When did games become hard?

March 18th, 2009gaming, the internet marc

I’ve been playing a lot of games recently. All sorts of games; flash based games, pervasive games, video games (in the purest sense e.g. PS3, XBOX360) and alternate reality games. One thing I’ve noticed is that some games are really really hard. Not hard in the sense that, I’m too impatient and don’t have the courage or will power to persevere and learn the important lessons they’re trying to teach me, but hard in the sense that they’re almost impossible without playing them over and over and over and over until my thumbs are no longer in tact, or until I’ve killed myself in frustration.

Hard games suck. They’re not fun, they’re not good, they’re bad in every single way except one…entertaining the people who love to play hard games. The experts, the people who play for hours and hours on end just to complete the game on ’super survivor arcade one life and if you die that’s it mode’ The audience for these type of games is very low, and unsurprisingly so, so why do game developers feel the need to make games, or parts of them ridiculously frustrating? I suspect it’s something that they had very good reason for, back in the day and it’s just something that’s stuck. The disillusion that there’s millions of people out there demanding to be entertained with the next ‘hardest game in the Universe’.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here, I’m not stating that games can’t be hard. I’m stating that if games are just hard then they’re probably not fun, and that’s really really bad. Look at games like Wipeout and Warhawk for example, both games that have a very steep learning curve. You could say that they’re hard. Yes, they are hard, but what’s different about these games is that they’re fun, and the mechanics within the game allow for you to play and have fun without worrying about whether you’re actually winning or not. Contrast that with games such as Sonic Unleashed, where you get a handul of lives to complete the hardest level at the end of the game. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. The last level is probably around an hour in length for the average player and sure, you can gain extra lives along the way. But it’s far easier to lose a life than gain one. Oh and did I mention that it’s not only 4/5 times longer than your average level, but it’s about 2/3 times harder too. More tests of skill, more tests of timing and more tests of patience. So un-fun it’s actually funny. After investing so much time into games like these, it’s both heartbreaking and confusing when they pull out the joker on the last level. In my opinion, it’s a giant no-no.
So when did games become hard, and why are they still unnecessarily hard?

I remember playing Sonic The Hedgehog as a child. I loved it. I played it all the time. In fact, although I owned an Atari, Sonic The Hedgehog was the first game that I really loved and was hooked to. Like a lot of video games of that era, you couldn’t save your game and come back to it later, and you definitely couldn’t continue if you lost all of your lives. So, basically if you wanted to get through to the end of Sonic The Hedgehog, you needed a lot of practice and patience. Sonic The Hedgehog was hard.

So, wait? Sonic The Hedgehog was really hard, but you still loved it? Yes. And here’s why…

At the end of the 80’s and in the early 90’s (pre-Playstation era), games were still relatively new, or at least games consoles were. In fact, they were becoming more and more popluar, but in terms of the number of good games available at that time, there weren’t many. People also didn’t buy games very often. I seem to remember a sort of attitude that if you buy a few games, they’ll last you. You can play them over and over again, and it wasn’t really thought that you’d need any more. That’s exactly what happened. I played Sonic The Hedgehog, Space Invaders, Pong, Alex The Kidd over and over and over, and the game mechanics allowed me to, because they were hard. I wasn’t going to give up becuase there wasn’t anything else to play.

I guess that’s one of the classic money-spinners of Arcade Games back in the 70’s and 80’s. The addictive arcade games made lots and lots, because they were really addictive, competitive and hard. It’s only natural that games that spilled over to the home consoles followed the same formula, at least until they could make better games faster and there was more to choose from.

So why are games still hard? Who knows. I feel it’s a mixture of developers not realising people don’t want to play hard games (especially when they can easily switch to any number of millions of games at an instant) and not being very inventive with game design. Kongregate for example allows people to find games they find fun. If it’s too hard, they’ll just find another one. Unfortunately, companies like Sega still to this day have something very arcade (or should that be arcane?) about them. To me, the Dreamcast was pretty much an arcade machine, from the titles released for it, to the graphics. Part of me thinks that Sega’s set in their ways and out of touch with reality, but the other holds out hope that I’m deluded and they do have a genuine reason to make games uber difficult. Because if they do, I certainly can’t see it.

At Six To Start, we’re all about making fun games, they don’t have to be difficult, and most of the time they shouldn’t be. One of the huge lessons we can learn from games like Werewolf / Mafia, hide and seek and other social games is that it’s the mechanics and interactions that make a game what it is, not it’s difficulty.

Some ARGs use difficulty as a barrier in puzzles. Whilst it does create a problem that the community must solve collaboratively (pushing them closer), it also alienates. For this reason codebreaking is bad, steganography is bad and cryptic puzzles that don’t tell you what the question is, let alone how to answer it are bad. Of course, there are exceptions, but I’m not going to go into them now.

The most important element to games should be that they’re fun. If you can entertain people for hours, I guess it doesn’t matter if they’re hard or not. But game designers should definitely learn from their audience more. When people are sleeping in a lecture, do something to wake them up. When people are being put off by a difficult game, remove the difficulty and make it more fun.

Tags: gaming, ps3, six to start, sonic, xbox360

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