"punishing difficulty" - why is this considered such a good thing?

thought of this because of the demon souls thread, but stuff like super meat boy etc seems to be in the same vein. This is one of those times where i feel kinda out of step with the gaming world, because although i dont want stuff to be stupid easy or anything, this phrase in a review is almost a guarantee i wont be interested in a game, but i know thats not the case for lots of peeps - wondering if its just an indication of how people get into gaming (i was never a metroid/platformer/SHMUPS dude) or something else about how rewards work out for different styles of gaming. or something else.

related: my tendency to play most linear games on the easiest difficulty the first time through unless i find out that there is actual missing content, but thats probably a different thread altogether maybe.

a warped notion of self, usually

related: my tendency to play most linear games on the easiest difficulty the first time through unless i find out that there is actual missing content, but thats probably a different thread altogether maybe.

― guh (jjjusten), Wednesday, September 21, 2011 12:59 PM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark

this is fairly inexcusable tho, but we are all different and god probably doesn't care about something like this

i always play first run on the normal or moderate setting cos i wanna feel like i've worked for it a little but i don't really wanna work for it.

don't understand how ppl can enjoy games that are basically tastefully decorated guided tours of coded worlds

sense of place is very important to me in most games, more so than "how fast can i learn to wiggle my fingers?"

but then again the draw to doing like perfect speed runs of metal slug is that you want to express your skill or obsession in a world you've chosen as tasteful so I don't even know what I'm saying anymore

haha

playing through shadows of the damned made me think of that because afaik the only difference is boosting the bullet spongery and increasing the damage, which doesnt seem like a way to make things more fun? not looking for that whole disnified game plays for you thing, but if i am there for the story, why do i want to make the non story shit longer? its like padding a movie with more slow panning location shots or something

note: i have only started doing this in the last few months, and largely because of gamestops liberal return policy.

this is why they shd just cut out the "walk 2 inches, encounter random monster" mechanic in most console rpgs

The thing about both Demon's Souls and Meat Boy is that the difficulty isn't arbitrary. If you develop your skills, you'll improve. That feeling is just as satisfying in video games as it is for any real life activity.

And since most games are either mega easy or their difficulty is achieved simply with more enemies/more HP/less ammo, it's fun to play games that derive their difficulty from the nuances of gameplay.

its like padding a movie with more slow panning location shots or something

k i might start referring to this as "Michael Mann game design" now

(xps) Deus Ex: HR's Easy difficulty is even called 'Tell Me A Story'
http://i2.listal.com/image/1079500/600full-max-bygraves.jpg

If you develop your skills, you'll improve. That feeling is just as satisfying in video games as it is for any real life activity.

yeah that was definitely true of trials hd for me - until the sudden
epiphany that i was wasting my life.

actually that is unfair and untrue. it was just a sudden epiphany that i really couldn't stand to play the game anymore.

ok polyphonic see that makes sense to me (and like i said difficulty and easy playthrough are different things really). lots of this has to do with the fact that i am not a great twitch player i guess, but i dont really feel a need to become one i guess.

thing is i think rarely it always works like that. not sure i got any better at lobbing sticky bombs at tripods in HL2 ep whatever - or any other boss battle i could care to remember.

"thing is i think it rarely works like that" wtf

I have no problem with escalating game difficulty if it pushes to a specific skill level to pass the encounter; this is actually what I liked so much about WoW raiding once I really started getting into it and I was a really, really good healer by the end of my regular raiding time. (of course now that I haven't played in like 4 months I have forgotten everything I knew, plus I'm woefully behind the gear curve, but whatevs).

I intend to go back to Demons' Souls at some point because I thought the world was fascinating but the initial "damn, I can't kill ANYTHING" phase is a little overwhelming.

seriously i think the "pretty easy but feels just hard enough to make you feel smart when you beat it" vibe is the desired experience for the majority of casual gamers/tired middle-aged men like me.

fwiw I thought Portal 2 was exactly the right level of difficulty for my maximum enjoyment of a game

also Arkham Asylum, at least up to the Killer Croc level (never actually continued past that because the KC level was so annoying)

i always think of things like fallout 3/NV wrt this, because i love those games but they are rarely if ever difficult.

w/ games like fallout 3 if I get bored I play like an idiot to make it more difficult

the scaling skill in arkham is just about perfect, the KC level was just stupid as hell and should be ignored once beaten and never spoken of again

i guess easy is also in the eye of the beholder because i also never thought portal 2 was difficult in a standard video game sense - its not reaction time or anything, its a big old mental puzzle, which is the sort of punishing difficulty i can get behind. unless its braid.

having said all this, the vast majority of my gaming time is Football Manager and that really is punishingly, painfully difficult, just not in a manual dexterity way

yeah i am just too much of a feeb to learn a new shmup since i cracked Space Invaders tbh

also plz note, i have never played demon souls so i am at least 50% talking out of my ass here. but i have yet to see a review or heard someone talk about it where something akin to "controller breaking angry" wasnt used to describe it.

Dunno if Portal 2 belongs here since it's a puzzle game, or maybe I just value puzzle solving more than pressing little buttons and moving little sticks with extreme accuracy. xps.

(trying to avoid the phrase "hand eye co-ordination" since a) i dig that and ii) my pet theory that videogames really don't involve much of that at all)

ha the games I play most regularly at the moment are:

- Words with Friends (difficulty entirely dependent on who you're playing)
- Slingo (totally random)
- Drop 7 (pretty easy once you establish a pattern of attack)
- Glitch (incredibly, insanely easy as long as you stay away from rooks)

I would say, though, that the original Metroid ranks as one of my favorite games of all time.

i've had a Glitch invite waiting for me for ages and i've not summoned up the energy

Glitch is less a "game" than it is a "meditative experience"

I rarely have the patience with a single game to enjoy the ramping up of difficulty except on Civ-type games where I enjoy figuring out the contours enough so that I can win at the top level. And puzzle games too, like Picross 3D.

I don't play FPSs or really shooters of any kind, though.

I enjoyed the original Tomb Raider but I am to this day annoyed that it helped usher in the age of merging shooting games with adventure games.

i like puzzle games getting tougher as long as the learning curve's fair, yeah, cracking that sort of thing is satisfying

xxp i rep hard for Endless Ocean so i'm probly okay with game as meditative experience

akshully the Glitch thread reads like it's a psychedelic Farmville, i think that's putting me off

If you develop your skills, you'll improve. That feeling is just as satisfying in video games as it is for any real life activity.

yep.

specifically, I've found one of the closest IRL matches to playing a shmup or a boss in god hand or some ancient impossible NES game is debugging a tricky programming issue. trying, failing, trying again, and again, AND AGAIN. the hook for both is the incremental sense of accomplishment. this gives it all a sense of momentum and the grueling frustration of constant failure feeds into a strange kind of rush because of those slight gains. and once you've bested the task at hand... some kind of euphoria.

I suspect you do have to have some OCD tendencies to enjoy this process, tho.

the tweeness of Glitch def puts me off

debugging a tricky programming issue

omg this is the worst ;_;

ha!

it's also kind of a generational thing. (games really are way easier these days.)

not that anyone is arguing otherwise

also plz note, i have never played demon souls so i am at least 50% talking out of my ass here. but i have yet to see a review or heard someone talk about it where something akin to "controller breaking angry" wasnt used to describe it.

You should really play it. It's a fantastic game, and it's fun to experience HOW it's difficult. It's very satisfying even when it's frustrating.

ledge your trials scores are monumental/mental btw

mine are pretty good too. :)

too kind, too kind

i think i started a thread about this before esp the changing meaning of 'difficulty'

i thought there was one but i couldnt find it

anyway when ppl talk about 'punishing difficulty' i feel like there are really only ever talking abt a specific kind of difficulty which you train your body to

like its actually a need for a certain kind of simplicity i.e. wanting a game to reward a specific set of abilities and only those abilities and to keep making you get better at them

i generally really don't enjoy wave survival or defense kind of games -- endless ramp up in diff until death is just frustrating and dull to me, idk.

most the controller-breaking angry moments i've had in games are from multiplayer situations, haha

i guess i usually play things on medium/normal -- but yeah it's rare that the 'hard' experience is materially any different, just less numbers of what makes you good and more numbers of what makes the enemy good. the only game i can think of not like this are uh total war from my old pc days -- i read there was stuff the AI would just not do at lower levels.

xp

yeah i was gonna say the phrase is totally used for kinaesthetic learning only

yeah exactly

although even in s.thing like civ v on deity its actually an 'easier' game in that the most optimal set of strategies becomes so much more quickly apparent that it ends up being easier to 'win' even if the conditions are much more difficult.

never played any Civ past 3!

the difficulty in those games (esp 2 which i played most) drove me nuts -- enemies just got huge breaks on builds and population happiness w/o getting any smarter

thing is, it wouldn't be too hard to do this on an fps. on easy, the enemy doesn't go for cover or anything, presto. usually fps's fake this by making the enemy have totally nutty accuracy at higher levels (call of duty i'm looking at u)

debugging a tricky programming issue

it's funny, i get the same feeling from playing games vs putting music together on the computer. when something isn't working for musical/mixing/technical reasons, it's just another puzzle to solve (and i find it helps to have a game-like faith in the existence of a correct answer).

I am drawn to this kind of difficulty like a moth to a flame (although I look for it in strategy/puzzle games rather than twitch ones) - it's absolutely the sense of mastery that appeals about it. If I don't die or get stuck in the first couple of levels I'll usually quit a game - there's no value to me in climbing a mountain that didn't once seem unconquerable.

How about a nice hill walk eh

(I wasn't at all like this until I was about 17, I don't think - before that I was sufficiently oppressed by the real world that I wanted videogames to provide a small challenge but reliable vindication at the end of it)

xp Ledge don't even try to pretend you aren't hardcore

oh sure i like a mental workout, and i've put in more than my fair share of hours of pointless mastery of difficult tasks, but for more immersive/fps style affairs i'd rather enjoy the story without having to work too hard.

Does anyone else have the thing, related to this I think, where they want to beat the game but 'the game' must be the clearly defined canon one otherwise the achievement becomes somehow worthless? Like with user mods say - there seems to be near universal consensus atm that Civ5 NiGHTS is better than original C5 but I feel this weird lack of weight to it - like if I just wanted to win a game written by some guy I could just 10 PRINT "YOU WON"? I have the same thing with Wesnoth where they keep adding new campaigns and it's like why even bother, they could add a new one after I beat it and I'd never even know I hadn't finished it.

I always play easy. Because it always ends up being hard to me anyway. It's so hard that I can't imagine playing any higher level and having fun.

Depends where the difficulty resides. I mean if the high level of difficulty arises due to pretty shitty game design then, well.

I remember NFS underground, the first one. Was fun for a while but then as the game progressed it started to become completely unforgiving if you crashed even just the once in a race. One bump with anything and you'd never get 1st place.

For me it comes down to this:
- I play video games for entertainment and fun
- I do not find punishing difficulty to be entertaining or fun
- Therefore, I stay away from things that are punishingly difficult

Saying that I don't like things to be a cakewalk, but overall I think I'm one of those people who plays more for storyline and characters than anything else. There are quite a few games I've just had to give up on because I reached a part that was just too infuriatingly hard and, yknow, there are too many games to play and books to read to spend hours and hours retreading the same boss fights over and over.

But like other people have touched on, I think sometimes it just depends on the type of difficultly, like, if the game allows you to overcome a tough spot by building a strategy or bulking up your characters, then that's alright. Overcoming that difficulty is a reward for problem-solving and learning from mistakes. It's just when games want to force players to have an agonisingly difficult experience with no room for strategy that I get a bit frustrated (like that Killer Croc part of Arkham Asylum mentioned above).

I remember NFS underground, the first one.

That game was the nearest I've ever come to breaking a controller. Those bloody drag races where the random traffic patterns would stay the same for half a dozen attempts, but then change around just as I'd gotten the sequence of lane changes down, and have me crashing into the side of a truck that hadn't been there before.

see now i am rethinking my feelings on this because when it comes to racing stuff like burnout or nfs i am totally down with hardcore difficulty because its kind of fun to redo races - but yeah in a linear run jump shoot that dude format i hate redoing shit more than like 3 times, because at a certain point it starts to feel like a quicktime event thing where i get so aware of the buttons i am pushing that i stop feeling like i am playing a game.

and the timing of the button presses - does this make sense to anyone else?

I don't usually have a problem with racing games. But with that particular NFS drag race example, in the later levels it requires an exact sequence of button presses to win. There's no room for flair or originality, you have to do it exactly. the. way. the. level. designer. decided. And that's not any fun. For the same reason that I can't get into Guitar Hero/Rock Band, because if I was playing whatever song on a real guitar, I'd be playing it my own way. But with GH/RB, you have to hit the notes exactly right otherwise you get the 'thunk thunk thunk' wrong-o sound. 'I Wanna Be Sedated' is not a hard song to play IRL, but on GH it is, because the game considers anything other than perfect timing to be incorrect.

where i get so aware of the buttons i am pushing that i stop feeling like i am playing a game

yeah, triggering this trance-like state is what separates a good shmup from a great one for me. certain racing games have triggered the same response (f-zero gx, which I love, is one of em) but I'm way less familiar with the genre.

w/ games like fallout 3 if I get bored I play like an idiot to make it more difficult

games like this get away with te "difficulty" thing in a way because they aren't so much about the linear narrative progression (even though they are, somewhat) as they are a sort of emergent difficulty (see also GTA) -- when they feel easy you MAKE them more difficult by storming in instead of sneaking in, or by stealing a car in front of a SWAT truck, or somthing -- but the "narratives" that that creates in your head are completely self-generated. where with a game like mass effect or halo or something where there is really only one way thru a space, and the "difficulty" only makes the space more adept at killing you, it makes no difference -- whereas when you set your own difficulty on the fly like with something sandboxier it's less "i got thru without 5 bullets hitting me" (vs 100 on easy) it's like "I got through even though I walked out in the open and threw rockets at everything."

I am kind of drunk and just decided to write here but I could talk more soberly abt this at great length so maybbe I'll come back tomorrow after pop mtl

i personally thought you made a great post

played gunstar heroes for the first time in many years the other day

couldn't get past this guy

http://www.texturemonkey.com/HCG/blog/gunstarHeroes_(14).jpg

it tells you you're going to have to fight five bosses in a row, and then it makes you fight five bosses in a row

man