Guilty over playing my current video games on the easiest settings.

Heh, right now I'm working on Star Wars Battle Front 2 and getting certain permanent medal bonuses just so the battles I face in campaign will be brought down to my level. And I still expect to fail repeatedly. Just not as bad as I was without them.

I play Alpha Centauri on the second difficulty setting with Lady Deirdre Skye and go for Transcendent victory, mainly because every time I really want to do that, I manage it. I love snatching victory from that bastard Yang as he is usually the only other main leader left who has a chance of winning by that point. I am also rather crappy at running a combat-focused army.

See, it's funny how I can't wrap my head around this. Even when I was an easily amused child I refrained from activating invincibility codes and the like because I said "What's the point?". It stops becoming a game and becomes a toy.

Not that I'm calling anyone out for doing it or anything. People can do whatever they want. It's just such an... Alien concept to me.

Bleye knows Sabers.

When I said "challenge", I mean an actual challenge. An invincibility cheat makes things too easy for me to actually have fun with it. (I tried that with Starcraft, once. It pretty much spoiled the game for me.)

It's always about finding that balance point between too easy and too hard.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Okay, so after playing Great Fairy Wars with friends on a Skype call, I've been able to pinpoint more accurately what's the deal between me and this aspect:

This fails to captivate me or make me want to continue trying until I've finally succeeded because I perceive such a thing as work. It often feels like the goalposts have been moved after I have an "aha!" moment (to quote the Extra Credits video again), since one usually isn't sufficient to get me moving forward significantly. It often feels as if there's too much work to be under-rewarded.

Unless you're doing them in a professional circuit, games don't reward players nearly well enough. Luckily there's lots of players who just love the challenge, but overall they're just ways to kill time. Unless you're looking for concepts and ideas to work with, they're just fun.

From what it sounds like, you dislike it when the game seems focused on finding the developers' "one true way" of getting through an obstacle. Does thi sound right, or am I projecting my own pet peeves on you words?

edited 8th Jul '13 4:15:15 PM by Novis

You say I am loved, when I don’t feel a thing. You say I am strong, when I think I am weak. You say I am held, when I am falling short.

The alternatives are to not hint that success is somehow possible or ensure that the progress requirements encompass every single thing a player might do. You're in luck if the latter is what you want since the industry mainstream has been on that path for a while.

Except even then, you don't generally win by incorporating moves from different methods of doing the task. You still wind up having to pick one method and stick with it unless you really want to work even harder than you should.

That there is part of what I dislike in difficulty - finding the method should ideally be enough for me since I was smart/skillful enough to find it, but in really difficult games that's often not the case, as refinements - or even a total rewrite of the method - as well as when actually executing the method is hard, that's where difficulty starts failing to hold my interest and starts interfering negatively with fun.

The former would very probably make things even worse for me; as for the latter...yeah, I'm pretty sure I'd find that to be a pretty good experience.

That's...kind of about right. I seem to dislike spending a long time piecing together a method for getting past an obstacle because it doesn't really feel satisfying to me due to the way I see such a thing - when one discovery might not mean much, and you need several of them to get somewhere, it feels like work. Basically, if a developer's one true solution for a certain obstacle is long, complex and difficult, it bores me.

Update: A brief story that might explain almost everything.

In mid-2012 I was an avid player of a certain online-centric video game, tempered by a constant desire to win in any matvhes I'd play. The more I played my (often very skilled) friends, the more I'd demand better performances from myself. This lasted for several months until August, when I stopped playing that game, from the height of an intensely stressed and burnt the fuck out self. From there on, especially after hopping from game to game a few times, where I did notice skill and playstyle demands from numerous players in different games, I ended up apparently developing an aversion for skill demands, regardless of their source: whether they're from other players or the games themselves, for example. And this seems to be basically why I can't enjoy most forms of challenge in my games nowadays.

edited 12th Jul '13 12:52:54 AM by AngelG55th

Oh god, it's happening again.

Although I have managed to escape most of my skill level-related pressures, and even managed to start a process of embracing Easy Mode as a whole, I continue to have a very low opinion of myself as a gamer, since I can only think of negative things about myself. Here are some of them, in "internal monologue" form:

If you choose to embrace Mercy Mode and all its perks...

• You will become deluded with power if you do not challenge yourself. When you cheat or avoid humans in multiplayer games, for example, you seclude yourself in your own world and place yourself at odds with the reality of those games as a whole.
• You will grow dependent on cheats and/or Easier Than Easy modes and eventually become increasingly spoiled and intolerant of challenge. Vicious cycle ensues.
• You are clearly an anomaly among gamers. No offense to anybody in here, but some of the posts made here only serve to hammer home the point that gamerkind in general thinks that a video game is not a toy, and thus only serve to further isolate you from this group.
• You will never know true feelings of accomplishment. When you delude yourself with power and smother yourself with success and victory, its taste will quickly turn to ash in your mouth as you realize said victories had lost their meaning and became hollow.
• You will never see many games to their end. (poor Touhou)

See? My self-esteem has hit rock bottom. I'd really like to see someone shoot down the arguments above and eliminate my guilt in going for Ultimate Fucking Pussy mode for being the way I currently enjoy video games.

edited 21st Jul '13 2:12:33 PM by AngelG55th

Playing a game how you want isn't a bad thing. Cheating in multiplayer obviously is, but you shouldn't feel bad for enjoying yourself when others regard it as Serious Business.

"Steel wins battles. Gold wins wars."

I like to look at it in terms of how you experience the content of a game. If what a higher difficulty does is add new challenges you wouldn't see on easier modes, then it makes sense to start on easy mode and go up one step with each new play through the game, so that even though you're repeating everything from before, you're surprised by something new each time. On the other hand, some difficulty modes work by taking away abilities you'd have on easier modes... But then it might still make sense to start on easy, so that at first you think you need this huge array of options to have any chance of success, but then a hard mode gets you to think more creatively about how to use more limited abilities to achieve the same goals, so once again you're surprised by what you can make happen on a replay.

Even if it's a game you're only playing a short time because you don't own it, it's probably a good idea to play on the easiest setting so you get through as much of the game as possible in a short time, unless the goal is to show off your skills for someone. About the only other case I'd start on hard mode is if it's immediately apparent that the whole game is way too easy.

i play IWBTG on the easiest setting

Bumbleby is best ship. busy spending time on r/RWBY and r/anime. Unapologetic Socialist

Don't feel bad about it, I say, as long as you're having fun.

After all, that's kind of the point of video games, isn't it?

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.