Games, Difficulty, and Why We Keep Arguing About It
Silksong stirred up the old, reliable debate again: game difficulty. It’s a many-headed hydra, yet internet discourse somehow collapses it into “too hard!! lol git gud” versus “baby mode when?”—said with varying levels of snark. Rather than tether this to one title, I’m looking at difficulty from both sides of the screen: as a player and as a developer. Because when difficulty lands, it creates emotional spikes you can’t get anywhere else; when it misses (for a given player), it smothers a promising experience in its crib. This is long on purpose. It’s a collection of viewpoints and working notes I’ve been hashing out in forum discussions—tidied up into one big “state of the difficulty discourse” post. The Obvious Foundations (That Still Matter) Difficulty isn’t one thing. It’s a bundle of demands: Silksong stirred debate by raising the difficulty bar without saying so out loud Knowledge and pattern recognition Reaction time and prediction Attention (visual/audio signal p...