By David Futrelle
I regret to inform you that the gamers are at it again. Or at least that subset of gamers who have somehow convinced themselves that finishing games on the hardest possible mode is an accomplishment as momentous as say, curing cancer or rescuing a litter of puppies from the 15th floor of a skyscraper in your underwear, or something.
What’s got the gamers’ manties in a bunch this time? Well, it tutns out that several games journalists have suggested that maybe the ninja vs. samurai game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, released last month, would be a bit more fun and accessible if it had an easy mode.
You’d think that someone had banned them from eating chicken tenders for life.
Gamebros have long preached about the evils of easy mode, but something about suggesting that a deliberately difficult game like Sekiro should have an option for those who don’t want to end up punching a hole through their monitor in frustration was too much for these sensitive — sorry, I mean, EXTREMELY TOUGH –gamer souls to bear
And then there was this masterpiece of angry gamer pomposity:
Some of the angry gamers (like, for example, Mr. Fetusberry himself) denied they were “gatekeeping” their hobby. But others did their best impression of a mean bouncer.
Others don’t mind letting the “weaklings” play, but only if they end up getting properly emasculated for choosing easy mode.
It’s worth remembering that these guys — and most of those yelling the loudest about this are indeed guys — are basing their self-assessments as “non-pussies” and “non-weaklings” om their prowess at a game that involves sitting at their computer hitting keys real fast.
Wow, guys, you’ve proved that you’re so obsessed with video games that you’re willing to grind through difficult game missions over and over again until you get good enough to beat it. Ten year olds can do this.
But these guys have convinced themselves that playing a ninja game has somehow made them the equivalent of an actual ninja.
What makes their complaints even more pathetic is that adding an easy mode to Sekiro wouldn’t stop them from playing the harder modes that these guys love so much. It would just make the game more accessible to a wider range of players.
How fragile must your masculinity be if you feel threatened by someone else enjoying a game that you like but with a little bit of the difficulty dialed back? WHO FUCKING CARES?
Some people play games in order to master them, to beat the final boss on the hardest difficulty setting; other people like to play to relax.
I’m in the second camp. And so, while I’ve been playing video games, off and on, for nearly three decades, I basically still kind of suck at them, despite devoting many hundreds of hours to some of my favorite games — generally the sort of open-world games that allow the maximum amount of just goofing off. I almost always play games on easy mode at first, at least until I get the hang of them. Sometimes I stick with easy mode because, well, I just don’t feel like dealing with a lot of frustration. I paid for the game, shouldn’t I get to enjoy it how I want to? Oh, and I was kind of addicted to the Candy Crush games for a little while.
Are you really not a real gamer, as “Gorilla Channel” inventor @pixelatedboat sarcastically suggested on Twitter, “unless you treat gaming as a horrible, joyless job you don’t get paid for.”
Seriously, if the mostly casual way I play video games, sitting by myself or with a friend in the privacy of my own apartment, offends you as a gamer, might I suggest that you maybe just shut the fuck up about it? What fucking difference does it make to you how I or any other “weakling” gamer plays a game.
I mean, Jesus Christ, dudes. Get a grip on yourselves.
H/T to Shitty Gamer Takes on Twitter, who highlighted that tweet about “weaklings” needing to go back to mobile games and got me heading down this whole rabbithole.
UPDATE: I added the tweet from Fetusberry; thanks to kupo in the comments!
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Occasional reader – it’s very common of prejudiced people to think group X is both weak and worthless, *and* secretly all powerful.
Nooooo! Not the tendiiiiiiies! *furious screaming*
@Bina
I imagine that, since these failsons never leave mommy’s basement and have the social skills of a sea cucumber, they’ve developed some rudimentary form of communication. One high-pitched screech for tendies and Mountain Dew, two for Pop Tarts, three for Cheetos.
This has been going for years now. Jim Sterling, a game critic who does a lot of good journalism about the industry itself, invented a persona called Duke Ameil du Hardcore to read these tweets in the tones of a pampered sixteenth century aristocrat. It is a treat. Especially when the duke gets a badly-spelled tweet, or breaks a teacup.
Here’s a link to the first video and the playlist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejh_Dt3z46Q&list=PLlRceUcRZcK39qZKlYcMlwhMVkpIjA35N
Since I’ve been playing life on hard mode*, I prefer to play my games on easy mode. And cheat like hell. I’m interested in the story, not on stabbing a gazillion mooks.
*Do you NTs have any idea how fucking LOUD and BRIGHT is?
One commanility between reactionaries is that they never seem to take any real joy or pleasure in anything at all.
Gamergaters don’t seem to actually enjoy gaming. PUAs don’t enjoy sex. The religious right is built on nothing but stopping anyone from having any fun ever. Nazis think white people are the master race, but don’t seem to actually enjoy all that superiority. I’ve even noticed it with Trump and I think I’ve brought it up here before. He doesn’t seem to have hobbies or love his family or have any genuine non-transactional friendships. He’s got no pets. Nothing.
The reason there’s always a ceiling on the number of people willing to join hate groups is that doing so means you have to give your life completely over to hate and upmanship and dominance displays.
For all the reputation feminists have for being no fun, we still joke around, discuss pop culture in non angry ways, talk about hobbies and interests, post cute animal pictures. You just don’t see that in groups of right wingers.
@BradMoonRising
???
hilarious that they think getting better at video games is the equivalent of growing and improving as a person
OT, but: Where the heck is spring?
Supposedly, the world is warming up due to GHG emissions, but the area I live in seems to be going in the opposite direction from the rest of it. Ten years ago the snow was gone within a few days of the start of April and green shoots were growing less than two weeks in. Now that doesn’t happen until nearly May.
Why is this one spot getting colder instead of warmer … and WHY did that spot have to happen to be the same place where I happen to live?!
</vent>
The SF novelist John Scalzi, in an attempt to explain the concept of “privilege” to such nimrods, said that they should think of being born white and male as the equivalent of playing life on the easy setting.
Relatedly, there’s a South Park game in which, when you slide the bar from easy to difficult setting, your character’s skin gets darker.
Climate change causes more extreme weather patterns, which means that places that tend to experience wintery conditions are going to probably have worse wintery conditions. Overall warming of the planet does not track with warming of each and every area.
@ReductiveChaos Yeah like I enjoy Sekiro (more than I did Dark Souls 3 frankly, which I feel like in practical terms only pretended to have options given how suboptimal most of your potential choices really were for the game as presented) but there’s definitely problems. They were doing something really different and there’s always going to be some stuff that didn’t quite work as well as they’d hoped.
Gator types seem to not quite get that you can enjoy a game as presented while also bringing up what you DIDN’T enjoy about it so that the next game can be better. In the same way they didn’t get that Dark Souls 3’s entire plot was ‘you’ve made us rehash this shit three times and the world, along with our creativity, has been reduced to fucking bare embers and ash’.
I wish I had the link where I saw it, but there was this great blog that broke down a lot of the pro-GamerGater arguments and really teased out the flaws in their reasoning and one of the ones that cropped up over and over again was this objection to games journalists focusing a lot on the artistic qualities (like choice of protagonists, representation, storytelling) rather than on the “mechanics.” The common refrain would be something like “Why do reviews always focus on SJW nonsense rather than how great the aggro management and cooldown timing of this game is?” And it painted the picture of this type of gamer as somebody for whom gaming is a system to be deconstructed, puzzled over and mastered rather than the leisure activity that it is to the rest of us. It manifests in a manner similar to a lot of the other obnoxious gatekeeping toxic fans who can sniff out “real gamers” from the filthy casuals by the fact that they know when a new game used a flawed rendering engine that causes slow reaction timing on your “toons” and you need to hate that game as a result of it and if you like it, you’re just a trend-following sheep!
They really do need to come to grips with is that there are people out there that don’t get the same thing out of a game that they do. Like when I play an MMO, I mostly just do it to make up fun little backstories for my characters and dress them up in fun outfits rather than obsessing about maximum DPS and AoE and the umpteen other obnoxious acronyms that get slung about the main chat. If I have a question about gameplay elements that can ease my progression through the story, just give me a straight answer rather than jargon-laden gamer talk. No I’m not interested in joining your Discord channel or clan or whatever, I just like playing the freakin’ game on my own.
But this isn’t limited to gaming. For instance, I’ve been playing Star Trek Online pretty regularly as a fun niche experience and the main chat is always about how much Discovery “isn’t real Star Trek.” They just can’t leave it alone; they have to gatekeep and push back on the authors at every turn.
I love Duke Ameil du Hardcore ! This stupid macho crap happens every time a super hard game comes out, particularly a From software game. But the whiny complaining gets more stupid each time.
I have had the sentiment that in some games, the implementation of easier difficulty level* have detracted from the game, because the design constraint of being able to modify the difficulty were hard to get around. And I have seen some game where I wished for an harder difficulty setting.
But seriously, it have nothing to do with sexe or character. It’s not a reason to throw such a stupid-ass tantrum for the idea that one could be added. The fact they don’t explain *why* it would be hard to add a difficulty setting to Sekiro is very revealing to me. It’s the same problem as for the Gilette ads, where they throw a disproportionate tantrum while not explaining what is the problem. (possibly because there isn’t one)
I also have seen games made too hard artificially (the old NES games are very often responsible of that). That’s more infuriating than being too easy to me, because you can use self-imposed challenge if you want easily enough, while honing your skill to the level some of them require is long, harduous, and probably not possible for everyone, even outside of the problem of having time for that. For some reason, however, they don’t talk much about that.
Their shrill shrieking also drown out the fact that difficulty come in a lot of different flavors. For some people, something like Final Fantasy 6 will be harder than Sekiro, because they have the reflexes and focus to beat a soul game, but they don’t have the foresight and planning to avoid being stranded without ressources somewhere along the line.
* I dislike “easy mode” because it forget that some of thoses so-called “easy mode” are still pretty hardcore. So I try to get by “easier”.
@ Surplus re- climate change – echoing what Catalpa said. It is messing with weather patterns, making things more extreme. Canada also is like, twice as bad as the rest of the world according to that report that just came out so…
If it were warmer, you’d need to worry about forest fires. :/
re: the ‘cheeto dust’ and ‘lives in mom’s basement’ talk…
I don’t know. I really don’t like it, it seems like a type of snack food has been chosen to demonise (which feels a little classist…?), and a set of living conditions. I’ve lived in basements, frankly I would be surprised if anyone living where I am now and who isn’t rich *hasn’t* lived in a basement. It’s just the most affordable place.
Living at home also isn’t an option for me, since I live very far away from parents. But the reality of housing prices and availability means that more and more people are needing to stay home, and it feels wrong to lump people who are dealing with the shit economy into the same boat as any of the ‘gaters.
I get that is the stereotype of people who play games and who are like this, but like… I don’t know what they look like, or where they live, or how they act away from being insufferable assholes online about video games. I don’t need to make any guesses about those habits to make them look bad. Their words do enough.
It could be just me that this bothers, but in case it isn’t… I just wanted to put this out there?
@Rhuu : I believe the real-life archetype for thoses peoples are actually mostly made of people in depression, who because of the depression stay in their rooms a lot, don’t light it up much, which make their room look like a cave or a basement.
I do think the archetype to be an attack on fragile people, even if in my opinion it’s more toward people in the middle of a mental breakdown more than toward poor people.
(that might be a national thing)
(and, yes, I have known two people who were deeply depressive at a point of their life, and people blamed the consequence of their depression to videogames)
A few thoughts:
1. For the angry gamer dudebros, people can play on Easy Mode to get good enough at a game to play on normal, hard, etc.. Easy Mode can be a great starting point for players not super-familiar with or particularly good at a style of gameplay that want to get into it.
2. The reason a lot of those old games were so hard was because start-to-finish, they have like 30-60 minutes of content. If you could beat them on your first go, you’d feel like you wasted your money if you spent $40 or whatever of 1992 dollars on the thing. Making the game obnoxiously hard and with a steep learning curve basically padded the length.
3. Per the tweet from Ramsey in the OP, I actually think that a soft toy you can pet when you die would be a great promo item for a “collector’s edition” of one of those “you’re going to keep dying” sort of games. Like, a soft, fuzzy, otherworldly horror or something.
It’s not. I was uncomfortable with it, too. It was unnecessary, classist, ableist, and puritanically anti-masturbation.
@Kestrel
I couldn’t agree more, they are proabably one of the best gaming communities out there, plus their Self-Promotion Tuesdays are a great way for people like me to advertise my indie game projects without feeling like a shill barging in to flog my games.
The only gaming-related community I’ve found that are even comparable in terms of friendliness and accessibility is the AdventureGameStudio community, largely in part due to the non-competive and accessible aspect to point and click games, and I recommend anyone here interested in gaming to check it out.
@Anonymous
@occasional reader
Indeed, and it’s sad to see how quickly the manbabies trying to convince the world that games were art made a 180 degree turn as soon as they realized art gets criticized for it’s messages and politics and immediately switched to whining that games should just be entertainment and free of politics, because the gamer manbabies don’t want artists to think that they can use a video game as a medium that could tell a story on par with Schindler’s list or Black Beauty, they want to think their shallow power fantasies filled with faux medevalism, military porn or generic sci-fi and dudes that look like this
are high art and saying you’ve played all Call of Duty games should be treated as an achievement comparable to saying you’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare.
I just find this so frustrating, since despite only making a handful of short freeware games on zero budget, I actually want reviewers to hold them to the same narrative standard as they would films and literature. I’m tired of games being considered the intellectual equivalent of the kiddie pool.
The tendies meme that David referenced in this post is a pretty accurate description of a lot of these dudes, though. I’ve heard some people call it ableist, and… maybe, on some level, it is. But you can’t say it isn’t descriptive.
This is actually making me think about a pair of games from a different studio, Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade.
So Odin Sphere is a gorgeously illustrated 2d action game with a plot loosely based on norse mythology. It’s literally the sort of game it’d be a shame to miss because of the difficulty, and BOY is it hard. In this case giving you an ‘Easy’ difficulty is important because they need that just to set it back to what normal human beings can achieve. This was made worse in the original release because it was on the PS2 and the game’s so gorgeous it actually strained the hardware to the point of lagging it at times (the PS4 re-release plays smooth as silk and has some serious improvements to the way the game plays that make it a lot more reasonable and fun). The game’s still very hard in the original release even on Easy, though, because lower numbers on everything just gives you more leeway and doesn’t fix WHY the game is hard.
Muramasa is very similar in some regards, it’s also a 2d action game (set in Japan as the name would suggest) and is also unbelievably gorgeous. It’s also very clear the developers actually did note that Odin Sphere was too hard and also had a better understanding of what actually MADE it too hard. Your difficulty setting in Muramasa doesn’t actually change the strength of the enemies or player per se, instead it makes defense much easier on the player. On the easier difficulty if enemies would hit you while you’re not in the middle of an animation that would prevent it you’ll automatically block them with your sword, while you have to do that manually on the harder difficulty. They identified the mechanic that would make the game really hard and by giving it variants they don’t actually need to mess with the balance of everything else to make the game easier.
Sorry if I’m kind of just rambling about video game design decisions and difficulty, but this is a topic that interests me.
@Cindy – I’m just wanting to clarify… Are you saying that stereotyping is okay because there is a grain of truth in it?
I’ve always hated difficulty options. I find it anxiety-inducing to be presented with a list of difficulty choices at the start of a game with barely any context as to the designer’s intended experience for a game.
However, as I’ve come to notice in recent years, that’s one of the laziest ways to implement difficulty modes as well. Mark Brown, linked in the Youtube video below, does an excellent analysis of how difficulty modes in games can be implemented, and he inadvertently recommended a game that has since become one of my favorites of all time: Celeste, a stunning Canadian-made platformer game which deals with anxiety and depression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NInNVEHj_G4
Celeste features an optional Assist Mode, which allows you to tweak game speed, get extra air dashes, turn on infinite stamina, become invincible, or even skip entire chapters. The game tells you when adjusting these that this is not the intended experience of the game’s designers, but in no way faults you for using it (you can even earn achievements with Assist Mode).
Celeste’s writer, Matt Thorson, wrote a tweet recently on how he would implement an Assist Mode into Sekiro.
https://twitter.com/MattThorson/status/1113534763564826624
Assist Mode is not for me. I love difficult games, and using cheats or easier difficulties or Assist Mode is only really my thing when messing around with a game. However, it allows accessibility without being condescending (this is important) and without taking away from a core developer experience.