Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode | Hacker News Reader

Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode

pixelpoppers.com

This is actually pretty thoughtful: the thrust of the piece is about status signaling, and how easy mode diminishes the status of the people who beat the game when it was hard. He compares it to climbing Everest, which "hardcore" mountaineers claim is being cheapened by making it safer and more accessible to less experienced climbers.

Something which should be good if the ostensible reasons for participation are true (e.g. games have an easy mode so more people can enjoy them, or fewer die on Everest so more people can appreciate its splendor), in reality are seen as bad because the ostensible reasons are false, and we're just signaling.

In that case, making that signal easier to broadcast (I beat megaman or climbed Everest), cheapens the signal of those who have invested in sending that signal before it was cheap to send.

Another point you could take from the piece is that people love being able to broadcast status signals. For example, adding badges/achievements/status to a social site can boost participation (see Yelp's elite, Stack Overflow badges).

It can be dangerous if you drive away your elite users (who are probably 80% of your activity anyway), but it can also be used to bring in new users and retain customers.

I don't think that Everest was the best example (though it did get the point across). Part of enjoying the splendor of Everest is having a decent respect for the harshness of nature, and the danger of the climb. If you just put a cable car up there that takes you to the top, then you hardly have the same awe and respect for nature. It just becomes a tourist attraction.

This has nothing to do with status (at least my opinion doesn't). The same thing happens with many of our natural wonders when we turn them into tourist attractions. Even as far back as the 1800s, Europeans were disgusted with the way that Americans had turned Niagara Falls from a natural wonder into a tourist trap.

By focusing only on the older fans and locking out the young ones, comics severely wounded itself. By focusing only on the skilled players and locking out the inexperienced ones, pinball killed itself.

Videogames are lucky. They can have it both ways - easier difficulties as a low barrier to entry, and harder difficulties to entertain and challenge the veteran players. This is a great advantage of videogames, and it should be thoroughly embraced.

s/videogames/your_platform|business_model|etc

The problem is when you include an easy mode, you normally don't have some types of challenges in the game. Take God of War, when you go for "hard mode" all that changes is the hit point pools. It's challenging only in the most limited concept of challenging and in the easy mode you kill gobs of enemies and quickly go though the world, in hard mode you stand around slowly attacking the same AI doing the same things for longer. What most gamers like is close to one hit kills with challenging foes and environment not to feel like you are attacking a brick wall with a ice pick.

Now if you add enemies to hard mode, require some sort of finishing move, or add extra ambushes that's different. But when you build a game for easy mode, and tack on pointless challenges it just feels cheap.

PS: One option would be to have extended death, where you "kill" enemies but they keep attacking for a few seconds but if you walk away they quickly die. It makes the world feel more real and adds more challenge without slowing down the pace of the action.

Simple tweaks to a game like increasing hit point pools can make the game difficult in meaningful ways if there is additional depth available in the game. If an enemy has 100 hitpoints instead of 10 hitpoints, you may have to learn to anticipate and successfully dodge attacks instead of just ignoring them. Perhaps, God of War developers could have increased the damage output of the enemies or increased the frequency of their attacks instead of increasing their resilience.

However, I agree that I prefer when they add smarter AI rather than just increasing the enemies damage output or increasing the amount of damage they can sustain. In a game like God of War, the depth of the AI in general may be small to begin with, and there may not be much they can do to improve it. I imagine with God of War, the enemies have attack patterns, hit points and damage values for attacks with a very basic AI that begins attacking the player's character once they are within range or sight.

Upping the challenge in a game may actually make the game less fun, in that in order to overcome the added challenge, you have to take the game at a slower pace or resort to exploiting deficiencies in game mechanics that diminish the immersion in the game.

What makes you think that Easy mode was what set the bar and Hard mode just had hitpoints increased? Perhaps Hard mode was what they intended the game to be like and for Easy they just lowered the hit point totals.

For all the people complaining about how horrible Hard mode usually is - what should it be? Everyone seems to say - they just make the enemies have more hit points, or add more of them, or make them aim better. What do you want hard mode to be?

I would think that to make "easy mode", first you tune your game for the hardest setting. Then, you start progressively removing obstacles, turning up player advantages, turning down enemy advantages, etc for your easier settings.

I wish he'd picked a different example.

Megaman II was the very first action game that I beat in a single sitting. I went to my friend's house on a Saturday afternoon, plopped down and went on to destroy the thing over the course of a few hours, winning with who knows how many lives left.

I found the argument to be pretty persuasive in general, but every time I saw the name Megaman, I thought come on, what kind of person would need an easy mode for that game!!?

Ninja Gaiden, on the other hand frustrated me for the better part of a summer. It desperately needed an easy mode. That game is to Megaman as Megaman is to You Have to Burn the Rope.

This article was explicitly a response to the comments he got on the article about Mirror's Edge, which is perhaps a better example:

http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2010/01/mirrors-edge-what-went-w...

Mega Man 2 actually had an easy mode that was called normal mode. Ninja Gaiden is a terribly difficult game, but it's unfair to choose Mega Man 2's normal mode as representative of the difficulty of the Mega Man series.

"Technically, Mega Man 2's easy mode was called normal mode, while the white-knuckled difficulty typically found in a Mega Man game was called difficult, but it was an easy mode."

http://kotaku.com/5444479/mega-man-10-brings-the-easy

I actually do have a reason for disliking the inclusion of easy-modes in video games. It takes development time away from making a quality challenging gameplay experience. Unfortunately, since the casual market is larger than the hardcore market, it is smart for the developers to focus on the easier modes that cater to this casual base of players. The end result is that hard modes in games generally feel more liked some quick and dirty hack to make enemies super resistant to attacks or perfectly accurate aiming machines, or just throwing more of them at you.

Perhaps if more developers took time to create a well-crafted and challenging gameplay experience it wouldn't bother me so much. More complex objectives or smarter enemies. Maybe that's a tall order, but it seems like in most cases, difficulty is a decision between fun, easy and unsatisfying, or frustrating, hard and maybe (or maybe not) rewarding.

I disagree - you're assuming that there's something fundamentally different about the easy mode (different AI, for example), but that simply isn't the case for most games.

Most "easy" modes really just multiply the damage you do to enemies, or nerf the damage they do against you. Look at, say, Call of Duty, a game that can be incredibly challenging on harder difficulties, but has a mass-appeal easy mode - the easy mode really just makes you a cushion for bullets, and there's nothing wrong with that. How enemies respond, how the AI works, everything remains the same.

I would argue that Call of Duty is exactly the kind of game I am talking about. As someone who has beat both CoD2, Modern Warfare 1 and 2 on Veteran difficulty, I can say for sure that most of the difficulty is due to the exact reasons I mentioned. More enemies with more health and better accuracy. Beating the game on Veteran was more about figuring out hacks to the game mechanics (knowing when to rush through enemy fire to reach the point that stops enemy respawns) than due to any true challenge with the combat.

One of the few examples of where good challenge was added was the point in the first Modern Warfare where you have to make a long distance sniper shot. On the harder difficulty settings, the wind and other factors were more pronounced, making the shot much more difficult, but in an interesting and challenging way instead of a more frustrating way. Unfortunately the rest of the game was filled with enemies with x-ray vision and what seemed like heat-seeking grenades.

It's not that there is something fundamentally different about the easy mode, it's that the developer spends most of their time making sure the default mode works.

In other words, it's not that easy mode just divides the damage you receive, it's that hard mode becomes easy mode with a damage multiplier.

I feel compelled to bring up what I believe to be a solid counterpoint to the "if you don't like Easy Mode, then just don't play it" mantra detailed in the post:

Halo 3's Legendary Campaign vs. Halo 1 and 2's Legendary Campaigns.

For those unfamiliar with the campaign gameplay of the Halo Trilogy (and those who might need a refresher), each of the three titles had four different difficulty modes for campaign play: Easy, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary (order representing increases in difficulty).

Keeping in mind that each of the three titles had these same names for the campaign difficulty level (and that when you play either Halo 2 or Halo 3 on Xbox Live, the highest level difficulty you've completed the entire campaign for is shown to other players in your profile), it's easy to see how the highest level of achievement might become a status symbol of sorts...

...if, that is, it's difficult to achieve.

Sure, once you got to a certain level in multiplayer gameplay on Xbox Live, the majority of players had achieved that Legendary status symbol anyway. But even then, it often simply meant those who hadn't were relegated to a lower echelon of respect.

So there's your status element for Halo's difficulty modes.

Now, getting back to the author's points on Easy Mode, I'll show why his overall argument (though perhaps quite appropriate for many other games) doesn't hold water with Halo 3, which should make the truth of his claim situational at best.

Rather than the author's example of the game developers adding an Easy Mode where there was none in previous installments, Halo 1 and 2 already had Easy Modes, so one obviously can't complain about its inclusion in Halo 3. (Well, to be fair, many have complained that EACH of the difficulty levels was made easier for Halo 3, but I've yet to see objective, rather than anecdotal, evidence for this claim. But even that isn't quite the same as adding an Easy Mode where none had existed before.)

No, rather than that, Legendary was made objectively easier to beat, thus devaluing its achievement and therefore its worth as a status symbol. Let me explain:

Legendary is of course at least as difficult-- and, the vast majority of the time, far MORE difficult-- than each of the other difficulty modes. (Duh, right? That's what a difficulty mode is.) The enemies had smarter AI, they were tougher (e.g., even a sticky bomb, an auto-kill on any other difficulty mode and in online multiplayer, couldn't kill most classes of Elites; you had to inflict even more damage than that), and there were way more of them.

In Halo 1 and Halo 2, if you played co-op campaign on any of the lower three difficulty modes and you died but your teammate stayed alive, you could just respawn back into action. If you were playing alone though, you'd respawn at the last checkpoint you passed. This is why most of the lesser-skilled players completed their campaigns playing co-op: it was WAY easier; there was no real penalty for dying. But here's the catch: the game developers wouldn't let you do that for Legendary. If you played co-op and either player died, you both respawned at the last checkpoint rather than respawning back into action immediately. Thus, completing the campaign on Heroic garnered little respect (but certainly not disrespect, necessarily), because nobody knew whether you achieved it "legitimately" (i.e., on single player, where you couldn't exploit the lack of penalty for dying) or not. Legendary, however, could ONLY be completed legitimately. It meant something concrete.

Except on Halo 3.

For the third game, the developers decided to allow players the same exploit in Legendary that had only previously existed in Easy, Normal, and Heroic-- thus robbing Legendary of its significance as an achievement. After all, the metrics for how good you are at the game in general are a) kills and b) lack of deaths. Remove the latter from the equation, and Legendary becomes...well, no longer legendary.

Prescribe whatever reasons you wish for this decision by the developers, but I'm willing to bet you'll face an uphill battle if your reasons are the same as the author's in his Mega Man X Easy Mode hypothetical.

As you pointed out, the other Halos had an easy mode. Your argument seems tangential to the author's. You just think they made hard mode too easy (perhaps another level of difficulty would have been in order, since they presumably shifted all the difficulties down because of market research).

Don't see how this conflicts with the author's point. The author stated, "Giving an Easy Mode to the people who need or want it has no effect on the play experience of those who don't use it."

However, in your example, they made Halo 3's hard mode easier. That's not the situation the author was referencing.

I disagree with the author's fundamental assumption that games (and mountain climbing) are fundamentally about experience, and that pretty much undercuts everything else in this article. To say that climbing Everest is about experiencing nature is actually absurd. People climb Everest because it is an accomplishment that is as much about personal triumph as it is about experiencing nature. If the trek is modified to require no personal growth, it is no longer the same trek. The author's cool approach to the subject allows him to convincingly deconstruct the hardcore perspective, but when I look at what remains after he's done, I am not convinced that it is gaming.

TL;DR: The logical extension of the article is that someone who watches a real-time movie of people climbing Everest has a similar experience to those actually climbing Everest, and should be allowed to claim that they too have climbed Everest. In my opinion the author does a disservice to us all by making a convincing argument of this.

If no one knew or cared about the difficulty in climbing everest at all except those who climbed it, climbing everest would no longer have near the status that it does.

He argues that hardcore gamers don't want an easy mode because it makes completing the game more of a status signal, however, the lack of an easy mode reduces the audience that is even aware of the game.

Completing a hardcore game that nobody knows about doesn't give the gamer any status at all.

He's not making the argument that people who climb everest by riding an pressurized elevator with an oxygen supply should be able to claim they climbed everest, but the fact that there is an elevator shouldn't logically diminish the status conveyed to actual climbers of everest.

The author closes using another Nerd Culture favorite of Firefly as his example. I watched an bad cam of the Firefly movie on my netbook and the video and audio both kept dropping out. Anyway, I thought it was a terrible movie.

But wait a second, you say, I was watching a bad cam on a tiny screen. Well, yeah, but the story's the same, no? My total experience of the movie, (arg! wtf? stupid half-broken rar files stupid torrent software, etc) contributed to my total impression of the movie. If I'd got to a theater opening night and there a few dressed up in costumes and the crowd was buzzing with excitement, my opinion of the movie might be higher.

Not having an easy mode on video games is like saying 'can only be watched on a big screen'. Theres a sense of accomplishment and pride by the end of the game that, if you were wanting to share in the experience with, that, as some see it, a minimum level of difficulty is required.

(For the record, I did rather like the Firefly movie.)

I had to read your comment a few times because while you seem to be arguing that Easy can dilute a game's experience and ruin it for a player, your analogy appears to make the exact opposite point.

You describe a frustrating experience in which you had to work very hard to experience the content, and as a result you didn't care much for it, and posit another experience in which the content is far more accessible and the experience is shared with a wide audience, and assume you'd enjoy this better. I'm with you that far.

And then - if I'm reading correctly - you suggest that the frustrating experience is Easy Mode, and the accessible one is Hard Mode? This is where you lose me.

If I'm trying to play a game I've heard good things about, my experience can certainly be soured by a high level of frustration. And I'd probably like a game more if I can share the experience with other people who like it. To me, these are both arguments in favor of Easy Mode.

I'm not sure his examples are particularly good. Video games are vastly more affordable than pinball machines, offer more things to do, are more visually interesting, etc.

Comic books losing was also pretty much inevitable. Thirty years of backstory, infrequent (once a month- that's a year to a 14 year old) releases, you can finish one in ten minutes. Sure, video games are much more expensive. But they last so much longer.

This is besides the point but the Megaman X series is much more fun than the "classic" series. I wish they would remake some of those.

Doctor Professor is wrong. Including Easy Mode is a catastrophic design flaw.

It should be a choice between Normal Mode and Flaming Death Mode.

Marketing, people. Marketing.

This jogs my memory of another game designer saying how some gross percentage of people always choose 'normal' difficulty, making difficulty modes somewhat redundant anyways. Since all of the people who need the easy mode will play on normal, it probably should be called normal.

Similar to how McDonalds no longer has a 'small' size of french frys?

How many people are going to play a game on easy and then also play it on normal? I doubt very many at all, and those who do probably won't take the time to go back and compare the two difficulty levels. So you could make normal and easy the exact same. (Hey, this thread was started as an appeal to marketing...)

Having just gotten the new Tony Hawk game as a gift, I was wondering to myself if I would ever play on any setting other than "casual". I'm not a huge gamer, so I kind of doubt I will, except possibly to see what the difference is.

Also, I just ordered a small fries from McDonald's when I was there last week.

Counter argument, I grabbed Rainbow Six Vegas 2 when it was on sale on Steam. I play that on "Realistic" because it's so hard. I normally don't like hard games, but in this case it really changes the feel of the game itself, beyond just making it harder.

It depends. For example, you couldn't play the game all the way through in easy mode in Doom. You had to play it in a harder difficulty to get to the third area. This was motivation for me to replay the game at harder difficulties.

Someone who needs easy mode might start on normal, get to some point where the game becomes impossible, then switch to easy. (Speaking from personal experience here.)

Smart games will do this for you. For example, Warcraft 3 initially lets you choose between normal and hard, but if you lose a mission, it unlocks easy mode. This way, nobody will end up playing through the game watered-down unless that is the only way they can make it through. Everybody who turns out to be competent will experience the game as intended, regardless of their initial estimation of their abilities.

Left 4 Dead's director does this on the fly in-game.. Having and easy time? It throws more at you, less items. Too hard? Opposite.

It's actually a lot more sophisticated than that. Here's a great presentation from Valve about the "AI Director" in Left 4 Dead:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of...

i believe there is a condom company that makes normal, large, extra large instead of small, medium, large.

Easy mode isn't for the hardcore gamers...

Ideally you should read an article before commenting on it.

The article is way too long.

For anyone that bothered to read the whole thing, did he make another point besides "let there be an easy mode and get over it"?

I didn't read past the 4 or 5th paragraph, but I'll give you the reason: Gamers are afraid of Easy Mode because you alwaaaaays have an excuse for getting killed on the hardest level.

You've got skill. But there is such thing as sheer dumb luck that makes you step out from behind that building at exactly the right (wrong?) instance and you get taken out by that sniper. If you're playing on Easy, that's just embarrassing. Same scenario on "Legendary" and you've got a good excuse :)

The author posits that hardcore gamers are against the inclusion of an easy mode entirely, not just that they are unwilling to play these modes.

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