more difficult pleasures
John Lassiter at Slate's year-end gaming club (one of Slate's finer innovations) celebrates difficulty:For me, difficulty is central to what's interesting about games. My day job is writing novels, and in that area, the idea of difficulty as a virtue has died, in my adult lifetime. Books would once upon a time be praised for being difficult, for putting up some resistance to the reader--but not anymore. It's fascinating to me that the newest art form, video games, is the one in which the audience most values difficulty. I know that the kinds of difficulty we're talking about aren't philosophically identical, but it still speaks to something new and fascinating in the culture of the medium.
And, yeah, it's not really the same. But it's kind of a neat idea.
In a certain way, though, it kind of is the same: in the world of triple-a, mass market games, difficulty was one of the many things that could cause people to stop playing your game, and was thus something to avoid; and we've all seen the video of the guy beating the first level of the latest Call of Duty without ever shooting his gun. The important thing there is the feeling of danger, the illusion that you're actually doing something. Mastery of a skill doesn't really enter into it. And so the embrace of difficulty could be seen as an elite backlash against a perceived mediocritization of the medium, only the elites look different than you expect them to, with less tweed and fewer pipes? Eh, the analogy isn't that convincing.
(in other year-end roundups, lewis denby has a neat technique: every year he draws up his list of fifty best games of all time; these lists necessarily change over time, and it's interesting if time consuming to regularly make a note of its contents.)
And, yeah, it's not really the same. But it's kind of a neat idea.
In a certain way, though, it kind of is the same: in the world of triple-a, mass market games, difficulty was one of the many things that could cause people to stop playing your game, and was thus something to avoid; and we've all seen the video of the guy beating the first level of the latest Call of Duty without ever shooting his gun. The important thing there is the feeling of danger, the illusion that you're actually doing something. Mastery of a skill doesn't really enter into it. And so the embrace of difficulty could be seen as an elite backlash against a perceived mediocritization of the medium, only the elites look different than you expect them to, with less tweed and fewer pipes? Eh, the analogy isn't that convincing.
(in other year-end roundups, lewis denby has a neat technique: every year he draws up his list of fifty best games of all time; these lists necessarily change over time, and it's interesting if time consuming to regularly make a note of its contents.)