sylvie

completely agree!! usually, I make a distinction between "mechanical difficulty" (e.g. the usual kind of difficulty people talk about) and "informational difficulty" (e.g. not knowing where to go, what to do, etc). although people usually talk like only the first kind exists, I'd say the second one is much more varied and interesting, like you pointed out. not trying to toot my own horn but perhaps you will find this interesting: https://cohost.org/vinizinho/post/839116-mystery-oriented-gam

I have been struggling with this, for me it is very obvious that VN's are difficult and painful.
i almost want to not associate with them because they are so, ugh, but of course i recoil saying that because, technically, i mean the world would be less interesting.

so, sorry for dumping this stay with me i found something- it is the contrast between that experience and my experience with traditionally difficult games. holding dear being all like of course i can beat the game !, and it can continue existing in your head because [of feeding the excitement by learning so much while trying].. (or see Sylvie's level "bird emergency!")..

about anything technically being interesting, there is a difficulty because [truly new experiences have less to make associations and see implicitly and get excited].

well in VNs or also map games in my head it has continued being idealistic to actually write it all out and play around.
now i can make a case about in VN's there maybe is no implemented thing to accomplish and you just keep reading distractedly, and suffering in the case of difficulty. and yet counter examples like Magic Tower where you do need to draw a map or somesuch type difficulty to keep climbing and see things i honestly think will be beautiful, but okay even then i still havent.

well also, there is the world of taking apart pieces from games for relevance to your projects. like in my bias with a 2d platformer i feel like i want to trace out every piece i can identify 5 different ways, compared to VN or any drama i was like 'well nothing new here'- somehow just completely unimaginative for how it could be appreciable information.

we have the technicality, even then, you don't actually need to know personally what to do with it. it remains interesting even if just in cold fact.
i don't know why it would be cold. it's the same as just a new place for you? even if it so trailblazed by others to be exciting but you are still holding onto yourself somewhere else.

like there is no one interesting thing, there is no one way to play a game. you'd be more short for words trying to find something other then what is intended or established but yea. i would never give up on a problem because there is always technically a way.(technically impossible to run out) but here i apparently get really bad 'this isn't the place to find it' syndrome, probably as a result of still holding onto somewhere else as a eventual way. or it feels like somewhere else where the colour is somehow eclipsing other colour.

i want to laboriously associate the as intense paradigm i heard about Space Funeral. my understanding of its popularity is that it trailblazed having 'messy graphics' and still being wonderful. something about lowering the bar, but recently the creator tcatm said that actually fact is the graphics are all custom made, which is more difficult than the pretty standard ones.
maybe they meant messy structure and liked the graphics but should be same thing. maybe out of what that rpg maker community had set up a new structure could be harder to steal then new graphics. anyway i feel like its partially an inaccuracy that you can make a unique game and be a game dev. the what extent you only have x amount to personally express and be done as different from constantly mix matching games in general - no, they do overlap and you can be both.. but need both, is a subject that is easy to attack.

whether you follow and could play in the implications of all that i don't know. having written it all out, about what you were saying..
it should also be said the idea of playing a game past the point of interest as moving more into as 'pain' than 'difficult', which is a Sylvie idea but as a neat generalization.
so much to say from what you said but i probably have the path now.... i'm not sure difficulty as a forced tutorial is going to help, you are asking the player to disregard pain based on something new. even if one started with easy games with the idea to somehow enter in, i mean which easy games?? are we inevitably needing to ask the player to give up their love and their sense of self to play some of these games?
i mean no because they can technically do both, but??
how do you think of suffering in your games? how do you decide how long the pain should stay up, and what contrast in has with the player? either that or trust the player to be analytical. (....)

i always group it into three kinds: comprehension difficulty (understanding how things work, like learning boss attack-tells or deducing specific combat rules), strategic difficulty (piecing together all the individual things you know into a greater whole that'll work), and execution difficulty (how hard is it to do the inputs to do the thing once you know it). It's much more useful to categorize things like that, and you can graph games on a triangle with it! (Actually, the VN stuff you talked about is difficulty but it doesn't quite fall into any of those, maybe this needs to be expanded...)

in my last game Copy Kitty, it's moderately difficult in all 3 categories, about evenly-distributed, so you're given many different pathways to improvement. Certain levels and bosses were often deliberately tuned to requiring a specific one of those 3 categories though, to make sure you can't completely neglect one and run into problems combining it all later.

but, nowadays... i'm pretty tired of hard games after playing them my whole life! So for my current thing i'm seeing how good i can do making a game that still feels challenging and fun to execute but easy enough a little kid could do it after a few tries. Turns out, making exciting easy gameplay is actually really hard to do, but i think i'm doing alright! 😅