Who should be able to experience art? The gut answer – the ideal answer – is everybody. No one should be prevented from experiencing art. Yet every form of art has a portion of its audience that is prohibited from it in some way. In many cases, we have adapted accessibility countermeasures to try and minimize that prohibited group, but even in the cases where they work, they can fundamentally change the core experience. More to the point, video games have an additional unique barrier to entry and enjoyment; difficulty.
Every game has a difficulty. Anything within such an interactive medium is going to inherently possess some level of challenge or strain. This difficulty can come in the form of a puzzle, a level, a boss, or even the core controls within a game. Each of these different aspects of a game might have varying degrees of difficulty alone or in conjunction with one another throughout the experience.
That fluctuation and variation is a major part of why difficulty is such a (pardon the pun) difficult topic to discuss; it’s subjective. A boss in Dark Souls 3 (From Software/Bandai Namco, 2016) or even an entirely new game and system like Sekiro (From Software/Activision, 2019) will likely be very different for a player with multiple hundreds of hours with games by the same studio, then it would be for someone jumping into the library for the first time.
Conversely, someone with any number of hours in Stephen’s Sausage Roll (Increpare, 2016) will undoubtably be more adept at the puzzles within and have a greater comprehension of the mechanical systems than me.
Truth be told, even writing this is opening up a potential rabbit hole with every other sentence. The difficulty of a puzzle game with only one set solution requires a different conversation than a traditional coin-op game with only one set difficulty. Both are different than the classic difficulty system of Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty selection. Then there are games with adaptive difficulty that tweak the challenge on the fly, and procedurally generated games where the difficulty is partially random based on context and circumstances.
All of those different game genres, systems, and mechanics are lying under the hood of any discussion about difficulty. But if talking about one then demands talking about them all, it becomes impossible to have meaningful discourse about the problem of prohibitive art due to game difficulty.
So, I guess what makes the most sense is to divide this into parts. (I sure hope this doesn’t get out of hand.) Discussions of difficulty can often devolve into multiple parties using the same words with incongruous definitions and ideas behind what they say. So, first I want to really break down what difficulty and challenge can mean – explain the nuance under the hood and see how it can differ between experiences. From there, I’ll go more into the “why” behind difficulty, talking about what it can mean to players and to games. Then finally, we’ll arrive at the crux of the discussion; accessibility, acceptability, and accountability.
Part I: What is Difficulty?
In short: A subjective mess.
In long:
Difficulty, as a word, can mean the state or condition of being difficult; or a thing that is hard to accomplish, deal with, or understand. That second definition is going to be a lot more applicable within the context of games.
Games can generally be understood – at least for this conversation – as an interactive experience that poses a challenge for the player to overcome. This can take the form of a level in Steven’s Sausage Roll (Increpare, 2016) or other puzzle games, a floor in Binding of Isaac (Edmund McMillen/Florian Himsl, 2011) or other roguelike games, a mission or quest in Borderlands (Gearbox Software/2K Games, 2009), or a match in competitive games like League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) to name a few examples.
This challenge has two states, success/progress/achievement or failure/punishment/loss. But if every game was only ever filled with the success/progress/achievement state then not only would there be no need for this to all be written out, there would be no difficulty – or arguably even games – at all.
A game is created by the inclusion of a possible loss-state into a task.
Jesper Juul, game designer, educator, and theorist wrote, “Failure can be described as being unsuccessful at some task in a game, and punishment is what happens to the player as a result.”
He explains four types of punishment:
1) “Energy punishment: The loss of energy, bringing the player closer to life punishment.
2) Life punishment: Loss of a life (or “retry”), bringing the player closer to game termination.
3) Game termination punishment: Game over (often coupled with setback punishment).
4) Setback punishment: Having to replay part of the game; losing abilities (Juul, 2009).
This can be applied on every level of gameplay. Missing a shot leads to losing ammunition, mistiming a jump leads to taking damage, repeated mistakes or a big enough single mistake leads to death, too many deaths leads to a game-over or putting the game down. With countless minor instances along the way.
But when most of us say that a game is difficult, we’re not taking the time to pinpoint what type of loss or punishment we are undergoing – we just experience the path of: Hey this is pretty difficult. Wow, this is really difficult. OH MY GOD, THIS IS GAME DUMB.
Difficulty, as a more layman idea, is the challenge posed by gameplay. Harder, more complex challenges are more difficult, while easier and/or simpler challenges are less difficult. If the challenge is killing an enemy, then that enemy having more health, damage, armor, turns, resources, etc. is empirically more difficult. It would take more effort/resources from the player to overcome that obstacle.
But that’s kind of where the objectivity and empirical talks ends – when in relation to itself. An enemy B can only be truly be more difficult than another enemy A if it is the same type of enemy but with higher numbers. It is an upwards change in scale, and as such B will be more difficult than A. A downwards change in scale would mean they are easier, less difficult. However, if you have two different types of enemies then everything immediately goes to the wind.
So many different aspects of a game’s difficulty are also far more fluid than just numerical values. Things like the level’s design, the context of the player and the context of the enemy all factor in to how one interprets the challenge. Considering this, stating A is more difficult than B essentially becomes a vacuous statement that is mostly predicated entirely on that player’s subjective experience.
Just to elaborate really quick, the level design might mean changes in environment, layout, win/loss conditions, etc. Context of the player can mean anything from previous player experience with this or other games as well as how strong/weak the player-controlled character is. Context of the enemy means how they interact with the player, environment, or other objects/enemies around them. In short, two wolves together in a forest fight differently than a wolf alone in an empty room.
As an example, in Doom (id Software, 1993) facing off against 5 Cacodemons in a large open room with nothing but a shotgun is a very different experience than facing off against 5 Cacodemons in a narrow hallway with only a plasma gun. Both are fundamentally the same number and type of enemies with only one weapon at your disposal, but which one is harder sort of hinges on the player response and how those Cacodemons behave. Like with so many other parts of life, context is everything.
Needless to say, this makes talking about difficulty in video games for anything more in depth than, “hey, I thought this thing was hard…” “Hey, I also thought this thing was hard.” An extremely difficult (pun intended) conversation to have. To illustrate this, imagine a conversation between two players.
One, a fresh-faced real time strategy and city management game fan says, “Hey, is Sekiro difficult?”
The other person, a Soulsborne* series and From Software veteran says, “Yes, Sekiro is difficult.”
This exchange can mean something entirely different if you just swap who is saying which line… preferences, experience, mechanical skill, reaction time, and so much more all play an important part in how we each assess and communicate the difficulty of a game with ourselves and each other.
*(the collection of From Software’s game catalog spanning from 2009 to 2016 and beyond Including Demon’s Souls (From Software/Bandai Namco, 2009))
Part II: Variable Difficulty
Many games that we know and love have variable difficulties. Easy Mode, Hard Mode, Medium, Proud, Critical, Extreme, Epic, Nightmare, FUBAR, Apocalyptic, Silver, Gold, Normal, Story, Narrative, Heroic, Legendary, and on and on, you get the idea. These different modes serve to make each individual enemy or encounter easier or harder – which is logically followed by the game itself being easier or harder. Oftentimes these changes are merely an alteration of the numbers, in line with the more objective difficulty scaling previously mentioned. However, some games (particularly strategy games) typically do more to hamstring or bolster the opponent’s AI or behavior, which gets more into subjective difficulty. This variance can change from game to game and genre to genre – FPS difficulty is a different beast than Turn Based Strategy difficulty.
That said, puzzle games are typically exempt from this, as there are some games where the difficulty lies in determining an answer to a problem, not engaging in a form of combat or an active/reactive foe. But puzzle games could have variable difficulty! And some do; allowing for hints, showing additional clues, or even minimizing certain aspects of a puzzle in order for it to be ‘easier.’
Generally speaking, this process is done in order to allow more people to play the game. Accessibility for a wider audience to participate in the gameplay experience, which is awesome. But even here there is some variation. Some games have a set difficulty, and only get harder by introducing things like a New Game plus or unlocking additional harder difficulties. This can provide further challenge and engagement for those who like the game and its systems and are looking for a greater challenge.
Typically, these sorts of games will start out relatively easy and escalate quickly. Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software/2K 2012) is a great example of this, with a pretty straightforward base game, much harder New Game Plus, and then a significant jump upwards for NG+2, the Ultimate Vault Hunter mode. This is, for some, where the real challenge of the game truly begins. For others though, this may be content that is too restrictive, preventing players without enough technical ability from progressing. But even those players have still been able to engage with a nearly all of the game’s full content.
Some games will offer up minor ways of making the game ‘easier’ while staying consistent. Heroes of Hammerwatch (CrackShell/Surefire.Games 2018) allows for particular buffs and various levels of pre-gameplay prep to give the players as strong of a chance as possible to ensure success. Even as the game gets progressively more challenging both throughout the floors and between New Game+ iterations, there are always slight optional tweaks that can be made to add or reduce strain for the players.
Some games, like Dark Souls (From Software/Activision, 2011), have various mechanics in the game that allow for a less dangerous way to play. Generally speaking, using sorceries and magic in the Dark Souls series can be considered an easier way to play, you don’t need to get within striking distance of enemies as often and can have less precise timing for attacking and evading. Certain enemies can even be poked and killed from so far away that they don’t even notice that they’re dying.
But then there are those games. Games where, like Dark Souls, there may be slightly ‘easier’ or less intensive ways to play as previously mentioned, but the game’s design and mechanics promote and push towards pretty universal standards of play. All this so far has been a lead up to the popular question that comes around every other year or so. It happened once with Cuphead (Studio MDHR/Marija and Ryan Moldenhauer, 2017), and now the conversation has buzzed up again with Sekiro. What should we do about games that are too difficult for many to play?
Let’s be clear though, this isn’t a topic exclusive to challenging action games. I personally stopped playing Ibb and Obb (Codeglue/Sparpweed 2013), an incredibly well-made puzzle game, in no small part because there were some secret bonus puzzles that were so incredibly frustrating to figure out that it drove me up a wall. Logic puzzles, mysteries, and strategy conundrums can be just as frustratingly challenging for different kinds of players as anything found in an action game.
