Guy and Unicycle perfectly illustrates why hard games are fun.

I grew up in the 80s. When I started playing games, the fundamental attraction to video games was difficulty. The NES with two controllers and a game was called the "Challenge Set". Every game commercial prominently stated just how difficult a game was to complete. If it was a sequel? It was HARDER than the first. When kids completed games, it was referred to as "Beating" or "Mastering" them. When new consoles came out, they made sure to stress just how much more difficult game could be on the new console than the one you already owned.

If video games were drugs, they were uppers. They were meant to emphasize the idea of getting your blood pumping, getting your brain working, and getting your adrenaline rising.

This is the way I grew up playing games and it's still the way I play games, even though it's getting much harder in the modern era.

What I've noticed, though, is that there is a generation of people who grew up playing games for entirely separate reasons. if video games are drugs, they are hooked on downers. They play games to "relax". Words used to sell games have "escape" and "immersion". This is all fine, but I feel like I frequently hear discussion of gaming history in which difficulty in games is treated like the era of black and white television. The idea seems to be that games used to diffiuclt because the industry simply lacked the technology to make fun games that weren't.

People who are told they like hard games in this modern era of games are told they like to "punish themselves". They are told they are "self flagellating" and that difficulty has nothing to do with gaming. While Dark Souls has done a lot of good in rehabbing this point of view on games, and difficult games have gained more modern acceptance for being hard and still being "good", there is still a sentiment out there that doesn't seem to understand the idea behind hard games.

I feel like this video perfectly illustrates all the emotions that go into attempting something that is difficult, no matter what it is, and then mastering it. I think it also perfectly explains why a person who plays a game on a hard difficultly level and a person who plays the game on an easy difficulty level have NOT played the same game and thusly cannot have the same opinion on it. This becomes relevant when you hear gamers say things, like, "Halo sucks." "... yeah, well, I put all games on the easiest difficulty level. I just want to see everything. I don't want to be frustrated by dying all the time."

This is why I play the Souls series and Bloodborne. Today I just beat the Bloodborne DLC after being stuck on a boss for over a week. It's such an amazing feeling when I finally won after hour and hours of constant failure. It's not something I would do if the game didn't give you positive feedback on your progress. It can be as simple as finally dodging that one move that kept hitting you to being able to consistently reach the next phase of the boss fight.

I understand that people can get frustrated from simply failing/losing a couple of times, but my personality drives me forward to figure out problems that I know I can solve.

Really cool video and an excellent topic in general - one that I thoroughly agree with. I think games can be many different things to many different people but it sucks when the industry is so susceptible to hard trends. Not just in difficulty but in genre and setting as well.

One of the more interesting examples I've seen of this lately has been some relatively recent additions and/or changes to Darkest Dungeon. Personally, I've been having a great time with it and have probably clocked more hours with it than most of the finished releases for the past year, but some recent patches apparently made a number of the players tap out and accuse the game of being unfair and/or "just a cheating RNG." To me, it appears to make a visible split in the audience between gamers who seek out and utilize exploits they find to progress, then throw their hands up in frustration and demand a refund when it no longer works, and the gamers that learn to adapt to the changes and take it on it's own terms.

It's an interesting and fuzzy line between exploit and strategy, now that I think about it. Looking at something like Souls series, I'd guess most of the player base consider exploiting poor boss AI/pathfinding to be perfectly legitimate styles of play. There's really nothing in the game telling you otherwise, in fact it almost always rewards you for it. It makes me wonder if the developers saw most of them and just said "Meh, sure." I won't sit here and say I didn't let dozens of brigands in the woods of Dark Souls bounce off my head on a certain ledge sending them to their doom for free xp :D

i think it might have something to do with how hard it is to make a 3d game feel hard and fair at the same time ( like the souls games )
and i think that the fairness is needed for most people to make it feel like its something you can conquer instead of feeling like your being fucked by the game.

well and money of course, sadly everything follows money in this world.

I never really found the souls games all that hard. They require patience and a lot of trial and error and those are two things I hate in games. I played all of Dark Souls and about 25 hours of Dark Souls 2 and I never felt relief or satisfaction from getting through an area or boss.

When I play single player games it's all about having fun for me. When I want an actual challenge I'd rather go online and compete against real people.

Absolutely. I frequent say that I'm not enjoying a game unless I am losing. I think people take that to mean that it's the act of losing that I enjoy, but that's not it at all. it's the act of problem solving that I enjoy. It's having to think up a strategy or an exploit. It's having to lock in and give a run at a game my absolutely best to win. And once you do, yeah, there's no better feeling. That "I did it!" moment is glorious.

I wish there was a youtube channel just dedicated to authentic "I did it!" moments. It's so easy to get swept up in someone's joy at having conquered something that was once thought impossible.

You're absolutely right. I agree that there is a blurry line between exploit and strategy. But, I think that, to some extent, it's a personal definition. If a game is hard enough, I feel like all exploits are valid. But it has to be VERY hard. (and, obviously, not a multiplayer game.)

personally some of my favorite games are the ones that are SO hard that anything you do would be seen as fair game.

I think this illustrates my feelings on the Souls games as well. I love fighting the bosses. The fights are usually somewhat inventive, for the most part, and landing that killing blow can be rewarding. I do not believe this is the case for every boss battle, and find some of them to be annoying and repetitive. Souls games, to me, are kind of like Mega Man. You either get to the boss, or you die and have to fight all of the enemies you previously fought to have a second 'go' at the boss. I like Mega Man, and I'm pretty decent at the games, but that doesn't mean I like difficult games. I just like the mechanics of Mega Man, despite the difficulty.

My problem with Mega Man and Dark Souls is surely the frustration caused by the difficulty, but to a larger extent it lies with the repetitive nature of the progression. I have mastered my battle with the disappearing platforms, and have mastered fighting the same ol', tired undead soldiers but I have to go through that same area again just to have a chance to battle the boss. It's not necessarily all about the difficulty, but more so having patience and know what's coming. I think Mega Man is more challenging and fair, but that's just me. I have the same problem with easy games (MGSV:TPP) in that I don't want to fight the same enemies in the same areas over and over to progress. It starts to feel almost MMO-like where I have to grind to progress and be able to fight the boss for the area. Then I go to another area and do it again. It's not really challenge so much as it is persistence, diligence, and patience.

I think the Batman games did difficulty kind of well where it's not really that much harder, but it's more a test of your competencies with the mechanics. The game still checkpoints very well, but you have to deal with tougher enemies, more varied encounters, possibly a weaker Batman, and most importantly there are no helping indicators for when you need to counter, dodge, or use your cape in fights. In general, I like this approach because it isn't difficult, it's just more challenging. I will admit that it really isn't that much harder or more challenging, but I like the ideas more than just limiting checkpoints and repetition. I could make references to games difficulties all day, but I'll stop here.

@huntad: It's funny because, in the examples of MGSV and Batman, the boss battles felt like the shitty filler between entertaining scenarios against the grunt soldiers. To me at least.

I guess it comes down to not being about difficulty in those cases though, it's more about inventivness and finding your own fun. But the boss battles felt shoehorned and scripted in a way less interesting way.

@tobbrobb: Oh most certainly. I don't think those games do boss battles too well. I was mainly talking about the moment to moment gameplay. I will say, though, that most games don't really do boss battles too well at all. There are much more numerous cases of bosses being overwhelming or underwhelming than being good boss battles. I was speaking towards repetition, because I think I find more at fault with that than I do with difficulty as to why I would not want to play a game. A game like The Binding of Isaac was fun for me, because I would fight the same bosses, but the tile sets would be different and my character and items would be different, etc etc whereas Souls games bore me after a short while. Whatever floats your boat I guess. Thanks for the response! :)

I think you make a good point! I do enjoy difficult games but sometimes I do find myself incredibly intimidated by them. A perfect example is the Resident Evil remake, I bought it almost a year ago and every time I go to play it I get paralysed by fear. Not because the game is scary, not even because it's really easy to die on the normal difficulty but because of the limited save system. I found myself constantly scared that I was going to run out of saves, so I started the game on easy and got a decent way through it but stopped because I felt like I was robbing myself of the "true" experience.

With Resident evil zero out next month I think I'm going to force myself to play through the original remake on normal because I do think I will love the game if I can get over the fear.

I heard someone not too long ago talking on a podcast (maybe the Bombast, I don't remember) about the reasons games were so difficult in the 80s; they cited arcade games being difficult for the sole purpose of taking the players' money, and later in NES era, games (in the west, at least) were made considerably more difficult to combat the game rental situation that was becoming more and more of a problem from a financial point of view. I specifically remember hearing that Battletoads was a difficult as it was so that a "normal" 12 year old couldn't sit down and beat it in a single sitting. If finishing Battletoads was your goal, you were then more likely to get your parents to buy it for you rather than ask them to spend 3 dollars on a rental. How much truth is in that, I don't know, but it makes a lot of sense as someone who would beg my parents to rent me a game only for me to fall in love with it enough to go back later and ask for it for Christmas or whatever.

I think another reason games were so much more difficult is that they were just a lot smaller than they are now. There needed to be something there to keep players playing. Again, this was in an age where the primary market was children (the NES was marketed as a toy, not a video game console. Saying it was a console would have been a bad move in the post crash years). Children always have more time than money, so you want that child to spend his or her homework time playing YOUR game, not your competitions. Yep. It's really all about money.

As an adult, I tend to play a lot of games on the normal or easy difficulty, and it's definitely because I have more money than time. With games being the size they are, I'd like to get through as much of a good game as possible before moving onto the next one, because I have all that crap that comes with being an adult to deal with. I'd just rather not spend 100 hours in a game that's super difficult. I'll also site Fallout here, which I'm playing on an easier difficulty because I don't have time to spend 100 hours in loading screens. I'd rather make it though a fight and be done, not die and have to wait forever for it to load so that I can try again.

That's not to say I don't want to be challenged, but I definitely don't want to fight battles over and over and over again until I FINALLY beat them because that's time I could spend with another game, or playing guitar. I guess guitar is a good comparison for me, because I've spent 25 years doing that and most of that time was me trying to get better at things that I'm no good at. That's worth considering, too: I play some games (the Batman games being a prime example) on easier difficulty settings because after a big fight with a gang of electrified brutes, my wrists and forearms really feel it, and I'm not going to risk my physical health in intense combat in a video game. I guess I could have developed healthier guitar playing habits when I was a teenager that would have avoided possible carpal tunnel, but sadly, I didn't. And now I feel it sometimes during video games.

While I'm thinking about physical health, I did try to learn to ride a unicycle when I was younger (my FAVORITE video game of all time is Uniracers for SNES, which inspired the decision). I took a pretty nasty spill one time just doing balance exercises and nearly knocked some teeth out, and that's when I realized that I'd rather play video games than break my teeth. Same can be said for skateboarding.

All that to say that I'm the kind of person that is way more likely to spend 100 hours playing Castlevania 3 or Ninja Gaiden over and over again than I am to spend 100 hours getting better at Dark Souls 2. Maybe it's just that the style of difficulty I like is in the games of my youth, not the games of my present, but really I it's just a time thing.

I used to like hard games. Now that I'm older, I don't like being frustrated. All the games I play anymore are set to the easiest difficulty settings. I'm much happier because of it.

People in the UK count Mississippi's?

@youeightit: I agree with you 100%, aside from the last paragraph (substitute Mario 3 and Legend of Zelda to bring us back into alignment!)

I definitely enjoy challenge in a video game, but the type of challenge I'm looking for is not combat. I am not a twitch gamer. My reflexes are fairly awful, and I can't stand games that rely on that. I enjoy being presented with complicated mechanics, and having to decipher them to get what I need done than having to aim a gun. I guess that's why I like Elder Scrolls (Oblivion and Skyrim) and Fallout (4) more than, say, Call of Duty or what have you. Combat is either trivial (in which case it's over as soon as I can get a bead on a dude) or super difficult (in which case I cast 'tgm'). Or, MGSV, as previously discussed. Again, this was a case of combat either being trivial or insane, and devising strategies to turn the latter into the former.

I also play a ton of modded Minecraft. People have introduced all kinds of complicated nonsense into this game. Want to deal with six different ways of processing ore, four different power grids and, like, eight different versions of coffee? Want to build a nuclear reactor and crater your base make a ton of power? How about THREE different nuclear reactors that are completely different? And, all the tech that you need to build up in tiers to get there? When you start, you have no idea where to even begin. But, 250 hours later when you master it all, you are almost literally a god over your sandbox, as the world flourishes/burns to your whim.

Either that, or I really enjoy crafting mechanics, since I also did a ton of that in the Bethesda games. But, that's entirely beside the point.

O_o... no. That's pretty much entirely wrong.

"The desire for hard games... was nurtured by the industry"

Puzzles and overcoming challenges is an inherent part of the original definition of "game". It's something that has appealed to human beings for THOUSANDS of years. It started well before video games. Everything from riddles, number puzzles, word games, midway games, skateboards, unicycles and, heck, even the "hoop and stick" or "cup and ball games" are build on the idea of overcoming a challenge.

When crossword puzzles became a thing at the turn of the century, the entire USA was overtaken by the idea of crossword puzzles and sought out harder and harder puzzles. "Normal" people want challenge.

The idea of pure escapism and fleeing from existence in virtual reality that rewards you for doing nothing is what is new.

I'm in the club of mostly enjoying "casual" games these days, but I still tend to pick at least medium difficulty. I played through whole of Shovel Knight earlier this year for some reason though, even when it kept frustrating me a whole lot. I think it might've been because I had an audience for my stream and heard reactions throughout my playing.

Challenges I usually find in competitive multiplayer games. Playing Rocket League is the way I prefer to get my fill of that stuff. Singleplayer games I play on medium (which is usually fairly easy these days) because I'm old and value immersion and story over anything else.

This mindset is why I love XCom. The thought that a single fuck up could end up getting one of my high level soliders killed is both exhilarating and stressful at the same time. Very few games come close to the feeling that game gives. With that said though, there is time and a place for these games. There were some days I just couldnt come home and play XCom, the stress would just be too much.

As someone who tends to be bad at most games, I kind of appreciate the trend toward providing an easier experience (or at least offering options to ease the default difficulty). With that said, there are still rare cases for me in which a game's brutal difficulty makes it more compelling. I started playing System Shock 2 recently, and it kicked my ass for the first few hours, but I eventually started learning it's mechanics and strategies, and now I'm hooked. Increasingly tough enemies and dwindling resources are still a threat, but that's part of what makes the game fun. It's that "upper" phenomenon at work: once you start to improve and learn, "you're instantly addicted."

I completely disagree with basically everything that you are saying.

The idea that gamers want challenge because it's part of their "self image" is an idea that you are inventing. It's as silly and broad as saying "women want men who are rich so they can buy them things" or "men want women who are young and pretty because they are superficial and primitive.".

As I believe the original video demonstrates, that entire premise is false.

"Games should challenge us, make us feel, teach us and change how we think. ... This is why we should play games."

Again, I completely disagree with that statement. The concept of "make us feel' and "change how we think" is completely disassociated from the concept of games. Not only does a game not need to be a game to do either of those things, actual GAME elements usually detract from those very objectives. This comes into the usual disconnect between the concept of what represents a "game" and what is an "electronic interactive experience."

I don't want to argue the semantics of "what is a game", but games have existed for thousands of years before electricity was required to make them work, and NONE of them existed to "make us feel" or "change how we think".

I think fans of electronic entertainment get swept up in the poetic notions of games as an art form and lose sight of the fact that much of what they want games to do would be better served without having any requisite tie to an industry that has nothing to do with the goals that they are trying to accomplish.

MOreover, not only is the idea that skills learned in games are untransferable to the real world completely ridiculous, it's scientifically proven to be wrong. Challenging games that tax a players physical and mental abilities develop concentration, problem solving, coordination and abstract thinking. Not only this, multiplayer games develop players abilities to coordinate, work as a team, and communicate. Video games are no different than any other type of game for this reason. In short, Chess is a game that is going to be beneficial for players whether it's made out of wood or binary digits.

The only video games that are the equivalent of junk food, completely useless, are games that are being created now that do nothing but promote their continued play by the player. They are, in short, the slot machines of the games industry.