That's fascinating. I have the exact opposite drive for playing games. If I'm not being challenged while playing a game, I feel like I'm wasting my time pushing buttons to advance a movie. Beyond that, games are where I can have things be challenging (even to the point of failure) without it having an impact on my real life. So I can throw myself against that brick wall of an enemy a dozen times, and losing 11 times is ok. It gives me space to be risky and test myself without risking the stability of my actual life. If I'm not challenged, I feel like I could just watch a compilation of all the cutscenes and save a dozen hours of buttonpressing.

None of this is to say that your way of experiencing games is any better or worse than mine. I just find it fascinating how people can get such a wide variety of satisfactions from gaming.

Problem solving is good for our ageing brains!

I think there's an important difference between challenge and frustration. I don't want to waste my time. I don't want to grind. Far too many big name videogames seem to confuse those things with challenge. I do, however, want to solve problems, discover things and enjoy good narratives in my videogames, among other mechanics. And they don't all have to be in the same game at the same time!

We're lucky to live in an era in which there are plenty of well-designed games that simultaneously avoid wasting people's time and provide tools that players who are struggling can use in order to ensure no one has to be frustrated and have a bad time. I'm not denigrating the chill game genre here - I also enjoy those from time to time. But nothing excites me more than a game that's so well put together that it both provides a challenge and doesn't hold me back with bad design, and it seems to do that for the vast majority of players, without any external tools being required.

I’m with you! This seems to be a divisive topic among gamers, albeit one I don’t hear much discussion about. For a lot of folks the challenge is the game. But I’m all about the role-playing, the story, the puzzles, the exploration and discovery. Like you said, I have enough frustration in real life and games can be an escape from that. I don’t take much satisfaction in retrying the same boss fight dozens of times over, trying to get it perfect. To me that’s just tedious and stressful.

I think I used to feel some shame in lowering the difficulty, because I’m a gamer and I’ve been one for most of my life. I thought doing so was like an admission that I’m no good at games. But that’s not really the case — I can play through games at the hardest difficulty but it’s just not fun to me. What is fun is meaningfully progressing through the game in the limited time I have available to play these days. I still avoid the lowest difficulty because one-shotting every enemy is a bit cheesy, but one level above that is usually the sweet spot for me.

I guess it’s not a surprise that I avoid certain genres altogether. Soulslikes, FPSes, twitchy fighting games, pretty much anything with competitive multiplayer… but give me a nice open-world RPG, stealth/immersive sim, or old-school adventure game and I’ll be happy as a clam.

Strong agree, that is why I’ve always been a filthy cheater when it comes to games. Botting, hacks, real world trading, etc. I never try to flex on people or to climb ranks competitively. I just want to relax and have a good time with only a moderate amount of effort.

Any recommendations for fun games that aren’t very challenging? I’m very interested in emulating pikmin now, and would like to find some other chill games.

I don't get why this is mostly treated like a binary decision? I have games for "brain off" days and games for getting better.

I mostly prefer the latter, so even my "brain off" stuff is mostly things like islanders/blue prince, that don't test my relfexes and are easy to stop and pick up later, but in general people like both.

I also think it sucks that so many people never enjoy overcoming the challenge that developers, usually, spent a lot of time balancing. Some of my favorite memories of games like XCOM are coming back from a bad mission where I lost some major characters, but most people just call it there and say the run is over. Likewise something like darksouls where you can really clock how much better you've gotten often by how much easier things have become (orrrr it's just your gear, but Armored core is maybe more accurate).

And on the other side it sucks when you want a game to get harder, but it can't. I played the hell out of megaman X one summer and realized I could no longer really be challenged by the game. I'd done everything I could to make the game harder (skipping basically all items and upgrades) but now there was no way to up the difficulty or challenge myself, so I stopped playing.

It's nice when games strike the balance between the two, and I think that should ideally be the goal of any game. Of course resources and time are limited and balancing little things like that is hard to do well.

You might check out Tactical Breach Wizards, it’s an XCOM style game, but more puzzle-like than % chance to hit, but you can freely rewind after seeing how (most) actions play out, and easily retry missions upon failure.

When I played some of Into The Breach, I really missed the inability to rewind after I did something that didn’t work how I expected it to.

I feel like when I do get time to play older games, save states make things bearable. I've been working my way through Custom Robo using Dolphin on my phone. Been using the touch based controls, which make the game harder to play since they're less precise, and being able to just swap instantly back to a save state if it looks like I'm going to lose the fight is fantastic. I don't need to sit through the losing screen or wait for things to load back up again.

I've been meaning to revisit the Pikmin games. I had played 2 for a bit but then forgot about some of the harder dungeons which I was terrible at as a kid. I remember watching my brother and his friend beat 1 and I hadn't gone back to do it myself, but I did watch Arlo's big Pikmin review over the span of a couple of weeks while I folded laundry which got me excited to play the games again.

I'm leaning the same way as I get older, but I find a complete lack of challenge kind of lame for when there's intended tension buildup and it doesn't amount to some kind of appropriate struggle. The idea of score and time attack targets are becoming more appealing, eg Neon White; it's a sliding scale that kind of lets you invest exactly as much effort and time as you'd like.

Puzzle games with layers like Animal Well or Blue Prince are also giving me a good amount of engagement while remaining challenging. I'm starting to Google stuff in Blue Prince, like if I don't have the magnifying glass for something, but I'm not terribly bothered since I'm just kind of letting the interesting things whisk me away.

I engage with video games as art so I can't make a universal statement. Now not everyone engages with art in the same way, and that is okay.

So what is challenge? Last year I beat SoTE before the end boss nerf and I played Mouthwashing. The former is technically challenging and the later is emotionally challenging. I rode the high from SoTE for a solid week after 250 attempts on the final boss. Meanwhile Mouthwashing send me into a week long bout of introspection and examination of how I take responsibility and whether my internal image of self is coherent with how I am percieved by others.

But another standout experience last year was Thank Goodness You're Here which is essentially an interactive british cartoon. Not challenging at all, but obsolutely a blast. Similarly my GOTY was Astrobot which had a difficulty curve so gracious that my fiance who has never played a video game could pick it up and we could trade the controller back and forth. The first time in my life that I've had a partner share this hobby with me.

All that is to say I want video games to execute their concept well. I don't really care what that is as long as it's saying or doing something.

But in regards to difficulty in games. There was a Design Delve episode on Second Wind that was talking about puzzle design (2023's Cocoon was the impetus for the video). A key idea raised in that video was that decreasing the time between knowing the solution to a puzzle and implementing the solution can be important to how frustrating a game feels.

Cocoon did good (maybe too good? It kinda felt like a sokubon after a while) at minimizing this "solution gap." IMO current darling Blue Prince actually does pretty bad at this which is why people complain about RNG. This would be more pronounced if Blue Prince gave you one puzzle at a time. but fr most peopel this "solution gap" is filled in by further exploration and solving other puzzles until the pieces align for a given problem.

And this is why Elden Ring was a good on ramp for me. You always have a bonfire right outside a boss. Many of my 250 attempts were on the scale of 30 seconds. From start to failure, to restart. It is an incredible short "solution gap".

And this is why I completely agree with save states. I really like Ninja Gaiden (NES) and I play it on original hardware. But I do that for the physical experience. If I want to play through the game it's emulation all the way. Because save states fix poor solution gaps.

My gaming habits are pretty much an inverse of what’s going on in my life. If I’m in a more relaxed state and things aren’t too stressful, then I have the throughput for something that’s challenging and demands something of me.

But when I’m tired or stressed out, I reach for the easy, mindless titles. Those act as a necessary stress reducer. If I tried to pick up something more difficult instead, it would feel just like one more log on an already very big fire.

Now, separately from either of those situations, I also just lean towards easier games or difficulty settings in general because I am legitimately bad at games. The longstanding joke with my friends is that they always want me to stream what I’m playing to the TV because it’s invariably good for a laugh.

You would think with how much I play I’d have built up some sort of natural skill, but, no. I’m pretty garbage.

Years ago, one of my friends who was a top-ranked Widowmaker main in Overwatch watched me play Control. Hearing her trying to politely stifle her responses to my awful aiming was quite a delight. She didn’t want to be rude, but also she was like a pot that was building up to boil over as I kept missing shot after shot after shot.

It remains a fond memory between us, and when I brought it up recently, she said “you know I love you, but I could out aim you left-handed and blindfolded.”

So, whenever you play a game and it lets you pick “Casual” for your difficulty? That’s made for people like me. And the worst part is that it often doesn’t even feel “casual” to me at all. That’s my “normal” difficulty, because I am genuinely a living, breathing skill issue.

I respect not wanting to be more stressed out from playing video games when life is stressful enough already, but personally I enjoy some difficulty in my games especially if it serves to enhance the story, or it's done in a way that doesn't make it feel cheap or punishing.

For an example of the first, take Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where you play as a peasant son of a blacksmith thrust into war and political schemes. You will struggle in combat early on before you've leveled up your swordfighting and gotten used to the not-braindead combat, and being outnumbered against equally armed opponents will always be a challenge, but this makes sense because you're not Doomguy or Master Chief, just Henry. Winning fights where you're outmatched feels like a genuine accomplishment for your character, even if all you did was shoot at your enemies with arrows tipped with very lethal poison from a safe distance.

For the second, take Intravenous 2, which is a top-down tactical stealth shooter, like Hotline Miami but mashed up with Splinter Cell. This one does offer multiple difficulty options, but the developer states that "True" difficulty is the intended experience, where stealth is challenging and dying is easy for everyone. However, the game does give you multiple saves per level, and you can earn more saves as you progress through a level, so you can save before a tricky part and keep retrying it until you get it, then save after you finally do. This doesn't make the game easy by any means, but the saves make it a lot more forgiving.

I recently played through The Italian Job on PS1. Loved it. The final stages were very difficult, far from a breeze, even with use of save states. By the time I encountered the late stages I had mastered the controls and driving. So, I'm sure I'd be able to complete them without any assistance given the extended time and energy that was more common in my youth. But at this point in my life I'd rather avoid the grind, continue having fun, and actually see the end credits. Save states are very welcome: I use them mostly to bookmark the start of a level to enable quick restarts and remove waiting time or repeated loading.

A more difficult decision is feeding coins into an arcade game to play it through in one go. I feel different about that because I value the slow and steady reveal that comes with the building up of skill level in arcade games.

There are many games I like to play that offer zero challenge. Heck, the only challenge in a lot of the visual novels I play is to make the right decisions, and even then you can go back with generous save slots that can be used at any time to make different decisions.

But I also don't only like games without challenge. Most of the time I like games that make me feel like I'm making progress through the challenge. Many exploration platformers will typically have skills you'll need to learn to progress, so the sense of progression not only comes through the character progressing in the world, it comes internally from the player improving their skill at the game.

And then there are games that are just a thrill to play all the way through, like bullet hell shooters. Akai Katana, for instance, not only has you feeling like you're a god who just can't be killed when you're on a good run, but it's also got one of the best soundtracks of all time reinforcing it. It's super hard and I can't get through the entire game, but that doesn't make it any less fun for me.

What kind of controller are you using? I have been playing the first Pikmin on Dolphin and look forward to the second, but with other Wii games it has been tricky setting the controls up.

Also, I definitely agree with your post, at least lately. I had not played games for a loooong time and recently started playing them at night for therapeutic reasons (believe it or not). In that mindset, the playing of the game should just be fun. I don’t want to work >_<

I find myself as I get older playing some casual games--which I would never touch 10 years ago, not criticizing them, just weren't for me at the time--and playing more games on the lowest difficulty. Well, most of them these days.

I say that as an avowed devotee of Souls games and tougher roguelikes. I've never wanted grinding for its own sake (I got enough of that in the 80s/90s playing a bunch of JRPGs and came to hate that model) but wanted to be challenged enough that winning felt like accomplishment. But as many have said here already, middle-aged me plays games in my limited spare time for entertainment value, not to check finishing a game off a list. I still like some challenge or strategic thought involved, I don't want everything handed to me, but I don't have the 2-3 hours a day I had in my late teens/early 20s to devote, largely because at the time I had nothing better to do.

The sweet spot of a game for me now is "I should probably lose to this boss once, but not more than five times". I want enough challenge to make me pay attention and care about the outcome, not so much that it's mind-numbingly frustrating. (Elden Ring actually ended up falling into this category--between focusing on leveling and loot first and using summons, I beat a lot of bosses on the first try and only maybe 3-4 bosses took more than several attempts to beat.)

I've also found myself getting way more into tactical-style games lately, such as Into the Breach, Alina of the Arena, and Battletech, and I find myself seemingly buying every deckbuilder out there. FTR I do think deckbuilders are played out (pun intended) but both genres let me drive by thinking and not catlike reflexes, and give me as much time as I need to make decisions. Likewise, levels in these kinds of games tend to be short, win or lose, which very much aligns with the fact that I often don't have more than an hour at most to play anything at all.

Difficulty level is something that I've thought a lot about lately in the games I've been playing. I'm currently playing an ARPG game (Ys Seven), and before that I was playing Control. But I've been thinking about it since I keep meaning to get into some gamedev one of these days.

The way I see it, there's three basic axis along which you can progress towards overcoming challenges in most games:

• Skill - a.k.a., 'git gud. Get better at the mechanics of the game so that you avoid taking damage from enemies, and hit them harder in return. Optimal reaction and button mashing, in other words. This is innate to the player.
• Equipment - Bigger and better weapons and armor or whatever. Maybe the game gives you some of these automatically during the course of the game. Maybe you save up resources (e.g., gold) to spend on these.
• Leveling - In games that have some kind of experience or leveling system, play long enough and your character simply gets stronger. This is innate to the character.

Admittedly, there's also things like skill trees in some games, but I see these as sort of a hybrid of the other three. You get some kind of resource to spend, like skill points, (similar to gold for equipment) and you spend them to either make your character stronger (like leveling), or acquire new abilities you can use in gameplay (new skills to practice). Likewise with the meta-progression in rogue lites.

But together, I see these as forming a sort of dynamic difficulty setting for the game. I think that a well balanced game should allow a low-level character with poor gear to defeat difficult challenges on player skill alone, if the player is spectacularly good. And for the mortals among us (I certainly include myself here), coming back and trying again with new gear can often help. And if all else fails, there's always grinding out some more levels until the numbers are on your side. (And were grinding is best if you have some interesting avenue for doing it anyway, like a good side quests.)

Effectively, I find I enjoy games where challenges start off very difficult and allow awesomely talented players to show off their skill (e.g., beating a boss early, speed runs, sequence breaking, reverse boss sequences), and then become progressively easier until just about anyone can beat them. Kind of a dutch auction of skill vs. game progression.

The frustration danger zone for me is when these three become static. I.e., there's no leveling system, I've grabbed all the gear upgrades I can at this point (and any more are gated by progression), and I've topped out on mechanical skill as a player.

(All that said, I have been appreciating games that give no-judgement options for fine-grain control of difficulty. I think I first saw this in Celeste, where the accessibility menu had options for things like invincibility, bouncing out of pits, and infinite dash jumps. It was nice to be able to turn those on and let my youngest kid have fun just running through without getting frustrated and constantly asking me to get them through a tough area. More recently, I noticed that Control also had accessibility options for invincibility, auto-aim, and one-shot kills.)

I guess I'm the opposite of you in some respects. I like to hone in on a single, often very challenging title for a while and explore the depths of what can be done in it. It matters a lot how that challenge is constructed though whether I will want to stick with it. I kind of think of it like a mini sport - it's the fun of learning, of change and growth, with the reward at the end being that you can do wild, cool shit like it's nothing. There's an element of teamwork too - a big, difficult game brings folks together a bit, discussing tactics and strategy, working out methods/technique, etc. All the fun you get out of many games with a lesser demand, I get from having practiced the one or two with a higher demand, maybe is a way to put it. I don't have to think a whole lot when I fire up Monster Hunter, Elden Ring, STALKER, etc, because I've learned those games well and know what to do in them. They're like dances, each has a set of moves that flow into one another differently depending on what you're facing. When you know the moves and can keep pace, the demand disappears because your focus isn't on its particulars anymore. While I can certainly enjoy something with a lesser demand (like Pikmin, I did like Pikmin), I will always come back to these more difficult experiences because their difficulty ensures the dance will feel good to do.

I love emulation, but I don’t like how “janky” it can be. I don’t like that it doesn’t 100% emulate (pun intended) the “feel” of playing on original hardware.

But boy, oh boy, do I loooooove save states.

I was almost certain a modded Wii would get you the best of both worlds: being able to play with original hardware and have save states. But against all my expectations, homebrew doesn’t have an option for save states for Wii and GC games… that would’ve been perfect. 😢

I am a cheater.

Not always, but routinely.

I play Minecraft on survival most of the time, but I turn off mob spawning because I hate it. I play survival because I like the farming aspect and hunger. But I hate hate hate the mobs. I drop into creative routinely, but..... I don't just grab everything. I do grab tools "for free", but for the most part, I legitimately harvest stuff. That said, I will cheat more of some things if I'm building and run out. But I tend to harvest and replant and mine for stuff. Mostly.

Other games I play I often - but not always - use cheats. And I don't feel bad about it at all.

GTA 5 for example - good game, and I played through the missions until I got a little bored of some of them and kind of lost track of what I was supposed to do next. Not that I've played in a few months, but I go through spells. But for me, I like driving around, making my own games. I childishly like the police-type mods, but I haven't installed one in a couple of years. Current backup computer can't handle the game anyway, so I'm forced to play a couple of others - like Minecraft and American Truck Simulator.

I hate most console games. I prefer open-world, and I tend to prefer games with mods and cheats. lol.

I love Age of Empires - every single one of those in the series. And I do play that legitimately sometimes, although I hate the missions without bases. But most of the time I play custom games where I want to build up a city - and base - that I defend from attack. But I wish there was a game that was AoE plus Simcity. I wantto build my cities. But also have combat. But also be able to have a game with modern combat like the original Command and Conquer (I hate fantasy war vehicles for the most part, even if I did play tons of Red Alert II and III back in the day lol)

I play Simutrans because it scratches about 10% of the SimCity-style itch, but as a transporation simulator, I play on"freeplay" mode (no financial worries) - and makemy own goals of trying to transport all the passengers andgoods in all the industry chains - which is actually a very difficult goal to achieve. heh. But I use it non-optimally as a freeway simulator and train set.

I know part of my problem is that I was a high-IQ child, and folks like me didn't struggle in school with learning, so a lot of us tend to avoid difficult things. So I'm lame, but it's not all my fault. lol.

But that discussion aside..... I know what I like to have fun, and I'm glad others have plenty of things they find fun. The more options, the merrier, I say!