Pushing Buttons: why games don’t have to be hard to be good
Pushing Buttons: why games don’t have to be hard to be good
Pushing Buttons: why games don’t have to be hard to be good
February 8, 2022
By Keza MacDonald
Summary
One such email came from reader Iain Noble, who got me thinking about difficulty in video games - a rolling debate that is about to become topical again thanks to Sifu, an unconventional and by all accounts ridiculously hard kung fu game, out today.
"As a 'mature' gamer aged 74, I find that my reflexes are not what they were. Increasingly I have to turn down the difficulty settings on games in order to play," he says.I grew up at a time when most games were difficult, and so I developed a high frustration tolerance that usually sees me through games such as Dark Souls and Returnal, where the difficulty is part of the point.
Some people derive absolutely no satisfaction from games that punish you for failure; others have disabilities that make games tough to play without adaptations.
Of course not every game has to cater to every player; there are entire genres that have thrown out the idea that something has to be challenging to be fun, including the thriving and diverse world of narrative games and so-called "Visual novels", which put few or no barriers in the way of telling their stories.
What to read. In the wake of the seven-figure Wordle buyout, our games correspondent Keith Stuart interviewed the New York Times' head of games about the plan for the viral word game going forward.
Question BlockI asked video game writer Alec Meer, who's written on games for Creative Assembly, Devolver, Housemarque, Amplitude and more, to answer this week's question: why do video game stories almost never work as films?
Reference
MacDonald, K. (2022, February 08). Pushing buttons: Why games don't have to be hard to be good. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/08/pushing-buttons-sifu-dark-souls-game-difficulty