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@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p71105 there’s just a persistent mismatch in expectations of priorities with videogames re the game/puzzle software program <-> art/media experience thing.
I think every time I make a long post on this forum I run into this problem of perhaps thinking about video games in a different way. I primarily think of video games as ways of playing around. Playing around not as a mindless thing, but playing around in the same way all art and philosophy are playing around. A playing around that can also be remarkably serious. I would disagree with you and say that there is certainly something meaningful that can be found in playing the Legendary difficulty of Halo, and I'm sure many people have considered that journey of mastery to have been worthwhile. People build their whole lives around playing physical and e-sports professionally -- there is clearly something there. Obviously, sports aren't art (??) but I think there is some element of mastery in common there.
I know I spent my whole post making a long book analogy (perhaps a mistake) but in my mind, narratives in video games, movies, or books are all fundamentally different in kind, in a way that I don't know I can do justice to. The dichotomy that you mention is perhaps a limitation of our being unable at this early moment to wrap our heads around video games as a medium, and will more likely be solved by the artists (video game developers) themselves than by critics or theorists. Video games are both games/puzzles, and narrative experiences, in the same way that plays are comedies, tragedies, or both; or literature is poetry, prose, or both. (But also in a fundamentally _different_ way than either of those things are either of those things.) Like these other mediums also, video games will develop and change over time, and our conceptions will evolve likewise.
**MAJOR TANGENT**
Also completely running out into the weeds, I think philosophy and poetry have a lot more in common than people give them credit for, and even philosophers with a reputation of being hyper-technical, such as Kant, incorporate poetic aesthetics into their writing -- even Wittgenstein's _Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus_, although presented as a book of rigorous logic, ends with the poetic line: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I would argue that 20th century French philosophers like Foucault do so to an even larger degree -- the fact that people share quotes by Foucault are a testament to the fact that his writing has some sort of "beauty" in it. _Discipline and Punish_ is an aesthetic object, and it is so on purpose.
The difficulty of _Ulysses_ and _Finnegan's Wake_ are, in one sense, almost "accidental" in that they are a consequence of the poetic language and sentence-structures chosen by the author, and in another sense kind of "the point," by which I mean that the extra effort required to make sense of it is part of what provides value to what you eventually gleam. It's no fun if someone just tells you something -- it sticks more if they encourage you to find out for yourself. I think Plato wrote his dialogues in the same way, and one could argue that Foucault had a similar idea. (I'm no Foucault expert -- don't even like him much at all -- but the books of his I've read seem to me to be structured as a sort of meandering journey rather than a textbook.)
To tie this back into video games, often the emotional payoff at the end of a game is not just the fact that you watched a good story unfold, but that you actively participated in pushing that story forward -- in a sense, achieving the ending. This in no way belittles the story, but much like a good story in a movie is nothing without cinematography and acting, or a good story in a book is nothing without interesting prose, a good story in a video game has little impact if the gameplay does not back it up. Obviously, when people judge video game stories in a vaccuum, they often don't seem to have much going for them, but that's like judging a movie by the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. It's the fact that upon completing a Final Fantasy for example, people feel that they have accomplished something, gone on a personal journey with the characters, that really matters in the end; not whether the writing is naturalistic, or the pacing up to the standard of whatever formula of pacing one chooses to apply.
I realize that that previous paragraph doesn't have much to do with difficult per se, but just with there being any amount of friction or interaction at all. But I can see how different levels of friction could work best with certain types of stories, in a way where I can totally understand the developers of _Dark Souls_ (as an example) feeling that the story would not resonate so well if the player were not challenged in a significant way. We can disagree as to whether this is true or not, or what the range of "significant difficulty" is, but I am inclined to leave it up to the designers themselves to determine, while also accomodating what I said earlier regarding accessibility features that allow everyone to _play_ but not necessarily beat the game.
I know I kind of went off here but your response really sent my flying (in a good way!)