That difficulty post got me thinking about other things and how I generally kinda strongly dislike videogame advice that attempts to 'flatten' the medium. "You have to do this, you never should do this, use this trick all the time" blahblah you heard me talk about Coyote Time.
So here is one I loathe. "Players shouldn't think about the controls! They should be invisible! It's your job to put the player's intentions on screen. If the player isn't getting what they want, it's a failure of the game" ... or similar variations.
The most insidious little bits of advice are the pieces of advice that are true like, 90% of the time, cause most of the time, this is a great advice! But in this time where arcades are rare and virtually all games are designed for the same type of controller, people forget that sometimes the controller is as much of the game as the game.
I'm a flight sim nerd. I love controls, I love buttons, I like awkward operating mechanisms, cockpits with poor visibility. I dream about getting more gear that will, ultimately, make me less precise, but increase my immersion. I'm not the airplane. I am the little dude inside the airplane, trying to be the airplane... and I think this example makes sense to people? Like who is gonna say "Having to use a stick shift in a hardcore racing sim is a failure of UX", right? But lets extend this to other games.
I took a long time away from the FGC pre covid and when I came back and was watching a someone play on twitch (thx pat) and he said "I really like how [Player] pilots [Character]." and I immediately fell in love with this expression cause it bridged two concepts so perfectly. Fighting games are the poster child for the "If the players are messing up their moves it's a problem with the game! Why don't they do what Smash did already??" but a fighting games, especially the ones I love the most, are less about being a character and more about being a pilot. It's about having a character, with all these capabilities and this super high performance theoretical ceiling and being the horrible meat bag that has to try and cox a fraction of that out. There was a great Day9 I think about a Starcraft Broodwar and it's hard mechanics and chunky interface and all the things players think they need to learn before playing.
All of these are not requirements to begin to play the game... They are they game
The controls and interface are as just much of the games as the developer wants them to be... and you can take this single player and talk about Bennett Foddy games, or Dark Soul's infinite input buffer thats actually trying to get you killed, but it's the same idea. The game just did what you asked it to. It's on you to get better at communicating.
Other Game Design Advice I hate:
"The player should always know what they need to do next! If the player is stuck and not making progress, you need to fix your game flow."
"There should be an obvious counter to anything your opponent does. The response needs to be stronger than the threat."
"Some players only care about the story, and some only care about the gameplay."
