A dear friend taught me about what they called the challenge triangle, vis a vis video games, where challenges take on three flavors: dexterity, planning, social. A dexterity-only challenge is a rhythm game: the DDRs and Guitar Heroeses of the world. Press this button at this time with correct alacrity. Dex challenge.
A planning challenge has no time component. All reason. Chess. Checkers. Go. The rules are well defined and understood, but you don't need to move your knight on the beat or whatever. In video game terms, turn-based RPG and strategy games cleave to this. Into the Breach. Fire Emblem. Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, ish, and so on.
A social challenge is a little more fiddly. Fundamentally involves other people, so multiplayer or pseudo-multiplayer. You gotta politick to succeed. The board game Diplomacy is as close to a pure social challenge as I can imagine.
So here's the thing: most video games are somewhere in the middle of the triangle, a rare sort cling to the edges, and almost none are on the vertices.
So, what does or should that mean to your approach to the challenge vector of video games (borrowed from the choice/challenge binary framework)?
I can explain them all with Dark Souls.
If you summon help for a boss, you are engaging with a Social solution to a Dexterity-Planning hybrid problem. Each boss has a finite number of moves that can be perfectly solved within the base game systems: a dexterity challenge, and made softer, easier, or more approachable within other base game systems: damage types, weapon types and upgrades, RPG-like stat growths, and so on.
Dark Souls is kinda a perfect example for this, because of the range of flexibility of options within all challenge types. You could spec for sorceries and lob magic bullets at the bosses to beat them: that's a planning solution to a dexterity challenge. You could put on all the toughest armor possible and get a bunch of health to buffalo through many of the game's enemies and obstacles: a planning solution to a dexterity challenge. You could bribe, or flirt with, or otherwise cajole somebody who is "good" at the game into lending you their might aid for a boss, and that's a planning-social solution to a dexterity-planning challenge. You can see the iterations, here.
This is part of why I mildly disdain so-to-say "purists" of the bloodsouls experience. So to say, those who recuse any outside help, only fight bosses solo, and count themselves more pure or real or perfect for having done so. I, too, was guilty of this, but I, too can and have improved.
Within the challenge side of the coin, you can be dexterous, or sociable, or canny-about-planning, and life will make you do all of it. But you don't have to be a mercurial master of it to be worthy. You can for all the world summon me and I'll be on the other side, ready for action.
Hell, a random motherfucker got immortalized in Elden Ring for putting a pot on his head and getting repeatedly summoned to deal with a heinous bonus boss on his own for you. Fromsoft sent him a sword. Clearly they think that that rules. I also think that that rules.
I set out at first to talk about the kinds of things you can do socially to "unlock" video games for other people. And I shall.
Resonance of Fate is probably the most important-to-me video game that I have never played. It frankly has a lot to recommend it to anybody: an absolute killer soundtrack of organ-forward prog rock with a top to bottom AB of every single track for when "exciting" things are happening seemlessly flowing from one to the next. Hexagons. Religion. Characters. Fashion personalities. Christmas. The game is over the top in every way it can be. Your characters do wild backflip gun-kata on a whim. You shoot buildings to death with a machine gun. This game should for all the world have gotten one thousand sequels.
But what I mean to drill down on is the gun tetris. See, in Resonance of Fate, you primarly deal with opponents by shooting them with a gun. The gun can be a handgun, that deals real damage, or a machine gun, that deals fake (called by the game scratch) damage. You can find parts, sights, magazines, barrels, and so on, for your guns, and play a kind of puzzle game to maximize the parameters of them with what you scrounged up.
Now, the true magic of this scenario is that I played Resonance of Fate with a partner. There was a clear delegation of tasks. I was to optimize the gun tetris, and she was gonna do everything else. Neither of the two of us would have played this game to completion on our own. I didn't like the rest of it enough to bother, and she got brain-overloaded when engaging with gun tetris.
We beat that game together. My part was social-planning, hers was dexterity-planning.
Sometimes you can do it all yourself, but you can always do much more with mighty aid.
