statement and am confused why you think it contradicts anything said in my original post.

“No. Games do not need difficulty options” =/= “Games should not have difficulty options”

I don’t take issue with games having difficulty options, I have an issue with people determining that all games should have them so that they can pick and choose what parts of a greater artwork they want to ingest, rather than acknowledging that not all art is made to be enjoyable for every single person.

[niftyniche]

In answer to your question; the reason is due to us having wildly different expectations for the end product. I don’t have any intentions of creating something for the purpose of mass consumption. As an indie developer I do not ask myself “what would make this most easily accessible to the largest cross section of the populace” because that is the route the AAA sector has gone and it reached it’s logical conclusion a long time ago: The same hyper-polished but ultimately bland experience recreated year-in, year-out with the safest, most incremental “innovations” imaginable. That mindset is the root cause of every stagnant franchise under the sun.

 My goal is to make an experience, one that does not cater to every possible player, but rather hopefully finds an audience that appreciates it for what it is, not what it could be if only it were blunted for everybody. I made another blog post a while back about the so-called indie-pocalypse that goes over my opinion that the root cause of it is that indies don’t take the risks needed to differentiate themselves from the crowd, and this is kind of an extension of that concept.

The only time that that has not been the case is when I have been employed as a developer when working on Candy Cauldron. In that respect I was not an indie developer, I was being paid to develop a game with the intention it would be profitable, but on all of my independent projects the audience has been secondary to what is my vision of the project.

I will have to admit I’m actually not sure what game or developer you are referring to on difficulty modes being added, I think it might be Fire Emblem which is not actually a franchise I have much experience with.

I don’t agree that no one complained about hard mode options in games though, because oftentimes those hard mode options rely on extremely shitty ways of increasing difficulty that DO hurt the experience (bullet-sponges) rather than offering more engaging ones.

I actually 100% agree that optional Hard mode difficulties should not be in many games either! Because what I am talking about, this idea of targeted difficulties that work to build an experience meant to evoke certain feelings or emotions, actually works both ways! Take Harvest Moon, Little Big Planet, or Animal Crossing for instance. These are relaxing, laid back titles that are not designed to test the players reflexes or their patience, they are designed to be enjoyed for entirely different reasons. A “hard mode” in Harvest Moon would completely ruin the relaxing and meditative nature of running a farm, the core experience of the game after all. Little Big Planets whimsical adventuring with friends and creativity would gain little from added difficulty, and I’m not even sure what you could do to Animal Crossing to give it any difficulty let alone a hard mode without ruining what is an idyllic town sim.

No. Games do not need difficulty options.

Do you want to accept the fact that games are (or at the least have the potential to be) art?

Then you also have to accept the fact that art requires the viewer to meet and experience it on its terms.

Sometimes part of those terms are a tightly designed, difficult experience.

You can’t profess to have experienced a book by skim reading.

You can’t profess to have experienced a sculpture or installation from having seen a photo of it.

You can’t profess to have experienced a game if the only way you could see yourself “experiencing” it is for the challenge to be removed. The experience you get from that is fundamentally different (and weaker) than what was intended.

Art does not compromise itself for your enjoyment. That’s the purpose of entertainment, and certainly the line blurs often in any media between art and entertainment. But if you can’t be bothered to experience art the way it was designed to be experienced then that art is either not meant for you or you are unwilling to accept the terms on which it is presented. Neither of those are failings of the art in question.

[niftyniche]

Watering it down to attract a bigger audience is the goal of entertainment. Art is meant to stand on its own as-is! And in many cases with different people it means that that is also where it falls, but that’s unavoidable. Even if someone doesn’t take issue with your difficulty, they might with something else that you “should” have accounted for and drop it all the same.

Yes, to a degree difficulty is “exclusionary”, in so much that it prevents some players from progressing when they hit a roadblock they do not wish to put the time into unraveling. But it’s important to point out that ultimately that exclusionary barrier is on the player, and rarely anything else. The example of flying to Paris is rooted in what is a financial impossibility for many folks, something that they cannot possibly do anything about. Difficulty in games is a matter of honing a skill (outside of physical disability of course), and as a result can be seen as a term of experiencing the art. It is only exclusionary in that people allow it to be (as is perfectly fine), but ultimately it is not a failing of the game.

Let me be clear, there is certainly “bad” difficulty. A hard difficulty is not an inherently good thing of course, and many of the replies to this post have touched on that. As one person pointed out adding health points or extra enemies to an encounter does not a good experience make, but that is a problem separate from the issue of difficult games. Spelunky immediately springs to mind as a game with one set, hard difficulty that does not succumb to this pitfall, and I would argue it is a better experience as a result of that targeted approach to difficulty and the experiences it brings with it.

Your point about prints is a good one, and admittedly where the analogy falls apart (as they all do eventually). But I would again point out that in many games the challenge IS the art, or at the least inseparable from it. A print at least captures the essence of the piece while missing the details, but if the essence of a game is difficulty, then there is no way to modify it without watering it down and losing that essence.

Woops! Replied on a different blog, trying to keep it one place, my apologies.

No. Games do not need difficulty options.

Do you want to accept the fact that games are (or at the least have the potential to be) art?

Then you also have to accept the fact that art requires the viewer to meet and experience it on its terms.

Sometimes part of those terms are a tightly designed, difficult experience.

You can’t profess to have experienced a book by skim reading.

You can’t profess to have experienced a sculpture or installation from having seen a photo of it.

You can’t profess to have experienced a game if the only way you could see yourself “experiencing” it is for the challenge to be removed. The experience you get from that is fundamentally different (and weaker) than what was intended.

Art does not compromise itself for your enjoyment. That’s the purpose of entertainment, and certainly the line blurs often in any media between art and entertainment. But if you can’t be bothered to experience art the way it was designed to be experienced then that art is either not meant for you or you are unwilling to accept the terms on which it is presented. Neither of those are failings of the art in question.

[niftyniche]

"NO. GAMES DO NOT NEED DIFFICULTY OPTIONS." Something can have varying levels of difficulty and still be considered art. Unless you're going to say things like pottery and cooking don't have varying difficulties depending on what you're making, and as someone who partakes in both, I can tell you that they have varying difficulties. And it's the same thing for games depending on what you're playing. The industry doesn't need elitist pricks like you holding it back, get over yourself.

More reasonable responses for an opinion post. I’m really sorry too, I actually do work for a kind of branch of the industry :( and not solely in an indie state.

[niftyniche]

Things can be of varying difficulty and still be considered art. Let's see you take on the harder things to make in pyrotechnics! I hope you get blown up in the process, the world doesn't need people like you bitching about what is and isn't art. Pull your head out of your ass.

What a reasonable response to an innocuous blog post!

[niftyniche]

The unique thing to a game is the ability to actively engage a player in an experience. Assuming that the focus of a game is to provide a challenging experience (which of course is not the case for all games but we'll assume we are talking about a game where it is) then that challenging experience is impossible to separate from the art in question. The challenge, the balancing of difficulty IS the art!

If that is not the aspect of the piece a person is looking to experience then that is not a failing of the art.

And asking for the art to be changed so it can be more easily consumed waters it down, with the intent being it can be more easily consumed as entertainment.

This argument only happen in game design because games take elements from so many passively experienced mediums like film and books that people are then dismayed that the experience doesn't cater those elements to them. And certainly in "narrative" driven games I can understand that difficulty is secondary, and making it editable doesn't change the experience in a meaningful way, but when that isn't the case and difficulty IS the experience, changing it only means that in the end the viewer is not experiencing the art in question, just an imitation of it.

No. Games do not need difficulty options.

Do you want to accept the fact that games are (or at the least have the potential to be) art?

Then you also have to accept the fact that art requires the viewer to meet and experience it on its terms.

Sometimes part of those terms are a tightly designed, difficult experience.

You can’t profess to have experienced a book by skim reading.

You can’t profess to have experienced a sculpture or installation from having seen a photo of it.

You can’t profess to have experienced a game if the only way you could see yourself “experiencing” it is for the challenge to be removed. The experience you get from that is fundamentally different (and weaker) than what was intended.

Art does not compromise itself for your enjoyment. That’s the purpose of entertainment, and certainly the line blurs often in any media between art and entertainment. But if you can’t be bothered to experience art the way it was designed to be experienced then that art is either not meant for you or you are unwilling to accept the terms on which it is presented. Neither of those are failings of the art in question.

[niftyniche]

I wondered how long the knee-jerk "artists intent" misunderstanding might take to hit this post. It was lightning fast as it turns out!

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what I'm saying it seems. You believe that I'm trying to say that a bare minimum amount of experience is required to appreciate art. But that's not what I said at all.

The amount of time one has spent playing games has little bearing on their ability to create perfectly valid opinions on the quality of a game. But in order to form those opinions they must still appreciate the art as it is presented.

If they cannot and insist that the art be modified for their enjoyment then they are requesting it be turned into a commodity for their needs, not a standalone statement by the artist.

Artists intent specifically refers to what you get out of the art as it is presented to you. Your example of Van Gogh is spot on! You and your friend both experience the art and take totally different things from it, Van Gogh's intent may have been received or it might not, but that doesn't matter.

But you came to that conclusion by experiencing it the way it was meant to be experienced. Had one of you experienced it by seeing the actual painting and the other formed an opinion based on a 2in. thumbnail, one of your opinions would be based on a faulty and modified version of the work.

No. Games do not need difficulty options.

Do you want to accept the fact that games are (or at the least have the potential to be) art?

Then you also have to accept the fact that art requires the viewer to meet and experience it on its terms.

Sometimes part of those terms are a tightly designed, difficult experience.

You can’t profess to have experienced a book by skim reading.

You can’t profess to have experienced a sculpture or installation from having seen a photo of it.

You can’t profess to have experienced a game if the only way you could see yourself “experiencing” it is for the challenge to be removed. The experience you get from that is fundamentally different (and weaker) than what was intended.

Art does not compromise itself for your enjoyment. That’s the purpose of entertainment, and certainly the line blurs often in any media between art and entertainment. But if you can’t be bothered to experience art the way it was designed to be experienced then that art is either not meant for you or you are unwilling to accept the terms on which it is presented. Neither of those are failings of the art in question.