Seems like a symptom of a larger issue that we don't understand the role of different value systems.
Right now, it seems like the only valid value is morality, so every argument is framed as a moral one. No one understands the values of aesthetics, so we don't argue along those lines, and even if you tried to, no one would care or tra…
Seems like a symptom of a larger issue that we don't understand the role of different value systems.
Right now, it seems like the only valid value is morality, so every argument is framed as a moral one. No one understands the values of aesthetics, so we don't argue along those lines, and even if you tried to, no one would care or track what you said.
To say you like or dislike a piece of art is only to comment on the morality of it; likewise if you like or dislike art, you can only frame that in moral judgments.
There seems to be a sentiment out there as well where if you portray or show something evil or immoral on screen then somehow you’re endorsing those actions. Which always seemed to be a pretty wild take to me, how can you tell a story without conflict?
I've seen this come up many times with literature specifically. People will choose specific lines from a book spoken by the villain and use them to say the author is a bad person. That's the point of a villain! They're supposed to be an unpleasant, crappy, or outright evil person that the heroes must struggle against.
Most of the critiques of Elden Ring (and From Software in general) have been aesthetic critiques, at least so far as I've seen. There is a hardcore group of people who really, really, really like their games. There is also a sizable group that finds their games to be an example of the worst elements of game design (artificial difficulty). These two groups despise each other.
There is a elitist streak in the hardcore group that responds to any criticism of the game design of From Software games with "git gud". Responding to that with a reason why one cannot "git gud" and so would like the game to provide an amenity that literally every RPG of any note has provided for 20 years does not strike me as an unreasonable argument, in that context. If there is a valid aesthetic reason for From Software not to provide a quest log (and I'm very, very doubtful there is), then they and their fans can defend it on that grounds.
From my perspective, a lack of a quest log is akin to requiring someone to do 20 jumping jacks every fifteen minutes to keep a movie going. It's pointless to begin with; that it excludes paraplegics is just further reason it's a bad choice.
I mean, they did reluctantly introduce the sliders into 'Pathologic 2' after pressure from their publishers. Maybe they really are equal opportunity offenders... everyone is going to feel miserable and hard done by playing their games!!
(or a bit skeezy.... I love 'The Void', but whenever I see it in my Steam library it looks like some dodgy visual novel or somesuch. ho hum!)
I think the difference has a lot to do with our expectations of how game logic works - it’s all supposed to have rules and “feel” “fair”. If X has been the jump button for the past 60 hours, it would feel like artificial difficulty to have X suddenly be the attack button - unless there were some justification in the story for the switch in mechanic, like, oh, this is meant to communicate that the gravity in the spaceship changed, or whatever.
When I think of “artificial difficulty,” I think of a character you meet fairly early on in Bloodborne. She’s the first character you encounter who’s not an enemy. My first instinct, seeing her in the shadows, shaped like every other enemy, was to sneak-attack her the way I did everyone else. She killed me instantly. …And then, after I respawned, every time I entered her part of the map, she killed me again. And again. And again. And again. She’s impossible to beat at the player’s level; the only way to stop this is to start the game *completely over from scratch* and just remember not to attack her next time.
So, in the logic of video games, I think “programming in a fail-state that requires a full restart to punish a player who reacted to a new game element in the exact way the previous 15 hours had taught them to react” would count as artificial difficulty. There’s a sense of, there was literally no story justification for this and the game logic hasn’t pointed toward this being possible before, so it serves only to remind me the video game is hard, not to enhance my experience of playing it.
(And of course I wince even typing this out, because to a certain subset of fan the fact it took me 15 hours to get to this character is proof I was probably too much of a baby to play the game anyway, and what I’m calling “artificial difficulty” is just me being mad the game wrote in Real Consequences, or something. So I guess it’s all very subjective!)
Yeah, I do agree with both you and the above commenter that “artificial” is a bad word for it. Like, that particular bit of punishment drove me nuts, but there are a lot of the hard-for-hard’s-sake elements of the game I really like - just, for some reason that one crossed some mental/emotional line and took me from “Wow, these mechanics are good but really unforgiving” to “Hey, that wasn’t FAIR.” But both are equally artificial.
but this right here gets at my problem with the term. i've not played Bloodborne but what you're describing is just bad design. "high level boss beats under-leveled player under softlock conditions" isn't illogical or "artificial," it's just unfair! and i think "artificial difficulty" encourages people to lump (1) a literal softlock and (2) "this boss is hard and now i'm in a bad mood" into "everything on a mechanical level that's ever made me mad in a video game." but (1) and (2) aren't necessarily similar issues! so why do we force them to share a diagnosis?
Think of it like a story: by its very nature, it's fake and so there cannot be an actual "what [character] would really do". But you'd still get annoyed if a character acted out-of-character.
Artifical (or fake, that's a good term) difficulty is stuff where it feels like you're fighting the game on a meta level. You're fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game. Some of it is a sliding scale: most people would agree that a hitbox 1 pixel wide is fake difficulty, but where a game switches from fake to acceptable difficulty isn't set. Some of it is pretty black and white: early video games often had levels that were impossible to complete unless you knew a trick that the game didn't teach you, which was done specifically to sell guides on how to beat the game.
Elements of these can, at times, be an artistic choice (Hellblade and Spec Ops come to mind), but more often it's lazy design.
"out of character" is a much better term suggesting a very different problem that "artificial difficulty" often does.
I spent a couple days on Reddit arguing with people about the Okumura boss fight in Persona 5 Royal. to my mind that was a very strong example of "out of character." it's a boss fight that springs several overlapping complications on the player out of nowhere with little to no consistency with any other battle in the game* before or after and with the calling card mechanic locking you out of the resources you need to get any viable offense off the ground. i wouldn't describe any of that as "artificial" but i'd certainly describe it as out of character.
*not inconsistent with Shin Megami Tensei in general, as Royal Okumura does in a lot of ways feel like a classic SMT boss fight, but certainly inconsistent with the rest of Persona 5 Royal, specifically
forgot i wrote a very long and roundabout substack post a couple years ago about "fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game"
How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this, but it's kind of ridiculous that a game is asking me to do it." It felt difficult not because it was, but because the developers had made a host of choices that made things take longer than they ought to have.
absolutely agree that there's bad balance, worthy of criticism, in a lot of video games. but "artificial difficulty" has just always struck me as a term that's too general, too hand-wavy, and too unintuitive (video games are inherently "artificial") to get at the truth of what's so inartful or unfair about certain implementations. "artificial difficulty" just ends up being the language of rage-quitting.
It strikes me as a very odd conceptualization as well. As if putting a bonfire directly outside a boss fight represents “actual” difficulty and putting it far away to create more of a sense of punishment for failure is false difficulty. Just a weird framing to me.
I'm curious what you think some of those choices are. Certainly the function of items in Dark Souls is somewhat frustratingly opaque but aside from that I can't really think of anything.
Some might have been because I played on the PC port, which is apparently notoriously bad: narrow and inconsistent hitboxes, a camera that swung around unhelpfully, and a weird inconsistency between visual indicator and actual hit (it took me a long time to time dodges correctly, because when it seemed like you ought to dodge based on the animation wasn't correct).
Long gaps between save points (requiring you to run a lot of content over again if you fail) combined with enemies that are hidden and often cannot be seen before they jump out. A lack of a save point before boss fights combined with boss fights where you have to already know how they work before you can beat them--I wouldn't mind "trial and error" boss fights or having to repeatedly run to a boss fight, but the combination of both is infuriating.
The wonky hitboxes are legit annoying, not really sure why that is except that a lot of games have hitbox issues. Dodge timing is just something you have to learn. As for the bonfires, well, that's a design decision. Dark Souls really wants you to learn the maps really, really well and that's one way they enforce that. Once you have a map down you're probably no longer than 30-45 seconds away from the boss.
I guess it's because I never talk or read about modern video games online but I have never in my life had my mind changed again and again by each successive reply in a thread. In my head it's like the Simpsons teacher strike episode.
Appreciate you pointing out the elitist streak among the fandom. I don’t hang out in online gaming communities so I got to enjoy beating my head uselessly against Bloodborne in peace. I have a friend, though, who loves games but has a physical disability that prevents them playing any FromSoft game, even with a specially modified controller that makes most other games doable. The best they can do to enjoy the games is watch livestreams or let’s plays, which can grate because even the streamers will act like anyone watching instead of playing must be doing it simply because of their inability to git gud, and anyone not interested in the head-beating for any reason must be mocked. When my friend wishes aloud that FromSoft were willing to consider maybe rolling out game updates with lowered difficulty settings that their accommodation could handle, I totally think it’s a reasonable request, even while for my part I kind of like the boldness of making a game half-unplayable to rubes like me in a world that seeks the most massive audience possible.
But yeah, whatever anyone’s feelings on the games themselves, genuine assholes on the game-enjoying side of things do their part to help push the conversation to the least interesting version of itself.
Here's a frame of a pro-no quest log argument on aesthetic grounds: automated quest logs (and map markers, clearly stated objectives, etc.) can encourage mindless disengagement from the game's world and story -- people rush through dialogues without listening, they look for bright blinking icons rather than relying on described information, and they either miss entirely or can't enjoy rich details that are mechanistically unnecessary to getting the simple dopamine hit of a completed task. forcing players to rely on the raw experience of the game's world and one-time interactions that can't be replicated demands a radical change in how someone thinks about and approaches something that has otherwise, for many people, become rote and sometimes joyless.
if done well, a truly open, unmediated game-world has the potential to heighten the genuine feelings of discovery, exploration, and immersion that great RPGs can evoke. it could create a sense of mystery around the limits of the game (not everything is discovered and documented) and also deepen your connection to your particular role-play (when did my character write that down? i have no memory of a person with this description, why does my character know who they are?). i don't know if this game does any of that, but these seem like legitimate aesthetic possibilities.
i like games with game logs. but i also want people to try new things that change how people experience and conceptualize video games, and i love that From does that, even if it's sometimes unsuccessful.
What he said. I'm not arguing that NO games should have quest logs, but it's much, much better that the Soulsborne games don't. It makes it far more immersive, and gives the player much more agency.
I am very on-board with this comment. Disclosure - I'm 40 hours into Elden Ring and consider it a masterpiece, I'm about 1,000 hours into From Software games and consider them my favourite dev. I don't particularly like the git gud mentality taken to a denigrating extreme, but I also don't want From to compromise what makes their games so good - which is the sense of mystery and discovery that Brian talks about above.
But the worst part of modern morality—its not codified. Instead morality is whatever someone says is morality. i.e. I'm moral, because I'm a pacifist, I don't kill spiders ... I call an exterminator instead.
It’s classic “rock/rap music is evil” logic. And the inclusion or omission of a quest log isn’t necessarily a good aesthetic argument to begin with, as the merits of its functionality could be argued on a mechanical level of execution and necessity as much as it can be a personal preference of taste (which in itself is self-selective).
I can’t believe people feel the need to argue over the lack of a quest log in a video game, when they don’t even know how to differentiate aesthetics from anything else 😂
Yeah, spot on. The problem is we've given everyone a hammer (the outraged outburst), and so everything looks like a nail. And this particular hammer rewards you with delicious morsels of dopamine from your peers every time you use it, as they cheer on your outrage and join in themselves.
Seems like a symptom of a larger issue that we don't understand the role of different value systems.
Right now, it seems like the only valid value is morality, so every argument is framed as a moral one. No one understands the values of aesthetics, so we don't argue along those lines, and even if you tried to, no one would care or track what you said.
To say you like or dislike a piece of art is only to comment on the morality of it; likewise if you like or dislike art, you can only frame that in moral judgments.
Boring.
There seems to be a sentiment out there as well where if you portray or show something evil or immoral on screen then somehow you’re endorsing those actions. Which always seemed to be a pretty wild take to me, how can you tell a story without conflict?
I've seen this come up many times with literature specifically. People will choose specific lines from a book spoken by the villain and use them to say the author is a bad person. That's the point of a villain! They're supposed to be an unpleasant, crappy, or outright evil person that the heroes must struggle against.
Most of the critiques of Elden Ring (and From Software in general) have been aesthetic critiques, at least so far as I've seen. There is a hardcore group of people who really, really, really like their games. There is also a sizable group that finds their games to be an example of the worst elements of game design (artificial difficulty). These two groups despise each other.
There is a elitist streak in the hardcore group that responds to any criticism of the game design of From Software games with "git gud". Responding to that with a reason why one cannot "git gud" and so would like the game to provide an amenity that literally every RPG of any note has provided for 20 years does not strike me as an unreasonable argument, in that context. If there is a valid aesthetic reason for From Software not to provide a quest log (and I'm very, very doubtful there is), then they and their fans can defend it on that grounds.
From my perspective, a lack of a quest log is akin to requiring someone to do 20 jumping jacks every fifteen minutes to keep a movie going. It's pointless to begin with; that it excludes paraplegics is just further reason it's a bad choice.
The Evil Within in a nutshell.
//Ice-Pick Lodge cackle artistically//
I mean, they did reluctantly introduce the sliders into 'Pathologic 2' after pressure from their publishers. Maybe they really are equal opportunity offenders... everyone is going to feel miserable and hard done by playing their games!!
(or a bit skeezy.... I love 'The Void', but whenever I see it in my Steam library it looks like some dodgy visual novel or somesuch. ho hum!)
I prefer the term "fake difficulty", as described in detail by TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty
I think the difference has a lot to do with our expectations of how game logic works - it’s all supposed to have rules and “feel” “fair”. If X has been the jump button for the past 60 hours, it would feel like artificial difficulty to have X suddenly be the attack button - unless there were some justification in the story for the switch in mechanic, like, oh, this is meant to communicate that the gravity in the spaceship changed, or whatever.
When I think of “artificial difficulty,” I think of a character you meet fairly early on in Bloodborne. She’s the first character you encounter who’s not an enemy. My first instinct, seeing her in the shadows, shaped like every other enemy, was to sneak-attack her the way I did everyone else. She killed me instantly. …And then, after I respawned, every time I entered her part of the map, she killed me again. And again. And again. And again. She’s impossible to beat at the player’s level; the only way to stop this is to start the game *completely over from scratch* and just remember not to attack her next time.
So, in the logic of video games, I think “programming in a fail-state that requires a full restart to punish a player who reacted to a new game element in the exact way the previous 15 hours had taught them to react” would count as artificial difficulty. There’s a sense of, there was literally no story justification for this and the game logic hasn’t pointed toward this being possible before, so it serves only to remind me the video game is hard, not to enhance my experience of playing it.
(And of course I wince even typing this out, because to a certain subset of fan the fact it took me 15 hours to get to this character is proof I was probably too much of a baby to play the game anyway, and what I’m calling “artificial difficulty” is just me being mad the game wrote in Real Consequences, or something. So I guess it’s all very subjective!)
Yeah, I do agree with both you and the above commenter that “artificial” is a bad word for it. Like, that particular bit of punishment drove me nuts, but there are a lot of the hard-for-hard’s-sake elements of the game I really like - just, for some reason that one crossed some mental/emotional line and took me from “Wow, these mechanics are good but really unforgiving” to “Hey, that wasn’t FAIR.” But both are equally artificial.
but this right here gets at my problem with the term. i've not played Bloodborne but what you're describing is just bad design. "high level boss beats under-leveled player under softlock conditions" isn't illogical or "artificial," it's just unfair! and i think "artificial difficulty" encourages people to lump (1) a literal softlock and (2) "this boss is hard and now i'm in a bad mood" into "everything on a mechanical level that's ever made me mad in a video game." but (1) and (2) aren't necessarily similar issues! so why do we force them to share a diagnosis?
Think of it like a story: by its very nature, it's fake and so there cannot be an actual "what [character] would really do". But you'd still get annoyed if a character acted out-of-character.
Artifical (or fake, that's a good term) difficulty is stuff where it feels like you're fighting the game on a meta level. You're fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game. Some of it is a sliding scale: most people would agree that a hitbox 1 pixel wide is fake difficulty, but where a game switches from fake to acceptable difficulty isn't set. Some of it is pretty black and white: early video games often had levels that were impossible to complete unless you knew a trick that the game didn't teach you, which was done specifically to sell guides on how to beat the game.
Elements of these can, at times, be an artistic choice (Hellblade and Spec Ops come to mind), but more often it's lazy design.
"out of character" is a much better term suggesting a very different problem that "artificial difficulty" often does.
I spent a couple days on Reddit arguing with people about the Okumura boss fight in Persona 5 Royal. to my mind that was a very strong example of "out of character." it's a boss fight that springs several overlapping complications on the player out of nowhere with little to no consistency with any other battle in the game* before or after and with the calling card mechanic locking you out of the resources you need to get any viable offense off the ground. i wouldn't describe any of that as "artificial" but i'd certainly describe it as out of character.
*not inconsistent with Shin Megami Tensei in general, as Royal Okumura does in a lot of ways feel like a classic SMT boss fight, but certainly inconsistent with the rest of Persona 5 Royal, specifically
forgot i wrote a very long and roundabout substack post a couple years ago about "fighting the choices the coders made, not the world that they have made inside the game"
https://mirutanku.substack.com/p/mikami
"artificial difficulty" the most maddening phrase in all of video game culture
Right, it's a bit of artifice: all difficulty is artificial
As I read this I was thinking that the entire video game is "artificial difficulty" since it's, you know, a game...that's made up...
How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this, but it's kind of ridiculous that a game is asking me to do it." It felt difficult not because it was, but because the developers had made a host of choices that made things take longer than they ought to have.
absolutely agree that there's bad balance, worthy of criticism, in a lot of video games. but "artificial difficulty" has just always struck me as a term that's too general, too hand-wavy, and too unintuitive (video games are inherently "artificial") to get at the truth of what's so inartful or unfair about certain implementations. "artificial difficulty" just ends up being the language of rage-quitting.
It strikes me as a very odd conceptualization as well. As if putting a bonfire directly outside a boss fight represents “actual” difficulty and putting it far away to create more of a sense of punishment for failure is false difficulty. Just a weird framing to me.
I'm curious what you think some of those choices are. Certainly the function of items in Dark Souls is somewhat frustratingly opaque but aside from that I can't really think of anything.
Some might have been because I played on the PC port, which is apparently notoriously bad: narrow and inconsistent hitboxes, a camera that swung around unhelpfully, and a weird inconsistency between visual indicator and actual hit (it took me a long time to time dodges correctly, because when it seemed like you ought to dodge based on the animation wasn't correct).
Long gaps between save points (requiring you to run a lot of content over again if you fail) combined with enemies that are hidden and often cannot be seen before they jump out. A lack of a save point before boss fights combined with boss fights where you have to already know how they work before you can beat them--I wouldn't mind "trial and error" boss fights or having to repeatedly run to a boss fight, but the combination of both is infuriating.
The wonky hitboxes are legit annoying, not really sure why that is except that a lot of games have hitbox issues. Dodge timing is just something you have to learn. As for the bonfires, well, that's a design decision. Dark Souls really wants you to learn the maps really, really well and that's one way they enforce that. Once you have a map down you're probably no longer than 30-45 seconds away from the boss.
I guess it's because I never talk or read about modern video games online but I have never in my life had my mind changed again and again by each successive reply in a thread. In my head it's like the Simpsons teacher strike episode.
Elden Ring doesn't need a quest log. It doesn't have quests!
Appreciate you pointing out the elitist streak among the fandom. I don’t hang out in online gaming communities so I got to enjoy beating my head uselessly against Bloodborne in peace. I have a friend, though, who loves games but has a physical disability that prevents them playing any FromSoft game, even with a specially modified controller that makes most other games doable. The best they can do to enjoy the games is watch livestreams or let’s plays, which can grate because even the streamers will act like anyone watching instead of playing must be doing it simply because of their inability to git gud, and anyone not interested in the head-beating for any reason must be mocked. When my friend wishes aloud that FromSoft were willing to consider maybe rolling out game updates with lowered difficulty settings that their accommodation could handle, I totally think it’s a reasonable request, even while for my part I kind of like the boldness of making a game half-unplayable to rubes like me in a world that seeks the most massive audience possible.
But yeah, whatever anyone’s feelings on the games themselves, genuine assholes on the game-enjoying side of things do their part to help push the conversation to the least interesting version of itself.
Here's a frame of a pro-no quest log argument on aesthetic grounds: automated quest logs (and map markers, clearly stated objectives, etc.) can encourage mindless disengagement from the game's world and story -- people rush through dialogues without listening, they look for bright blinking icons rather than relying on described information, and they either miss entirely or can't enjoy rich details that are mechanistically unnecessary to getting the simple dopamine hit of a completed task. forcing players to rely on the raw experience of the game's world and one-time interactions that can't be replicated demands a radical change in how someone thinks about and approaches something that has otherwise, for many people, become rote and sometimes joyless.
if done well, a truly open, unmediated game-world has the potential to heighten the genuine feelings of discovery, exploration, and immersion that great RPGs can evoke. it could create a sense of mystery around the limits of the game (not everything is discovered and documented) and also deepen your connection to your particular role-play (when did my character write that down? i have no memory of a person with this description, why does my character know who they are?). i don't know if this game does any of that, but these seem like legitimate aesthetic possibilities.
i like games with game logs. but i also want people to try new things that change how people experience and conceptualize video games, and i love that From does that, even if it's sometimes unsuccessful.
What he said. I'm not arguing that NO games should have quest logs, but it's much, much better that the Soulsborne games don't. It makes it far more immersive, and gives the player much more agency.
I am very on-board with this comment. Disclosure - I'm 40 hours into Elden Ring and consider it a masterpiece, I'm about 1,000 hours into From Software games and consider them my favourite dev. I don't particularly like the git gud mentality taken to a denigrating extreme, but I also don't want From to compromise what makes their games so good - which is the sense of mystery and discovery that Brian talks about above.
But the worst part of modern morality—its not codified. Instead morality is whatever someone says is morality. i.e. I'm moral, because I'm a pacifist, I don't kill spiders ... I call an exterminator instead.
It’s classic “rock/rap music is evil” logic. And the inclusion or omission of a quest log isn’t necessarily a good aesthetic argument to begin with, as the merits of its functionality could be argued on a mechanical level of execution and necessity as much as it can be a personal preference of taste (which in itself is self-selective).
I can’t believe people feel the need to argue over the lack of a quest log in a video game, when they don’t even know how to differentiate aesthetics from anything else 😂
It's a kind of secular religion, perhaps
Yeah, spot on. The problem is we've given everyone a hammer (the outraged outburst), and so everything looks like a nail. And this particular hammer rewards you with delicious morsels of dopamine from your peers every time you use it, as they cheer on your outrage and join in themselves.