I saw a tweet from Mr. Nifflas which caught my attention. It went something like this:

New rule! Do not have achievements for beating the game at certain difficulties. You may not think of difficulty settings like it, but they are essentially accessibility features. Don’t reward players for being more abled.

My instant reaction was: that’s kind of neat. Yeah, you get to win and play at your level with no stinking achievements getting up your snout. But then I was overcome with uncertainty so quote tweeted attaching this question:

This is an interesting suggestion but there are plenty of nuanced achievements that cannot be done unless you are strong on the sticks without explicitly mentioning difficulty.

Is it the ‘reference to’ or ‘inference of’ difficulty the important bit?

And I’m still not sure.

I fired out the question in the style of a drive-by shooting, fleeing the social media scene to get on with sorting out my PC cabling and mowing the lawn. Many hours later I discovered that Nick Bell had quickly responded thus:

I asked 20 students:

Should Dark Souls have difficulty options? Resounding “No.”

Should Dark Souls have accessibility options? Resounding “Yes.”

We had a good discussion about how it’s the same question, just *optics*. Let’s just throw out “difficulty settings” as a concept.

Does this answer my question? Let’s get a few teeth into this.

The main thrust of Nifflas’ tweet and Nick Bell’s followup is that ‘difficulty’ is an alias for accessibility. Are you uninterested in combat in games but love story? We’ve got HOT FOR PLOT MODE where combat is reduced to a few simple choices. Are you a thumbstick gymnast? Then step right up, enable THUMB HARD. Are you, like Joel, unable to cope with more than a single button? Then have a go at NOT BAD, NOT GREAT, JUST RIGHT MODE.

It’s not the first time I’ve talked about how action games need to have “difficulty levels”. Games be like: here’s 110m of hurdles, but unless you can do it in 20 seconds you should sit this one out. Sure, you could still have fun running at slower speeds, setting your own goals or even QWOPing your way through it in a fit of laughter, but NOOOOO if we let everyone had fun, it would make the pro athletes glum. Your money ain’t no good here, mister.

I don’t want to gaze too much into the practicalities of building effective difficulty/accessibility modes. On the one hand, there is a business argument for making a game more accessible; the more people who find a game joyous, the more people who might buy it. But on the other hand, balancing a game for different player-types is not easy especially if you’re the little indie that could.

I played third-person shooter Vanquish (PlatinumGames, 2010) on “Normal” and found the thumbwork beyond my ken; after I switched down to “Casual”, it was a shadow of its former self: spectacle sans balls. And this also goes the other way, too. I recall once-prolific-commenter Badger Commander griping that – if I remember right – that Dead Rising 2 (Blue Castle Games, 2010) was just too easy for him no matter how he approached it.

Difficulty modes have typically been seen as a way to measure a player’s mettle. Okay, you dealt with ‘Normal’ mode, but can you deal with ‘Iron Man’ mode? What about ‘We’ll Actually Knife You IRL If You Die’ mode? And a lot of difficulty modes back in the day were terrible: let’s just keep getting faster until your neurons are haemorrhaging for your skillz. A cheap way to give a game a bit of longevity and, oh, it certainly was cheap.

While I loved Dark Souls (From Software, 2011) to the point I made a short film about it, I never did get the hang of parrying. To this day, my character remains frozen in amber outside Blighttown. I do wonder if the stick-acrobatics were just a fraction less complex, I might’ve been able to convince myself to go on. And I am still sore that certain levels of Nex Machina (Housemarque, 2017), levels I want to point out I paid for, are walled off unless I can make it through the high difficulty modes… which I can’t.

If it’s time to accept that difficulty modes are really about play that’s right for you, it makes sense to throw away achievements that indicate you completed a certain accessibility mode. Did you beat our COLOURBLIND mode? Now see if you can defeat RGB mode! And if you’re really crazy hardcore, TETRACHROMAT awaits!

My original question, therefore, slightly confused things. I started talking about difficult achievements versus accessibility. In theory, the “difficult” achievement should be equal for every person playing at their perfect accessibility level; you killed Keyser Söze! It was just as hard for you, Joel, with your stupid one-button hands on JUST RIGHT mode, as it was for an eSports legend on THUMB HARD.

But I have… an issue. Achievements ended up replacing score as a ranking system. Even if you keep accessibility out of the equation, they’re still treated by some as a way to prove game athleticism, that they’re way better than Joel. Achievements may continue to reflect an “ableist bias” even if you strip out the low-hanging fruit of “Finish on Expert Mode”. Some players won’t want the achievement systems to be tweaked to be entirely accessibility-invariant. And I start getting bogged down thinking about play so good that it’s performative art, in pressure cooker titles like Devil Daggers (Sorath, 2016) or Post Void (YCJY Games, 2020) . I feel this is the thorny heart of my original question.

Perhaps, though, it’s good enough to drop the explicit difficulty challenges only, otherwise we might have to just dump achievements wholesale. Well, okay… maybe we should? Most achievements are vapid, right? But if we did that, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about that time I tried to become a Hoplite Master and that was one of the best essays I ever wrote.

The conclusion? I’m chuckling away here because I don’t have any. Go wild in the comments, my good friends.

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20 thoughts on “A Difficult Conversation

  1. It’s a good, if thorny, question. To be honest though I never use achievements as a scoreboard. For me they’re a mild irritation at worst, but at their best they suggest things to aim for. “Can you go from ruling only one county to ruling the entire Holy Roman Empire in Crusader Kings in a single lifetime?” I don’t know, game, can I? 1% of players have done it, so that might be my Saturday afternoon sorted.

    I also remember how important difficulty settings were in a formative gaming moment for me: beating the final boss in Metal Gear Solid 2 on hard mode. I’d already beaten the game on normal, and tbh he wasn’t that difficult. On Hard, though, it was a proper soulslike experience. In my initial playthrough I didn’t understand how my inputs controlled my weapon; on Hard, I realised that where I waggled the right stick controlled which direction I slashed my sword *relative to my third-person character*, which was kind of a bonkers UI choice but was something I could work with. I even looked up tips for the fight and realised that if I stood on the side of the boss where he wore his eyepatch, he wouldn’t see me coming. It took hours, but I wore him down and finally beat him.

    This story will be familiar to anyone who’s played a Soulslike, but in the PS2 era the only reason this happened at all is because the Metal Gear series awards different ranks for you based on your game performance, and difficulty is a part of that. Had I not wanted a “Snake” rank, I would never have pushed myself to have that experience.

    So, I really don’t know. To be honest I don’t have enough data points. I mostly game by myself; I don’t have a group of schoolfriends to swap war stories with when class starts or whatever, and I try to ignore Steam friend notifications as much as I can. How much do achievements matter to people who game more socially than I do?

  2. Interesting perspective considering “difficulty” as “accessibility”. Goes to show the importance of the “right” framing – who’d be against accessibility options? At the same time, we are used to think of accessibility options as connected to some kind of disability: the assists in, for example, Celeste, tend to feel closer to a colourblind mode than to a difficulty setting, I’d wager, I’ve given up on the last chapter of the game because of the insane difference in difficulty, and thinking about it now I’ve never considered using assists. Usually, I have no problem dropping to easy if I feel the bad kind of frustration, so I have to guess that in my mind assists were intended to be something else from an easy mode. Again, framing, even unconscious, is key.

    Achievements are a strange thing. On Xbox 360, I felt compelled to get as many as I could (and hated the “finish on x difficulty” ones) – maybe because of the fabled Gamerscore, maybe because as an adolescent I had less games lined up and more investment in each. On Steam, I hardly ever look at them. An old Extra Credits video on the topic lauded the achievements that encourage the player to play in an unconventional or unexpected way: they might suggest that there’s more than meets the eye in a game’s systems. But to do so you’d have to foreground them in a way that would give them more importance, and maybe push players into the compulsive completionist mindset.

    I don’t know. More and more I feel that I want games to allow me to put them away not feeling… wasteful, or incomplete. But to gently nudge me in an unexpected direction, that’d be something achievements (or whatever we come up with next in this line) could be good for, like in your Hoplite example.

  3. Joel: youre right, that hoplite post is pretty good. i glanced at it and ended up enjoyably rereading the whole thing.

    personally i loathe achievements (yet sometimes chase them anyway). maybe its just the distance-from-the-game; maybe its the dick-meauring. CA’s first comment on the hoplite post about Necrodancer encouraging varied playstyles through different characters with different rules is an approach i like the sound of: teach the player about the designs breadth with the game itself, not with a checklist!

    along that line, i like the way Heat Signature’s ambitions, traits, and vows provide goals to achieve and playstyle variety nudges—but then it also has achievements, including ones for beating a mission of each of the higher difficulty tiers (difficulty is a mission rating, not a game setting, so you can easily dip a toe in something harder or pick something less demanding as you feel like it).

    but nifflas’s “new rule” is begging the question of what achievements are for. is it a reasonable expectation that any player should be able to complete every achievement? should achievements be recognising actually rare feats? when i compare my achievements list to Joel’s, should i feel bad in that mythical compelled-to-do-better-by-nonsense-rules-someone-else-arbitrarily-imposed-on-me way so beloved by poor schoolteachers, bad managers, and other aspiring authoritarians? who are achievements even for?

    ugh. just realising this whole thing somehow compelled me to wade yet again into a swampy discussion whose entire existence i detest. if theres one thing i hate more than achievements, its Difficulty Discourse. lol

  4. I like achievements as goal-setters, things that make you want to play a different combat style, character build, or path in the game. I like the niche little achievements that are for finding easter eggs or completing specific challenges (such may be skill based or not). I think a good example are the various Halo achievements available in the Master Chief Collection. For several of these achievements, if a player wants to, they can choose from all of the difficulty options, and they can choose to enable the skulls (which can both be challenge-creating and challenge-reducing! ie an infinite ammo skull vs a level up enemies skull). There are plenty of achievements that do require the game be played on the higher difficulty and with challenge skulls enabled–but the game overall has 700 achievements. You can work on getting the achievements you WANT and that suit your playstyle, and there’s no reason to get ones that you wouldn’t want to. So while 100%-ing isn’t something I, or many players, is going to do, the achievements do give me goals that have made me do things in the game I wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. I’m spending weeks with a friend working on the achievements we feel we can get, and using them as goals has been a great way to motivate play. I think achievements should be used for something like that instead of as a scoreboard marker. I’m proud of the achievements i get, but I hardly feel like the progamer attitude of 100% or bust is pretty passe (and honestly a red flag in a guy, lol).

  5. This was a pretty difficult read for me. In fact I wrote a really angry post which, having calmed down and had a cup of tea, I no longer feel in the right frame of mind to hurl into the sky, all a-tremble with righteous fury.

    And I’m glad I didn’t post it, because you Joel, or you, kind commenter, might have thought it was aimed at you when it totally wasn’t. The people I was angry at would probably have never read it, and maybe that would have been for the best.

    But having read it back, I still don’t disagree with any of it. I’d rather not foul up or derail the conversation here, so I’m going to encase it in ROT13-grade lead to contain the radioactivity and anyone who wants to read it can do so at their own risk.

    V’z nznmrq gb frr evtug-ba, yvoreny guvaxref nccebcevngvat gur ynathntr bs npprffvovyvgl gb nqq n eurgbevpny tybff gb jung ner – va zl uhzoyr rfgvzngr – crggl naq gevivny rtb-qevira qrznaqf.

    Zl fvfgre vf oyvaq. Guebhtubhg ure yvsr, sebz cevznel fpubby gb gur jbex cynpr, fur unf unq gb qrny jvgu oneevref guebja hc ol crbcyr naq betnavfngvbaf snvyvat gb gnxr npprffvovyvgl frevbhfyl. Ure onax jvyy fraq ure n guvpx oenvyyr znvyfubg nqiregvfvat gurve yngrfg whax nppbhag be perqvg pneq, ohg jba’g vairfg va n jrofvgr gung jbhyq ranoyr ure gb cnl ure ovyyf. Ragver cnegf bs gur pvgl fur yvirf va ner rssrpgviryl bss yvzvgf gb ure, abg bssrevat fnsr jnlf gb pebff ohfl ebnqf be obneq choyvp genafcbeg.

    Qba’g trg zr jebat; npprffvovyvgl arrqf rkgraq gb uboovrf naq cnfg gvzrf gbb. Jr’ir frra fbzr cnegf bs gur vaqhfgel rkcnaq cebivfvba naq pbafvqrengvba sbe pbybhe oyvaqarff, ivfhny vzcnvezrag, qrnsarff, yvzvgrq qrkgrevgl naq zbgbe pbageby naq V’z fher zhpu zber orfvqr. Gurfr ner jrypbzr fbyhgvbaf sbe birepbzvat rkgevafvp oneevref gb cnegvpvcngvba va gur zrqvhz. Jung gurl ner *abg* ner vagevafvp nqwhfgzragf gb gur xvaq bs qvssvphygl naq punyyratr cbfrq qryvorengryl ol n tnzr’f qrfvta.

    Vs noyr-obqvrq crbcyr jnag zber bcgvbaf sbe erqhpvat _gung_ xvaq bs qvssvphygl gb orggre fhvg gurve cersreraprf, be gb sbesraq gur nccnerag fpbhetr bs haybpxrq npuvrirzragf cerlvat ba gurve vafrphevgvrf ng avtug, gung’f gurve evtug nf pbafhzref. Ohg fjnqqyvat gurfr cersreraprf va gur synt bs npprffvovyvgl nqibpnpl gevivnyvfrf naq qrgenpgf sebz zhpu zber frevbhf arrqf, cngebavfrf artyrpgrq pbzzhavgvrf, naq whfg trarenyyl znxrf zr jnag gb guebj hc.

    (Wbry, V qba’g zrna lbh be nal bs lbhe pbzzragref urer. Naq V ncbybtvfr gb rirelbar sbe zl gbar. V qba’g vagraq gb fpbyq nalbar, gur crbcyr V’z natel ng jvyy arire ernq guvf naq gung’f cebonoyl whfg nf jryy. V whfg unccra gb srry fgebatyl nobhg vg!)

  6. No worries CA, I get it completely. I’m out drinking so I’ll respond another time, who wants my slurred words all over the comments

  7. I also prefer to use achievements as inspiration/encouragement to better explore a game or play it in ways I might not normally consider or attempt. The best lists end up being fun to catch ‘em all, but it’s just as important (for me anyway) to remember the negative value of playing a game in a way I don’t enjoy just to check off a list.

    I recently played Unsighted and was annoyed that so many of its achievements were related to replaying it with a variety of “pro gamer” mindsets (speedrunning, boss rushes, zero deaths, etc). Those were all about mechanical mastery and tenacious repetition, and while I enjoyed my initial playthrough, I heavily suspected that I’d sour on its mechanics if I forced myself to engage with them on those terms. But that’s fine! There’s surely a niche community that will get extended enjoyment out of those acheievements and I don’t have to be in it.

  8. Beyond achievements, my biggest resistance to extremely granular/customizable difficulty settings (aside from the feasibility of many devs having resources to do it well) is I’d rather the very smart game designers balance their game than require me to do it for myself. If there’s a clearly communicated “here’s how we think it’s best played” option then I’m not bothered by a “I would prefer this part of the game be trivial” option, but I don’t want to twiddle knobs to figure out how the designers meant for most players to experience it.
    (Admittedly, this might be a privilege of generally falling in the broad sweet spot most games are balanced for.)

  9. @CA: I think you make a fair point, actually. When my girlfriend can’t enter a place of business because it’s not wheelchair accessible, that is an order of magnitude worse than someone not being able to make progress in Dark Souls.

    This talk of achievements, btw, is sort of missing an elephant in the room: games *must* have achievements these days. Every single one. If it’s on Steam, it basically has to have achievements. So now, a game’s mandatory paratext (stuff that is “alongside” the main text) are
    – Main menu
    – Credits
    – (Steam?) store page
    – Achievements

    Doesn’t that feel weird to anyone? It’d be like if every book had a title page, contents, chapter headings, and a little doodle from everyone else who had “beaten” it before you. I know this goes back to “are games about overcoming challenges or experiencing a story” but it still seems pretty wild to me.

  10. @James Patton: “It’d be like if every book had … a little doodle from everyone else who had “beaten” it before you.” — when i was a kid books *did* have this mandatory paratext! every reader before you had their name on the little card in the pocket on the inside back cover…

  11. I don’t have much to say about achievements, but regarding the difficulty/accessibility talk, I would side with CA. I feel it needs to be reminded that there are essential living services which remain to be provided to disabled people. Making the story of Dark Souls available to everyone, although a nice point, feels like a concern on a way lesser scale. I would say there’s a sufficient gap between both to differentiate accessibility on one side, from difficulty on the other.

    Moreover: what’s the deal with making media available to everyone? Aren’t there enough games to provide entertainment to all skill levels? I do understand there can be social frustration in being left outside of the Dark Souls or whatever AAA discussion of the month, but I don’t find it any different from not being able to talk about Stranger Things or the latest big show on Netflix. The logical continuity would be to blame Netflix from charging one bill a month although some people cannot pay for it, or even to blame them from putting out overlong episodes that some people just couldn’t find the time to watch.

    Taking a step back from audiovisual media. Should we blame artists and cultural institutions for producing art which requires some context from the audience? (No, the answer is no. That was yet again a rhetorical question.) Even though we cannot define a common ground for art appreciation (i.e. there is no base set of aesthetics, social or historical knowledge, and knowledge is definitely a skill), it has never been, and should not ever be, a reason for dismissing the work of someone expressing themselves.

    Media just cannot be expected to cater to everyone. It is (mostly) not a public service. And to those believing they are entitled to video game content X or Y, I would kindly suggest to ponder upon what made them believe that a private corporation held someting essential to them.

  12. This does not seem like anecdotal trivia anymore after my previous comment, so let it be reminded that Nifflas’s latest Ynglet (which is such a joyful and creative platformer) got 50% of its budget from Danish public funds.

  13. I really knocked the title out of the park on this one: a difficult conversation, indeed. And while I was unable to end this post without a conclusion, because I wasn’t sure what I thought. I’m even less certain after everything I’ve read here. This is most unexpected.

    For starters, everyone here seems more or less on the same page when it comes to achievements. Electron Dance readers generally like achievements which make them think differently about a game. But there’s also some irritation with them. Lorenzo doesn’t like the little edge achievements give a game, that it’s not finished until the Fat Lady achievement has sung. I have real sympathy for this one, being someone who has wrestled with completionist tendencies a lot. And some achievements are designed to be a sign of inhuman fortitude such as the infamous “Little Rocket Man” achievement in HL2 EP2.

    And if there’s something that derails the achievement focus of the post, it’s precisely what Andy (vfig) gets at: What are achievements? Who are they for? Some are inspirational, some are for the hardcore, some are ridiculous and others are just to point out you’re on the right path. Sometimes they’re just there because they have to be. They’re a technology, a shared database of metadata, and that’s about all you can really say about them. I hated the first achievements in HL2 EP2 and I don’t think I ever really got over that. I dislike the fourth-wall breaking popups when you’re in the zone. Don’t make achievements based on difficulty levels: maybe this could all quickly be rephrased as don’t waste our goddamn time with bad achievements.

    But maybe that actually impossible? Achievements are metadata with meaning imposed upon them. Different people want different achievements out of their games. Hardcore achievements are very different from the inspirational achievements, yet they all sit under the same umbrella. I suddenly had this dystopian vision of a gaming future where you tell games what genre of achievements you’re after so you never have to hear of a stupid achievement to take a gnome into space.

    Lorenzo also throws in the point about using assists in games. My obsessive-completionist disorder means I want to play a game neat, without switching on kind of assistance. This is completely different to my father who, I might have told you before, had me hack games in the 80s to give them extra lives. In his mind, the developers had screwed up. They had a great game but made it too frustrating: it was our job to fix that. I didn’t touch ANY of the hacked versions, no sir. I was going to play LIKE GOD INTENDED. Nowadays, we’re more likely to say the developer had failed to balance the game in the review and they’d have to patch it later. But I feel like I’m still averse to assists. I need developers to convince me that it’s okay to play “my” way not the “normal” way. That’s why Nex Machina pisses me off so much: you can’t see the whole game until you play “our way”.

    CA has an strong point and it makes me wonder if all this is my fault. See, it’s not exactly clear what “accessibility” is referring to in the tweets I cited. And I watched a followup video about “Difficulty vs Accessibility” which is notable for looking into the agreed definitions of disability yet avoids going into specific examples once the groundwork is laid. So now I’m left wondering, did I just see what I wanted to see? Are we talking about subtitles for the hard of hearing or easier game play because I’m shit at buttons?

    I have a reference to dropping combat for a game which… is that even the same thing? With one lens, sure, “I’m no good at combat sections”, but with another it’s more about preference: “I just don’t like combat sections”. And if I’m honest, I remember having the odd moment of pause, because just like achievements I seemed to be getting confused about all the terms. Difficulties are: extra challenges? alternate ways to play? preferences? making a game more approachable? literal accessibility? And what do we call it when we’re really good at the game and want the game to be harder? Do we now call this a challenge rather than a difficulty? Isn’t that just wordplay?

    So I’ve come away from all these brilliant comments a lot more confused, even further from a conclusion. I’d find it hard to write a similar article now but I’m glad I did because of all the discussion. Even the angry bit. I think I’d probably rewrite the whole thing in this vein: “if games can offer you a style of play that works better for you, that’s great, and should probably not make achievements that make you feel like a schmuck for playing your way.”

    I think I can respond to Oriane’s comment with a bit more certainty. A crude summary of Oriane’s point removing all the nuance (SORRY) “is making games for a big audience really important?” And I’d say yes and no? In fact, I’d say it was more important the higher $$$$ the game is worth and not just because it’s “sound business”. Big games tend to have big cultural impact and if they’re unintentionally unplayable for segments of the population, it can feel like you’re shut out of those conversations. Should it mandated somehow? God, no. And, of course, maybe you’re not a big AAA player like me, and missing this particular conversation isn’t difficult at all.

    And one more thing: I’m surprised adaptive difficulty hasn’t become more of a thing, so we wouldn’t have to adjust the game manually – it would do it for us. Perhaps difficulty levels just push the problem of balancing on the player? (Again, the friction between “seeking more challenge after honing my skills” vs “we’ll only ever play one difficulty level and that makes it a ‘style'”).

  14. just a note: in games where the challenge is part of its purpose, adaptive difficulty is set up to fail, because although the game can measure (however poorly) how well the player is doing right now, it cannot tell how high of a bar the player is aiming to clear.

    if i am sucking utterly at a game but intent on beating it no matter how long it takes me — versus if i am sucking utterly at a game but just wish i couldhave a cheat to get past this bit and see more of the story — how is the game to know?

    designing difficulty levels needs to be concerned with both skill floor (how good are you right now?) and skill ceiling (how good do you want to get?). both could be called “difficulty”…

  15. The discussion reminds me of a scene from the film Gattaca, in which a couple attend a famous pianist’s performance. Afterward Ethan Hawke discovers that the musician has six fingers on each hand, to which his date Uma Thurman blandly replies, “that piece can only be played with twelve.” Genetic variation is frowned upon in this story, so the implication is that this pianist’s parents had him engineered to become the maestro he does, or he himself capitalized on a variance that would normally be a significant disadvantage in the world proposed by that movie.

    Maybe the issue is the word “ability,” which has more than one meaning, or (more likely) the problem lies in how people tend to be judgmental for no reason at all and even less right. I am endlessly annoyed by the “git gud” crowd, particularly around the Souls franchise which has given rise to a subculture so ignorant it insists unironically that things like multiplayer summoning is flat-out the wrong way to play.

    In a position of actually knowing something about how video games are made, I can assure you that studios are not in the habit of spending millions in budget and thousands of hours in development creating features that the player is not supposed to use. There really is no wrong way to play when done in the context of ensuring enjoyment.

    I never mastered parrying either (strangely, I was pretty good at it in Demon’s Souls, which is weird since it’s the same mechanic). If I read the above correctly and you stopped playing outside of Blighttown, I’d encourage you to return and bull through if you feel any draw. The Depths and Blighttown are a very understandable hard stop, but there’s great stuff beyond, and perhaps more importantly, I promise it doesn’t get worse than Blighttown.

    It’s great to see developers devoting resources to enablement, from closed-captioning to color-blind mode to new controllers. While I’m not certain that we should equate difficulty levels with ableism, I do get the concern that they could be conflated. This is a discussion that’ll go on for a long time to come.

  16. @vfig – I guess I understand there is an issue where a game has to distinguish between consistent failure, cheating and player-in-training. A game like Return Home – which is really an athlete’s game – it’s adaptive difficulty is over a short period and can reset each time. But I constantly feel I’m not as good as I should be; certain crazy elements just don’t pop up unless you’re doing well.

    The obvious answer is to export your skill data as an NFT so all games can adjust before you even hit start

  17. @Steerpike

    I really do want to head back into Dark Souls but it’s not just the frustration awaiting me but also the time sink nature of it. You have to give of your real soul to get the Souls. And there is so much else to play maybe it’s time for a ‘I returned to da Souls’ Twitter thread.

    The git gud defensiveness is grating but I also understand it, the great fear of the “difficult video game” extinction if that’s what you live for – or at least it’s demotion in importance. That, of course, was inevitable once games became increasingly mainstream. Be careful what you wish for. I’m simultaneously sympathetic and annoyed.

    (I wasn’t supposed to bring up difficulty in an article. I crossed my own red lines, oh dearie me)

  18. footnote: ‘When I first released Antichamber, Valve suggested I add achievements, because they would help boost sales.

    ‘I didn’t care then, and I don’t care 10 years later.

    ‘“But we, the community, like achievements!”

    ‘Cool. I, the creator, don’t want them in my game. I hate 90% of them!’

    — Alexander Bruce, https://twitter.com/Demruth/status/1580197495233126401

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