Had a good discussion with @sylvie about the purpose and function of Difficulty in games and when I'm not so husked and barely conscious I might write some of those thoughts down here.
Alright so, when I started talking with @sylvie about how difficulty can make you engage more deeply with a game and how it encourages you to solve problems in the game's system, my thoughts on how I gauge Difficulty really started to click into place in a more conscious way for me.
In platformers like Celeste or Sylvie Lime (Although many Sylvie games have this quality and you should play them to see!) the difficulty comes in mechanically and through level design. You have to figure out really precise or creative or technically difficult ways to complete a section, you die often, get to retry rapidly, and this entire process is both fun and it pushes a player to get better at the movement techs, think in new ways about movement in this space, and it feels extremely rewarding when they clear a stage.
I mostly write visual novels and text-heavy exploration games. Most people don't think of VNs as having any Difficulty to them because the mechanics are usually really simple, but if And Then, There Were None can have a difficulty level as a novel then games can too. If you've ever felt stressed out by a dialogue choice or agonized over doing a fight because of the character implications or pored over a wiki to try and understand soulsborne lore, that's a sign of difficulty too, isn't it? The narrative's hooked you just like those platformer mechanics and because of that, you think about it more deeply and feel driven to engage with it more seriously. I'd even argue that just like games teach you how to play them mechanically, they teach you how to read them too.
It's just not a thing I ever really thought about in these terms because these aren't the terms or frames we usually use to talk about narrative design.
I've got more thoughts on this, but I also really want to know:
How do you think of Difficulty in your games? How do you decide where that difficulty comes up, why you've added it, and what effect it has on the player?
it was playing through seabed that revolutionized the way i think about... not just difficulty in games, i think, but interactivity in art as a whole.
seabed is a kinetic vn — it's completely linear, with very little in the way of choices. and yet, i firmly think of it as an extremely interactive game, and quite a difficult one at that! and this is due to the exact nature of its prose. the writing is unusally sparse, with the narration focusing heavily on seemingly inconsequential details while ignoring things you'd think are important, and there only rarely being any explicit indication of who said any given line of dialogue. as a result, while playing i feel like i must constantly pay an extreme amount of attention to everything that's said, because if i don't then it's very easy to lose track of even basic things as "who said what" or "how many people are in this scene"! and this experience goes perfectly with the game's story. it's clear that this was all intentional.
you often see people treat difficulty in games as if it's arbitrary, meaningless. xyz game should be easier because there's no reason for it to be hard, and so on. and maybe that's true for some games, but it's certainly not the case for all of them! this difficulty, this friction, is a work's way of communicating how it's intended to be interacted with. what does it say that game x is easier when i play in so-and-so way? what does it mean that, if i pay really close attention to seabed's writing, there's suddenly a ton of things going on in it? i think it's questions like these that we should be asking.
...also, speaking personally, i just like it more when a game expects something out of me, too. i want to have to meet it halfway! to do some work so that the experience can succeed! that's indicative of a trust that it has in me, that i want to be engaged and trust it in return. if a game's just easy in every way and rolls over before me, i end up feeling insulted! like, oh, you have this little faith in yourself? you can't even trust that your audience will want to reach out towards you? why should i care about what you have to say, then?
i don't want to spend time editing this post so hopefully it makes sense lol
seabed has been stuck in my mind for so long precisely because of the choices i had to make during it despite ostensibly playing something linear. i could even see several different playstyles at the end of it. it can boil down mechanistically (when a player decides to read the tips section and in what order compared to the main game) or even the kind of mental approach the player takes on while playing.
i was surprised while watching playthroughs of the game because people were poring over every detail trying to solve things while i took to it like a dream, just going through the motions and finding out what happens next. but i remember very vividly when that i chose to let myself relax after initially trying to be vigilant with the mystery. and given that the game revolves around perception and reality, it just feels right for it to ask something of us. whether that's a meticulous eye for detail or a willingness to blur reality and fiction.
just... the idea of writing as design absolutely fascinates me. i really hope there's more releases like seabed. and that people bring themselves fully to them.
