I'll preface this by noting that I've always felt pretty strongly that for
any single-player video game whatsoever, it is
entirely the player's right to cheat. If I have decided that I like some things about a game but prefer to skip others, then I feel like I have the right to tune my experience and get rid of those parts I don't like--as long as that doesn't affect anyone else. I don't consider cheating in multiplayer games or to get the high score in a leaderboard OK, because that involves ruining other people's fun. But single-player cheating is fine, because at worst the cheater is only ruining the game for themselves, and at
best they're creating an experience better tailored for them than the designers themselves could ever have done.
That being said,
every time I hear about some game from some developer having an easy, skate-through-the-game, be-invincible, mode or feature, I feel something about that news, and it's not a positive something. Rationally, I shouldn't feel like there's anything wrong with it, because as I just stated above I think it's any player's right to decide how they want to play the game, how hard or easy they want to make it, so on and so forth. But I still
do. Whenever news like that comes with a comment section, I often find myself rifling through those comments or that forum thread searching for someone who feels the same thing I do, and has the
words to express just what exactly it is I'm feeling and why. I never find it.
There are usually only two sides to the argument for or against a "
baby mode"
being included in a game, and they basically tend to go something like this:
For: Games should be more inclusive and accessible so more people can enjoy this wonderful newish medium. It doesn't affect people who
want to play the harder version of the game because that version is still there for them to enjoy. Some people don't want to play a hard game, they just want to have a good time.
Against: This game isn't for kids (even if it literally is)! I'm a hardcore gamer and don't get to brag about beating this game legitimately because you can see the same ending just by auto-steering! This easy mode isn't the way the game was
designed to be experienced! The game isn't the same without its difficulty and people who play the easy mode aren't getting the
real experience of playing.
So my problem is that rationally I agree with the arguments
for any given game to have a stupid-easy mode, but emotionally I'm pulled in the exact opposite direction, and I don't really fully understand why.
To give a concrete example, let's talk about Pokemon. I enjoy some aspects of Pokemon and not others. I play it entirely as an abnegatory (in
this sense) single-player experience, with no online or multiplayer business whatsoever, so I have no reservations to cheating using save editors like PKHeX and so on. The two things I find least enjoyable in a Pokemon game are grinding (i.e., walking around a grass patch endlessly until my party is the right level) and having to try over and over again to catch something, with the possibility of failure. So, to mitigate those and enjoy a game I've played dozens of times before on my own terms, I'll save edit myself a supply of master balls to not have to worry about catching things, and rare candies to be used sparingly when I feel like the game is trying to force me to grind, and then not have to do that. Obviously since I consider it OK for me to do that, I'd consider it equally fine for anyone else in the world to do the same thing, or to do some other combination of cheating to make their single-player game of Pokemon a more enjoyable experience for them personally.
But this is the weird thing: If, when I started a new Pokemon game up, it came up with an option to have pokeballs always catch things and start with an unlimited number of rare candies, I would be upset about it. There's just something different about having it plainly in my face as a "
default"
option that the game designers included for anyone to do from the start, that would make it feel
wrong, even though it's exactly the same thing that I would be doing for myself with cheating. Even if you altered the easy mode a bit to account for my "
use rare candies sparingly"
by giving the player some smaller number of them at certain points in the game if they chose this mode instead of an unlimited number at any time, I still don't think I'd be happy about it.
I think maybe there's something different about cheating, where I
know what I'm doing is illegitimate and against what the designers really intended me to do, so if my cheating results in a lesser experience than someone else then it's entirely my own fault and not the designers. Maybe I do fall in line with people who feel like difficulty is supposed to be a part of a game's design, but whenever someone tries to express that feeling it tends to come across somehow as "
I'M A HARDCORE GAMER AND WANT TO FEEL SUPERIOR BECAUSE I ACCOMPLISHED THE HARD THING"
, which isn't
at all what I feel. To me it's not about the sense of personal accomplishment from beating something hard or some kind of competitiveness with other people playing the same single-player game, because obviously playing the harder modes on a game with an easier mode can supply the former and I'm an
extremely non-competitive player in general. But I still feel something to that effect, even when the developers and supporters of the decision assure everyone in earshot that the easy-mode
is an intended part of the experience in one way or another, because after all it's
their game that
they made.
I really wonder if anyone else feels the way I do about this, or if I'm just crazy. Maybe there's a better explanation for it than I can give somewhere out there, and I just haven't seen it yet.
____________________________
109th Skywatcher
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[Last edited by Xindaris at 12-03-2017 09:52 PM]