Difficulty and Accessibility in Video Games
2Recently, it was announced that Psychonauts 2 will have an “Invincibility” mode where the player cannot take damage from enemies. Double Fine says that this was done out of a sense of accessibility: “All people should be able to enjoy games. All ages, all possible needs. It’s an ongoing and important process for our industry and a challenge we need to met. End of the day? We want you to have fun, to laugh, to experience a story that affects you. On whatever terms you want.”
My argument in this video is not to “gate-keep” and tell other players that they MUST PLAY ON THE HARDEST SETTING. I play on Standard, almost invariably. It is also not to shame those that just want to sit down and play a game and finish it; Lord knows that’s how I want most of the games I play to go. But I do want to stress that there can be value in a game limiting accessibility options and demanding more from the player than they might want to give at the outset. Much as the field of literature benefits from the existence of books that need to grappled with before they reveal their treasures, so too does the field of gaming benefit from games that demand that they be mastered before they are beaten.