Chapter One, this is
The
Hard Part
^w^
Over the years, I’ve learned that almost anyone can finish almost any video game if they’re just willing to just... play the game long enough. I feel like we talk about gaming skill as if it is some rare talent or a set of reflexes that only certain people possess, but honestly, it’s really just a willingness to endure it until you figure it out.
When I was, I’d say six years old, I spent almost a whole day trying to beat one of those secret levels in Super Mario Sunshine. The stages where Shadow Mario would snatch away your FLUDD right at the start, leaving you with nothing but Mario’s slippery ass momentum and a series of floating wooden blocks in a black void. I was crying because I couldn’t beat it at all; I’d get close but never complete it. My mum had never played a video game in her life; her entire exposure to Mario at that point was occasionally watching The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 on DVD with me.
After watching me sob for a while, she sat down next to me, took the controller out of my hands, and spent about ten minutes just figuring out how the controller worked as she moved the character around. She didn't know anything about gaming beside the fact that I loved it, but she understood spatial timing and she had patience. I remember being so shocked as she proceeded to clear the level for me on her third try, and for the entire run of the game, whenever I hit a wall in that game, I would go and ask her to come help me. I’m convinced that if you handed my mom a copy of Dark Souls right now and gave her three weeks, she would beat Gwyn, not because she has any interest in dark fantasy or action RPGs, but because games are ultimately deterministic systems that can be eventually beaten with time.
That gets lost in how we talk about difficulty. When you die in a game, it feels like a personal insult, especially late at night when your eyes are dry and your brain is tired, but it is actually just neutral information being handed to you. You dodged two frames too early or you got greedy and tried to land a third sword swing instead of backing off.
There’s almost a meditative joy in watching yourself bridge that gap over time. Now I could talk about the flow state, but in games, the most interesting stuff actually happens right before you hit it, in those frustrating moments where you’re under-skilled for the task. It’s a process of continually pushing yourself just beyond your current capability by breaking down the hard parts into tiny, repeatable pieces, and games are perfect for that.
You can watch this happen to a friend in real time, where they’ll die thirty times in a row to a boss in Bloodborne. For the first few times, they’re swearing, complaining, claiming the controller is dropping inputs, and blaming the camera. But after a while, they start getting into the rhythm of it. I don’t know about you, but watching yourself improve in real time is pretty freaking cool.
Developers don't design hard games out of malice or elitism, even if the communities for those games like to sell them that way. They design them because friction is one of the primary tools a designer has to give a game actual emotion and presence. They’re forcing you to pay attention to the environment in a way that other kinds of games don’t require; it’s an artform all on it’s own.
If you can get through a castle clearing every room by mindlessly swinging your weapon, then it’s just a backdrop sliding past your eyes while number go up. But if every corner in that castle holds the threat of sending you back to a bonfire, now the room matters, the sound design matters, the weapon swing animations matter, and the space itself takes on a new view in your mind that it wouldn't have had otherwise.
This is why the removal of resistance strips a game of its actual identity. Over the last few years, there’s been a explosion in the cozy game genre, which started humble, but is now really been driven by corporate publishers realizing they can package frictionless comfort into low-budget titles and sell them to an audience of exhausted adults looking to relax after work (and exploit them, too.) A lot of these recent, heavily marketed cozy games have abandoned friction in favor of pure, uninterrupted dopamine loops where nothing can ever go wrong, no one ever dies, time never runs out, and every action gives you an immediate reward. While I completely understand the impulse to seek refuge in those spaces when real life under late capitalism is an exhausting grind of work and anxiety, a game that has no resistance left often ends up feeling... numbing after a few hours. When there’s no potential for failure, your choices lose their gusto, and the game devolves into a chore wheel where you’re just moving a character around to click on icons and watch progress bars fill up. If I wanted that, I’d just play a clicker game.
If you look back at the games that actually birthed the cozy aesthetic, they always had some kind of friction to them. Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life on the GameCube was a nice and melancholic experience, but it was grounded in reality. Your farm animals eventually died, the crops would wither if you didn't manage the soil correctly, the people in your town aged and passed away, and you had to live with the effects of the passage of time. The comfort in those games feels earned and memorable because it exists in constant dialogue with limitation, decay, and effort.
When studios strip away that underlying friction to create "cozy content," they start to kill the very thing that gives the genre its heart. Comfort is treated as a passive product to be consumed rather than a state of mind that you construct for yourself within a set of rules. The struggle against a game's constraints whether that struggle involves learning how to parry a boss or trying to manage a small farm's budget before winter arrives, is where the relationship between the player and the developer is built. Without that resistance, you’re just letting the system play itself.
Chapter Two, where
We
Got This
:3
The phrase "this game hasn't aged well" is everywhere on the net, usually in online discussions, and most of the time, when people throw that line around, they aren't actually identifying a genuine flaw in the original design at all, but rather pointing out that the game requires a set of habits that modern design has spent years training us to discard.
I feel like we’ve reached a point where any mechanic that doesn't conform to the standardized dual-analog camera setup or the modern action-game input layout gets categorized as broken or archaic, as if game design history were a single linear ladder leading toward our current, highly refined baseline rather than a complex web of different deliberate choices. We talk as if they were cavemen building this shit, which I feel like is very demeaning.
I remember trying to play the original 1999 Silent Hill a half decade ago, and for the first twenty minutes, I was miserable and constantly pressing left on the d-pad and watching Harry Mason spin in a slow circle. I kept sighing and thinking to myself that the controls were unplayable and that the developers clearly didn't know how to handle 3D space yet (yes, I was dumb), but no. Tank controls were never an accident or a technical blunder; designers like Shinji Mikami used tank controls because when you have fixed or cinematic camera angles that change as you move from room to room, the controls would cause your character to suddenly reverse every time the camera angle changed.
Tank controls basically anchored the character's movement relative to their own body rather than the view on the screen, allowing the devs to control what you could and couldn't see. Once I stopped fighting the controller and spent half an hour learning how it all worked, the frustration melted away and I spent the rest of it absorbed in the town itself.
You get the best kind of satisfaction when learning to meet an older game on its own terms instead of demanding that it adjust its own to match yours. It’s the reason I can give my youngest sibling games like Ys I and II, and watch them beat it over the course of a month (and now they’re up to Origin!) These kids don’t care when it was made, they just want to play it. It’s kinda similar to learning how to read older literature or watch films from the silent era, where you have to adjust yourself to accept a different set of rules.
When we insist that every game from thirty years ago ought to control like a modern third-person shooter, it’s like we’re practicing a kind of superiority that treats the present moment as the apex of human design, and end up losing the ability to experience alternative ways of thinking, because those alternatives often depend on the friction that we now dismiss as an outdated nuisance.
This kind of mindset has been fueling the remake economy over the last decade, where major publishers spend tens of millions of dollars taking established classics and sanding off every single rough edge until the original character is completely gone. Look, I’ve already gone into this before, so I’ll just say that there’s a difference between a thoughtful translation of an older game and a update that effectively replaces the original. When Capcom remade the original Resident Evil for the GameCube in 2002, they treated the original friction with respect, preserving the fixed cameras, the save limits via ink ribbons, and the claustrophobic inventory management while expanding the mansion and polishing the visual presentation. But when you look at the modern wave of remakes, the underlying game philosophy is changed to fit the current expectations.
While those newer games can for sure be engaging and impressive on their own merits, they usually act as erasures because the industry treats them as replacements for the original works, leading digital stores to hide or drop the originals and leaving newer players with the impression that the modern version is the true version of the game.
This urge to modernize and essentially clean up history comes back to what we were talking about with the rise of cozy games. Both stem from a broader culture that views friction of any kind as a failure rather than an essential component of artistic expression, and under modern late-stage capitalism, where people are routinely overworked and mentally depleted by daily life, art is increasingly consumed as a therapeutic tool to restore energy rather than a challenging form of media that demands active, and sometimes uncomfortable participation.
Publishers have realized that there’s profit in that, whether that means creating farm simulators where your romances can never be failed or remaking games so that you never have to wrestle with a fixed camera or a restricted inventory space again. When all the roughness is treated as a defect that needs to be ironed out, we end up training ourselves to expect convenience from everything we touch, which leaves us vulnerable when we encounter systems that refuse to yield to our comfort.
When you spend time with an older or more difficult system and slowly figure out how to operate within its boundaries, you develop a kind of patience that has become, I think, increasingly rare in modern life. That you aren’t the center of the universe, and that the work in front of you has its own context, and its own historical reality that requires you to step outside of your usual habits. You need to slow down, and to trust that the friction itself is carrying information worth understanding. If we lose the willingness to engage with that kind of resistance; we start to lose the human capacity to sit with things that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and to find value in meeting them exactly where they are.