From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
On Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:04:22 -0500, The Wizard of Izz
<
horchata12839@gmail.com> wrote:
To lose interest in games because they are too difficult.
They are too difficult because you have lost interest.
I'm doing great at Quake and Dawn of War the Soulstorm Czampaign.
I think the complaint is that the loss of interest isn't necessarily
that they are too difficult. I think the evidence shows that most
people aren't afraid of difficult or time consuming games. It's that
the effort of mastering some of these games isn't worth the effort
involved. Whether that's because the game is made to be intentionally
grindy, or because the player picked a game in a genre that isn't
suited to them, or whatever reason, the rewards of pushing through the mechanics aren't worth it.
But it can often be hard to see WHY a game doesn't feel rewarding
enough, so the difficulty level is often a catch-all excuse. After
all, if you bang your head against an early-game boss, repeatedly
dying, it's often easy to say "It's just too hard" even though the
problem might as likely be, "the game doesn't give enough feedback" or
"the controls are too imprecise" or whatever.
Then, also, people play games for different reason. I've previously
described this as the "Pong vs Adventure" problem, where one group
engages with a game /precisely/ because they enjoy the challenge of
mastering the mechanics, whereas the other group feels more rewarded
by immersing themselves in the virtual worlds the game presents. For
the latter group, excessive difficulty interferes directly with the
part of the game they enjoy.
Fortunately, for all the other many problems in modern game design,
one nicety is that many games cater to both styles of gameplay, with
robust difficulty scaling to meet the needs of any player.
Unfortunately, video-game culture still interferes with this a bit
("Oh, you played on "Easy mode"? You're not a real gamer!") but this
is happily starting to recede somewhat.
So everybody gets to be happy!!!! ;-)
(Still getting through the backlog slowly! Are you all tired of my
posts yet? I can go back on vacation if it helps ;-)
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