{"id":54696,"date":"2022-09-04T18:16:43","date_gmt":"2022-09-04T22:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54696"},"modified":"2022-09-13T17:39:05","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T21:39:05","slug":"disability-and-video-games-easy-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54696","title":{"rendered":"Disability and Video Games: Easy Mode"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a disabled person, I spend a lot of time calling things difficult. I complain about how hard it is to get out of bed because my knees hurt. I complain about not being able to reach card scanners in stores because I’m too short in my wheelchair. And I complain about stairs an awful lot because wheels aren’t like, super compatible with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

I also complain about video games. With diminished mobility on my right side, including my hand, video games can be more difficult for me than the average player. But even before arthritis decided to awaken in me like the world’s worst X-Men geneNo no, don’t bring up Rogue here, yes, I know she kills people she touches and all that jazz, but my knees hurt really bad like, often, so…I have it worse, okay? <\/span> I was complaining about video game difficulty for other reasons.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When you have a job and your boss tries to work you to your limit for max productivity, it\u2019s generally a bad job. When playing D&D, a dungeon master who sits down at their table thinking about how best to kill their players is generally a bad dungeon master. When playing a game, large groups of players dying over and over is generally a sign of a bad game. Us VS them thinking can make any task annoying if the goal is to simply make things harder every time the subject in question achieves something new.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

High-difficulty macho players tend to argue against this, \u2018but the challenge makes it worth it!\u2019, \u2018what about taking pride in achieving something?\u2019, and \u2018I like dying forty-seven times in a row!\u2019. This can be annoying to someone trying to argue something is too difficult. But, the issue is, they aren\u2019t wrong. They\u2019re just misunderstanding the point because of what they personally get out of games.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The point of a game is to enjoy it. If you enjoy extra-hard-nightmare-mode then, of course, you\u2019re not going to agree with me that a game should be easier. But in my case, dying forty-seven times sucks all the joy out of it, and so that game has failed me personally as a player. This can be due to taste, in the case of a game like Dark SoulsOooh, two mentions of the forbidden game in two weeks, I better lay low for a while.<\/span>, or it can be due to the game actually failing a group of players. This mostly boils down to if it was intentional or not. My dad talked about the essence of this issue a lot.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If a cute little puzzle game with a great story is set at an impossible difficulty, it\u2019s blocked much of its main audience. If a dark and gritty game about beheading Cthulhu is laughably unchallenging, it\u2019s failed its<\/em> target audience.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This system works for the most part. And when it doesn\u2019t, places like this blog and the rest of the internet can complain about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem is\u2026it\u2019s not a system built for disabled people; it’s ableist. That\u2019s a pretty big statement to make about an entire industry, so let’s get into how and why rather than just calling a bunch of people ignorant without explanationAlso that would be a pretty insane ‘column’ if I didn’t. ‘Haha, video games suck, bye’, what even is that situation?<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

First of all, it doesn\u2019t set out to be, just like so many other things built into the foundations of life, it just sort of is. At some point in the process of creating video games as a concept, someone decided to use \u2018easy\u2019, \u2018normal\u2019, and \u2018hard\u2019 to describe different difficulties within those games. It\u2019s simple, the system works fine; it\u2019s three buttons and an easy interface. The three difficulty settings require little-to-no explanation and pre-date video games in the way of things like Sudoku and crossword puzzles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing is, Sudoku and crosswords only really have one or two axes of difficulty; things like how many little boxes are there to fill out? And how many hints do you getFor the most part, I\u2019m not getting into extreme puzzle-solving here, that\u2019s a whole other rabbit hole<\/span>? Video games have multitudes of things that affect difficulty. <\/span>How much HP do you have? How much HP do your enemies have? How much ammo is there? How fast is your run speed? Do your enemies have a cool-down between hits? How many checkpoints are there? Etc. etc. etc…<\/span><\/p>\n

In our current system, these things are all lumped together on the back-end by someone making the game. High HP for the player, low HP for the enemies, lots of ammo, boom, easy mode. Medium HP player, medium HP enemies, some ammo, slower run speed, medium mode.\u00a0 Put all the settings all the way up for hard mode, and add something like insta-death for an extra-hard-nightmare-mode, you\u2019re good. It takes time and effort to tinker with the scaling but, at the end of the day, it\u2019s just\u2026what you do. It’s the expected system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing is, if you\u2019re like me at all, those medium and hard modes are totally approachable<\/span>\u2026except for one or two things. <\/span><\/i>Because, while I can tackle having high enemy hit points, and would maybe even love to try and play with fewer checkpoints or rarer ammo spots to add a layer of resource scarcity to my game\u2026I can\u2019t dodge out of the way fast enough to avoid hits because of the pain in my hands. If I could just play with high HP but everything else on hard mode I\u2019d be fine, But it\u2019s all one-size-fits-all, so I\u2019m stuck on easy mode. This is just one example. The problems I can have with a game vary wildly, but this is the most common challenge<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Someone who suffers from epilepsy can\u2019t just toggle flashing lights in a horror game and someone with attention issues might want hard mode except they want to keep their faster run speed. Even an able-bodied person might benefit from choosing their difficulty level because they might be really bad at aiming, but love playing high-risk with low HP.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My dad couldn’t easily play games that punished the player with time-wastes every time they failed. He wrote about this in this post<\/a>, but basically, he had an adrenaline problem with that method of gaming, the ‘Do it again, Stupid’<\/a> kind of gaming, as he called it. He couldn’t just put his game on ‘easy’ mode because he felt insulted by being given training wheels, so he’d try again, and again, and again. I can’t even imagine how much nicer life would have been (for both us and him) if ‘cut-scene before boss fight every time’ and ‘long checkpoint walk back’ could have been disabled. More than that, what if there was no ‘expected’ or ‘default’ setting for it to have been in? He would have just looked at it, thought it was asinine to even have an option for that, and moved on.<\/p>\n

I can almost hear him now. 'Why would someone even turn that option on? What are the developers thinking? In what world? Who would <em>intentionally<\/em>- I mean can you <em>imagine<\/em>?'<\/div>
I can almost hear him now. 'Why would someone even turn that option on? What are the developers thinking? In what world? Who would intentionally<\/em>- I mean can you imagine<\/em>?'<\/div><\/p>\n

No hurt pride, no feeling coddled, just options to make<\/em>\u00a0the game more fun on a player-by-player basis.\u00a0This might sound a little idealistic, but it\u2019s happening in some places already. Customizable difficulties are slowly becoming commonplace, and it\u2019s changing how people think about games for the better. These aren\u2019t cheats, they aren\u2019t \u2018edits from the norm\u2019, they are <\/i>the norm. If how you enjoy a game is benefited by it being ‘easier’, there shouldn\u2019t be any implication of \u2018badness\u2019 with it. The point of a game is to enjoy it, not to be the \u2018best of the best\u2019And if being the best of the best is how you enjoy games, keep it up, no shame in that, this just doesn\u2019t need to be everyone’s goal<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Minecraft is low-hanging fruit in the way of an example here since it's so sandbox to begin with. Stardew Valley does this. Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Don't Starve, and Hades apparently all have settings like these. The genres are varied but more complicated difficulty screens are less and less rare every year.<\/div>
Minecraft is low-hanging fruit in the way of an example here since it's so sandbox to begin with. Stardew Valley does this. Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Don't Starve, and Hades apparently all have settings like these. The genres are varied but more complicated difficulty screens are less and less rare every year.<\/div><\/p>\n

The shift we’re seeing with these difficulty settings is changing how people approach games on a fundamental level. If you’ve seen a let’s-play YouTuber run into these, the odds are that you saw them go from ‘how can I make this look the most hardcore for my viewer base’ to ‘huh, let’s check some boxes to make this fun’ in a matter of seconds. Some people play harder difficulties because they love them, and some do it because the game’s formatting makes it feel somehow desirable. Slaying the biggest dragon and climbing the biggest mountain are both well and good, but if you’re not having a good time why are you even playing the game?<\/p>\n

The system didn\u2019t set out to be ableist, no one sat down one day and went \u2018you know what, fuck them bitches in wheelchairs\u2019Well, unfortunately, that\u2019s not true, but at least that guy isn\u2019t the one who started<\/i> the built-in issue here. That\u2019s just a douchebag somewhere. I\u2019ve met some of those, it\u2019s mystifying how overt they get, but I digress.<\/span>. <\/span>But intentionally or not, we\u2019ve landed here, and maybe people like me want to play both the cute puzzle game <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> the game about beheading Cthulhu. People vary, a lot, and almost nothing is one-size-fits-all.\u00a0 Sometimes, even we disabled folks want to \u2018master\u2019 games in our differently-abled ways just like the macho guys do; working within the realm of possibility, but still being challenged to the peak of our own personal abilities. These custom difficulties allow for that, and I’m excited.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a disabled person, I spend a lot of time calling things difficult. I complain about how hard it is to get out of bed because my knees hurt. I complain about not being able to reach card scanners in stores because I’m too short in my wheelchair. And I complain about stairs an awful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,618,55,120],"tags":[624,622,619,623],"class_list":["post-54696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","category-epilogue","category-game-design","category-videogames","tag-difficulty","tag-disability","tag-epilogue","tag-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54696"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54787,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54696\/revisions\/54787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}