Challenge Accepted: That’s not a challenge
I hate to make it seem as if I’m kicking a game on the way out, but if there was ever a poster child for some of this…
I probably don’t need to tell you about fake difficulty; we all know what that is by now. It’s one of those concepts that’s been held over in design for years now, a crutch that games use both unintentionally and intentionally. Forcing you to sneak past rows of enemies you could dispatch in moments is an intentional use of it, a game that just isn’t coded very well and winds up with difficult controls that hamper your experience has sort of stumbled onto it. You might think this article was meant to be about that.
It’s not.
While we all know about the telltale markers of fake difficulty, we don’t talk much about the elements of challenge that don’t actually qualify as challenge. These aren’t relentlessly cheap, but they’re also not really something that’s hard to do so much as they’re bulking out actual challenges with filler. If difficulty is meat and fake difficulty is something vile substituted for meat (tofu, maybe, since I don’t like tofu), these are water. You can inject a bunch into anything and fill out the size, but the actual content remains about the same.
Ruined forever?
This is just plain good to have around anyway.
I love the Transformers wiki. Sure, that was kind of to be expected, seeing as I love Transformers in general (and I can indulge in that a bit more now, as I just realized both Beast Wars and Prime are available on Netflix in their entirety), but the wiki itself is a joy to read even aside from that. There’s a lot of great commentary on the pages, stuff that I find hilarious to read even outside of looking up specific bits of information.
There’s also a lot of good metacommentary on fandom as a whole, including the absolutely priceless and TVTropes-inspiring page on Ruined FOREVER. You can’t help but run across that a few dozen times in basically any online fandom. This latest change has ruined the franchise forever, and now we’re into the inevitable decline. And while I love that idea, I have to wonder… has it ever happened? Have we really ever seen a franchise that has been irrevocably ruined forever? Or is jumping the shark as a concept kind of ridiculous?
Challenge Accepted: How games challenge you
Sometimes it’s just challenging to keep your feet underneath you.
Consider a simple game for a moment. Your objective is to tap a key as fast as you possibly can, let’s say the letter X. Every time you hit the key, your score goes up by one. If you stop hitting the key for five seconds, your game ends. Now let’s consider another equivalent game with a different end condition: if you don’t alternate between X and C, your game ends, although you can take as long as you like between presses.
Both games are functional, both offer a challenge, and both could be dressed up to provide a sense of opposition. (Although sometimes all we need is a Flash interface telling us to hammer on the X key to waste two hours of an idle afternoon.) But this isn’t the same game repeated. There’s a different challenge in both versions. In one, it’s all about speed; in the other, it’s memorization. If you’re going to think about challenge, you have to think about more than just the existence of same and more of the types that can be faced.
The benefits to free games
I don’t know where I’m going to put all of these.
So I own Dead Space now. Not because I had planned on owning Dead Space, mind you, although I’d always looked at it with a bit of curiosity, that sort of blushing giggle that you use when dealing with a game that you might like quite a bit but haven’t explored yet. No, I own it because Electronic Arts decided to just give it away for free on Origin.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that this is the company voted as the worst in America, which has also been honored as an excellent workplace for LGBT individuals. But that’s not the point here.
What is the point? Well, now I have a game that a lot of men and women worked hard to produce without paying any money, something that seems like it should be anathema to an industry which as a whole is always playing catch-up for costs. Budgets get bigger, player demands get bigger, and how is any of that going to be made easier by using “free” as a price point? Yet free is increasingly an accepted entry point, and not just for multiplayer games. And there are some real benefits to it.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 