Difficulty isn't Everything

There’s this sect of gaming culture that clings to the idea that pain is purity, that to suffer is to play authentically, and that anything less than maximum difficulty isn’t good enough. You’ve for sure seen the meme-turned-dogma of “git gud,” flung at players who dare to ask whether Sekiro might be more welcoming with an easy mode, or who admit to dropping a game down a difficulty because they want to focus on the story instead of rehearsing the same boss fifty times. Difficulty has been elevated from a design parameter to a moral test, as if it’s a way to separate the “real” gamers from the pretenders.

But difficulty has always been engineered, by coin-operated arcade cabinets that needed you to die quickly so you’d pay another quarter , cartridge-era developers stretching short games into something worth $60 through cheap tricks like limited continues, and by cultural norms that defined what “normal” should feel like in Tokyo versus in Los Angeles. Easy modes, assist features, cheats, save states — these have all been part of gaming’s DNA since the start.

The Soulslike renaissance of the past fifteen years has kinda crystallized difficulty as an atmosphere. FromSoftware thoughtfully, and deliberately made failure part of the fiction; every death in Dark Souls or Bloodborne makes you feel desperate, the insistence that persistence in the face of despair is the point. That’s brilliant design. But the community around it often mistook that atmosphere for universal law, turning a thoughtful mechanic into a stick to beat dissenters with. Suddenly, to critique the genre or ask for accessibility was heresy, as if one studio’s design philosophy should become the medium’s entire ethic.

Friction in games can be powerful, even transformative. But difficulty is not the sole source of meaning, nor is it always a sign of artistry. Easy modes preserve flow, story, and access without taking anything away from those who want hardship. They help make games into art for all, not just for the elect few who can spare the time or endure the grind.

If you look back at like early games, you’ll see that difficulty was never some abstract measure of honour, but engineered. It was shaped by economics, hardware constraints, and cultural choices that had very little to do with art and everything to do with survival in this young medium. The myth that “hard = good” starts to errode as soon as you get that much of the older games were designed to squeeze quarters or stretch cartridges, not to elevate players into some higher state of mastery.

In the late 70s and 80s, games were not sold as packages you could own, they were coin-operated machines in arcades, designed to earn money by basically forcing you into failure. The design philosophy wasn’t about giving you a fair fight, it was just keeping you just invested enough to put in another coin. Space Invaders, usually remembered as a benchmark of escalating challenge, wasn’t even deliberately designed to speed up as you cleared enemies, that speed increase was the byproduct of hardware struggling to render fewer sprites . What players experienced as rising tension was, in truth, an accident of limitation, later came back into design philosophy.

By the time of Ghosts ’n Goblins, difficulty had become almost sadistic. Two hits killed you, enemies respawned relentlessly, and the true ending could only be unlocked by replaying the entire game a second time. That shit was not a test of purity; it was a design built to keep arcade cabinets profitable. The difficulty in this period was intrinsically tied to masculine performance culture, where the ability to withstand punishment became a form of status . The “git gud” ethos starts here, in spaces where failing meant social embarrassment and more money spent.

If you claim difficulty is sacred, remember that its earliest form was capitalist exploitation wrapped in machismo. There's no artistry here, just economics.

When gaming moved into the home, difficulty's role in gaming had changed. Cartridges on systems like the NES and SNES had severe memory limitations, and developers had to find ways to make games feel longer than they really were. The solution was padding through difficulty, where you had limited continues, unfair enemy placement, and punishing knockback mechanics. Ninja Gaiden famously sent you hurtling into bottomless pits if a single bat clipped you mid-jump. Battletoads introduced the Turbo Tunnel, a speed-bike sequence that required near-perfect reflexes and memorisation, turning a few minutes of content into a wall that many players would just never pass.

Much of what we nostalgically call “challenge” in this era was in fact “content extension”, difficulty standing in for content the cartridge couldn’t fit in. This wasn’t about cultivating mastery for its own sake; but about disguising brevity as longevity. When Battletoads was re-released decades later in Rare Replay, the collection added rewind functionality; an implicit acknowledgment that what was once touted as authentic challenge was, in practice, a barrier most players weren’t willing to climb anymore.

The “good old days” of gaming weren’t a golden era of pure difficulty. They were a time when developers used cheap tricks to make short games seem full, because they had no other choice.

What often gets erased from this story is that easy modes and accessibility weren’t later intrusions, but have been part of the medium since its formative years. Masahiro Sakurai, when creating Kirby’s Dream Land, explicitly set out to make a game that would be approachable for beginners, with forgiving difficulty and mechanics designed to invite rather than punish. In his later reflections, Sakurai defended this choice as a form of kindness to new players, proof that accessibility can be part of artistic intent, not opposed to it.

Even “hardcore” PC shooters like Doom came out with “I’m Too Young to Die,” an easy mode that doubled ammo pickups and halved damage taken. Nobody accuses Doom of being less of a classic because it dared to let players modulate difficulty. On the contrary, the presence of changeable modes helped it reach a wider audience, embedding it in gaming history as a foundational work.

And then there’s (my baby) EarthBound, a game that included a system where if you encountered an enemy far weaker than you, the battle would simply end in your favour instantly. This was a design philosophy that respected the player’s time, stripping out meaningless friction so that flow and story could remain intact. EarthBound recognised that not all battles needed to be fought for challenge to remain meaningful.

Easy has always been in the canon. It’s not a late-stage concession to “casuals.” It's been deliberately added into the DNA of games we now call classics, and pretending otherwise is selective memory.

If arcade machines have taught us that difficulty could be a profit engine and cartridges taught us that difficulty could be a disguise for brevity, then FromSoftware’s Souls series taught us something else entirely; difficulty could become atmosphere, almost a theology. Beginning with Demon’s Souls and fully forming with Dark Souls, FromSoft changed punishment not as filler but as world-building. Death was not simply a fail state, but lore. Every time you fell to a hollow or a beast, you were participating in a story about decay, futility, and persistence in the shadow of despair.

Games are unique in their ability to transform frustration into meaning, where the very act of failing, retrying, and eventually breaking through becomes part of the pleasure . Few titles embody this thesis as well as Dark Souls. The bonfire is both checkpoint and sanctuary, and its warmth feels earned only because of the deaths it punctuates. Failure becomes not an obstacle to the story but the very language through which the story is told.

That is artistry. But artistry is not dogma.

The brilliance of FromSoftware’s design produced a community culture that often mistakes aesthetic choice for moral law. “Git gud” began as a meme but changed into law, a way of dismissing critique with two words. Struggling with a boss? Git gud. Asking for an accessibility option? Git gud. Wanting to enjoy the story without the grind? Git gud.

The controversy over Sekiro really did show just how deep this dumb dogma had sunk. Articles and opinion pieces debating whether the game needed an easy mode were met with hostility. Critics who suggested accessibility modes weren’t trying to neuter the vision of the game, but were asking for a way in, a chance to participate. But large parts of the community treated this not as a plea for inclusion but as an existential threat, as if the presence of an easier option somewhere in the menu would somehow invalidate the challenge they cherished.

Difficulty is not a zero-sum resource. Adding easy mode does not subtract hard mode. If your sense of accomplishment depends on someone else not having access, that’s just your own insecurity.

Naysayers often invoke the “artistic vision” defence, that to alter difficulty is to betray the artist’s intent. But this ignores that intent is plural, contextual, and often evolves with time. Sakurai intended Kirby to be approachable; the team behind Celeste intended Assist Mode to be part of the vision, not a betrayal of it. If intent can support kindness, why must we pretend that cruelty is the only form of authenticity?

Other art forms don’t enforce singular experiences. Nobody claims that you must read Dostoevsky in Russian to understand his work, or that you must attend a Beethoven symphony live to appreciate his music. Translations, recordings, adaptations- all of these coexist without diminishing the “true” version. Games are no different. To argue that Sekiro would be ruined by an easy mode is to argue that games must remain uniquely exclusionary among the arts, a claim that collapses under its own arrogance.

Not every challenging game subscribes to the Soulslike ethic, and some of the most celebrated contemporary works deliberately reject it. Celeste, a brutally difficult platformer on its surface, included Assist Mode from launch, allowing players to toggle invincibility, infinite stamina, or slow-motion. The developers explicitly stated that Assist Mode was part of their vision, an extension of the game’s metaphor about climbing mountains at your own pace . The game was showered with awards, and its legitimacy was never questioned; proof that accessibility can coexist with artistic depth.

Outer Wilds has another kind of challenge, one of cognition and comprehension rather than reflex. The difficulty lies in unraveling a cosmic puzzle, understanding the rhythms of collapsing solar systems and forgotten civilisations. No one says that Outer Wilds lacks “true challenge,” because its depth is intellectual and emotional rather than mechanical. It demonstrates that games can be difficult without requiring dexterity at all.

Soulslike difficulty is not the pinnacle of design, but one option among many. This... insistence that “hard = good” is just a cultural fixation, not a natural law.

For players with disabilities, standard difficulty settings can be outright exclusionary. Someone with motor impairments may not be able to execute rapid button presses or precise dodges. A player with ADHD may find grinding repetition impossible to sustain. Someone living with chronic illness may not have the stamina for long, punishing sessions. Without easy modes, these players are just locked out, told implicitly that the art form isn’t for them.

Everybody should have the right to participate in culture without unnecessary barriers, and if you claim difficulty is locked in place, who exactly are you sanctifying? Because in practice, you’re sanctifying the exclusion of disabled people from the medium. I'm sorry, but that's just gatekeeping.

What counts as “normal difficulty” is not universal, it is constructed. Japanese releases of games like Kingdom Hearts often shipped with a “Beginner” mode by default, while Western localizations bumped the baseline to “Normal,” effectively raising the floor on what counted as the expected experience. Persona 5 Royal’s “Safety” mode exists not as an afterthought but as an officially endorsed path through the game, a recognition that different markets and players approach challenge differently.

This removes the myth that there is one true way to design or play. “Normal” is a negotiation, not a natural law. If it changes from Tokyo to Los Angeles, from one studio to another, then its authority is arbitrary. Easy modes simply acknowledge that truth.

Look at how AAA titles now frame accessibility. The Last of Us Part II launched with more than sixty accessibility features, from high-contrast modes to navigation aids to combat difficulty sliders, and was loved not just for its technical polish but for setting a new standard in inclusive design. God of War Ragnarok went even further, offering more than seventy options, covering everything from motor assistance to text readability. This stuff isn't concessions, they’re celebrated as craft.

If most devs in the world are currently building accessibility into their flagship titles, then insisting that “true art” requires exclusion is out of step not just with ethics, but with the state of the medium itself.

The all illusive flow arises when skill and challenge are in balance, it's too easy and you’re bored, too hard and you’re anxious. For many people, however, the supposed “default” difficulty curve is already tilted against them, making the state of flow impossible to reach.

Easy modes correct for this imbalance. By letting players lower friction when they want, they allow more people to enter and remain in flow. The player who dies twenty times on a boss may never feel mastery; the player who lowers the difficulty and progresses may enter that space of absorption and satisfaction instead.

EarthBound anticipated this when it implemented its “instant win” feature. This preserved momentum and narrative engagement by stripping out hollow friction. That design is what easy modes inherit, they respect the player’s time, ensuring that challenge is meaningful rather than arbitrary.

Friction is spice, not the meal. It works best when calibrated, not when imposed as law.

Easy modes aren’t some radical intrusion; they are simply the formalisation of a desire players have always had, to tune games to their own taste. For goodness sake, The Konami Code exists because of the need of an easier mode. First programmed into Gradius by a developer who couldn’t complete his own game during testing, it became an icon of gaming culture, granting players thirty lives in Contra. The Game Genie, a cheat cartridge that allowed players to manipulate memory and alter gameplay, was so popular in the 1990s that its legality was contested in court, with the ruling ultimately affirming that players had the right to transform their experiences.

Save states in emulators, difficulty hacks, mods that remove grind, have all been ways players bent games to their lives and desires. Easy modes are simply the ethical, supported, and dignified continuation of this tradition. To claim that games lose legitimacy when developers themselves offer the choice is hypocrisy because players have always seized that autonomy, whether studios wanted them to or not.

To be clear, friction matters. The scarcity of ammo in Resident Evil 4 turns every shot into a rush. The deliberate cruelty of a Souls boss turns every fight into a dance. Good friction can heighten immersion, deepen atmosphere, and inscribe memory.

But that doesn’t mean friction is always good. Too much, or poorly calibrated, and it breaks flow instead of creating it. Friction that overwhelms becomes busywork; friction that excludes becomes gatekeeping. The brilliance of modern design lies not in enforcing friction universally, but in giving that choice over to the player.

That’s why Celeste’s Assist Mode is such a fucking great rebuttal to difficulty dogma, because it doesn’t erase the friction, it lets you choose how much you want. Some players savour every precise wall-jump; others want to experience the narrative of grief and persistence without technical mastery. Both paths are valid, and both are part of the same artistic vision.

The story of difficulty in games is not one of timeless purity but of changing contexts. In the arcades, challenge was a tool of profit, engineered to drain quarters. On early consoles, difficulty was padding, making three hours of content stretch into thirty. With the Soulslike revolution, it became atmosphere, a way of turning death itself into narrative. At every stage, it was designed... it was never neutral. Easy modes, cheats, save states, accessibility features have always been present, threaded into the gaming industries DNA alongside the hard walls and steep climbs.

What the “git gud” mentality completely misses is that difficulty is not synonymous with quality, nor is it the only pathway to meaning. A Journey does not need punishment to be great; Disco Elysium does not need boss fights to be labyrinthine; Hollow Knight does not need reflexes to be moving. Friction is one spice among many, and its value lies in being calibrated, not imposed as dogma.

Accessibility does not dilute artistry, but expands it. Celeste proves that even the most demanding platformers can embrace Assist Mode without losing critical legitimacy. Sakurai’s Kirby’s Dream Land was never accused of being lesser because it was kind to beginners. If the most celebrated designers in history can endorse easy pathways, then the claim that difficulty is sacred falls under its own weight.

Easy mode doesn’t erase the mountain; it gives players more than one way to climb. It preserves autonomy, respects bodies, and acknowledges the realities of time, labor, and culture. It lets friction be something savoured, not something enforced. And most importantly, it ensures that games, the most powerful art form of the digital age; remain open to anyone who wants to step inside.

So no, playing on easy isn’t weakness, nor is it betrayal. It’s a reminder that games are bigger than suffering, that access matters more than gatekeeping, and that artistry has never been about exclusion. If your identity as a player depends on locking others out, then what you love isn’t games... it's exclusion.