This is the sort of thing you ’ ll be used to seeing if you play video games ; a request from the author to decide before you even know what you ’ re getting into how things should proceed ; a way to alter something until it suits you instead of being encouraged to leave your comfort zone and learn to appreciate it for what it is . Difficulty options . Are they a useful , democratic compromise or a specious industry convention ? What does it say about a game when you ’ re asked to pick from multiple difficulty
|
options from the getgo ?
To me it suggests that the difficulty is artificial , that it ’ s just a case of cranking up the dials , that the game hasn ’ t been designed to suit any of these options specifically . But more than that it tells me that this piece of creative work is trying to cater to me , which means it ’ s trying to cater to everyone else who buys it too , which means it ’ s catering to an enormous and unknowable mass which means it ’ s designed for no-one at all .
Obviously it sounds like a very positive
|
thing , allowing the consumer to decide how they would like their game to be but there ’ s a good reason why I used the word specious to describe this system .
I think our on-demand culture has made us so used to having things our own way we can no longer see the advantage of having certain things dictated to us .
Without wishing to sound like a fascist , I don ’ t think democracy is the answer to everything . It ’ s not a healthy state of affairs when every individual in a community thinks
|
they ’ re qualified to influence something they know little or nothing about .
The effect of this indiscriminate ascription of power is to have things unwittingly spoiled by people who have a mistaken idea of what ’ s best for them . Let me give you an example of what I mean .
I know that I like games to be challenging . I like the thrill of overcoming something difficult through perseverance or strategy or skill . Because I know that I enjoy this sort of thing whenever I ’ m faced with the decision to choose the difficulty
|
of a game I always opt for the highest setting .
I figure that because I love a challenge this will be the best way for me to play the game . But when I first played Mass Effect – a game which I ’ m sure you ’ ll all agree is more about investing in the story and the characters than the challenge of the combat – choosing the hardest difficulty setting had me slogging through shooting segments for hours at a time without that much-needed dose of narrative to incentivise progression .
My decision to play Mass Effect on the
|