

Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode - DoctorProfessor
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2010/01/status-and-signals-why-hardcore-gamers.html

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pmichaud
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.

~~~
Periodic
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.

------
anigbrowl
_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

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
ryanelkins
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.

------
xiaoma
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.

~~~
barrkel
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...](http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2010/01/mirrors-edge-what-went-wrong-
and-why.html)

------
Goronmon
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.

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
Goronmon
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.

------
Towle_
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.

~~~
spiffage
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).

------
ynniv
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.

~~~
grhino
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.

------
fragmede
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.)

~~~
DoctorProfessor
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.

------
krakensden
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.

------
yesimahuman
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.

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Daniel_Newby
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.

~~~
lmkg
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.

~~~
fragmede
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...)

~~~
RK
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.

~~~
cschneid
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.

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

~~~
almost
Ideally you should read an article before commenting on it.

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rickmode
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"?

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ComputerGuru
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 :)

~~~
freakwit
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.

