script wip

Video Games and Difficulty: Accessibility or Skill Issue?
Flyer


	Video games are supposed to be fun. They're supposed to be enjoyed. They're supposed to be open and available to everybody who wants to play them. So why are so many of them so hard? Are the journalists correct in crying for an 'easy mode' in video games? Is difficulty a gateway to players; and is that gateway a design problem or a player problem? In order to answer this question, or least give an uneducated opinion on it, I decided to submit my friends to what most would consider “hard” games and get their takes on what they thought it meant for a game to be difficult. For the record: I do NOT consider difficulty to be something valid in an accessibility discussion. I believe that hard video games are an acquired taste, in the same way you could say bleu cheese or ranch dressing is an “acquired taste.” If you have a peanut allergy you do not go around ordering PB&Js and if you have the deficiency that makes cilantro taste like soap then I really hope you aren't slapping it onto your next Chipotle order. Difficulty, then, is something you inflict onto yourself. FromSoft's flagship game Dark Souls is the poster child of presumed difficulty, and at this point calling something “The Dark Souls of X” has become more of a mocking tone than an actual “hey this is hard”. The Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy, which was a remake of the original PS1 trilogy, for example, had Louise Blain of GamesRadar say that it, quote, "MAKES THE BINDING OF ISAAC FEEL LIKE A SUMMER GETAWAY".


	To that end, the first video game on the docket was exactly that: The Binding of Isaac. For those unaware: The Binding of Isaac is a top-down arcade styled 'Rouge-like' where the player takes control of a crying child named Isaac who has to venture deeper downwards to escape the wrath of his mother. It was made by Edmund McMillen and his team who also, rather famously, put out Super Meat Boy. That too is regarded as one of the harder games, but let's get back to Isaac. Isaac has both a normal and a hard mode. What're the differences? More rooms, reduced drop rates, less health drops, harder enemy variants can show up more likely. All things which game play and skill can work around. Is this an accessibility issue? No, just play on normal difficulty. “Feels like a summer getaway”? Getaway from what?

	[put some shit here from other people who played it about what they think about Isaac like I dunno man fuck]

Game 2: Ninja Gaiden / also Black (actually this shit is honestly hard)

Game 3: Dark Souls (The game is fair until it wants to be funny)

Game 4: Mario 2 Lost Level (this game fucking sucks god damn it / difficulty where it doesnt belong)

Game 5: Ghosts n Goblins (difficulty as a means to scam quarters even in the home market)

Closer: Difficulty is as much a design decision as it is an artistic one. Difficulty is not a deterrent, but rather is an open invitation for the player to improve themselves as a player and to prove that effort can overcome challenges. Subtitles and colorblind modes and re-bindable controls are real accessibility issues, and trying to conflate a game being hard with a game being unplayable to real groups of people is not only insipid, but is actively wrong. Any average person has all the tools available to them to play a hard game, regardless of whether or not they have the actual skill to beat them. Trying to conflate that with a position of “games should be playable by everyone” completely ignores that they are, in fact, openly playable by everyone. To wrap back to the title: Accessibility or Skill issue? Skill issue. If you want to debate this with a real topic, then you should be doing it about modern games automatically assuming that you, the player, have prior game knowledge.