I wonder how much nuance we're collapsing in comparing the difficulty of a boss fight with the difficulty of a book. Is the mental effort of understanding Finnegans Wake in any way similar to that of learning the attack telegraphs of a big demon?
Interesting piece. I would argue for a venn diagram. You raise love to learn, and I would put that in the intersection. I don't recall if Elden ring takes the same intentionally obscure approach to lore as Dark Souls does, but that also fits in the intersection as well.
But otherwise, video game difficulty may have more in common with audience performative arts, like dance or sing along music or I suppose acquiring new languages for literary purposes.
Optimization probably has less overlap and one may need to look to sports for analogies, or perhaps Japanese light novels with a strong economics bent.
I appreciate this reply, thanks for reading. I think you hit the nail on the head with your middle paragraph--to my mind the difficulty of video games and the learning they entail is somewhere in the realm of physical performance, sports, or language acquisition. There is real learning involved and real skill development for sure. But it feels different from the sort of holisitic "intelligence" that, say, high level philosophy does require
Yeah, I think the most comparable point of "difficulty" within Soulslikes wouldn't be the difficult gameplay, but rather the difficult *narrative*-- which does, we know, have its fans, but those fans are significantly lower in number than fans of the gameplay, who often ignore the story (and a significant number of its fans, rather than puzzle through the story on their own, engage with that story via the game equivalent of sparknotes: Lore Videos)
I sometimes work as a substitute librarian in a little New England town. A good deal of shelf space is dedicated to crime, romance, and fantasy fiction belonging to the simple class. I hear frequently from female patrons that if a book is too difficult they feel like the author, if male, is up his own arse and "mansplaining" to them. Of these patrons, one said she won't read Shakespeare for this reason. Another said she was traumatized by Chaucer and so won't read classic literature. Many avoid male authors all together.
Another trend I've noticed is that grandparents must read a book cover to cover before reading it to their grandchildren. They are looking for any offensive racial, ethnic, or gender content that their parent children insist on shielding the grandchildren from. For example, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan didn't make the cut for "readable" due to its references to Native Americans. My classic children's literature recommendations are most often ignored because of so called trigger content, as well as due to the difficulty of the language. They generally end up selecting board books about kittens rather than say "The Underneath," an example of sublime American children's literature by Kathi Appelt. I grieve the loss for all these children and shudder to think about the quality of mind of their good intentioned parents.
I think more than difficult /non difficult it is about the tools a writer uses . The problem here is literary criticism has become so recondite and granular that it overinterprets at times, or creates meaning out of loopholes in the body of ideas in a zeitgeist. Then there are those so rarefied in their sensibility that they just wax eloquent about something in a suggestive, associative way with grand rhetorical flourishes- a lot of george steiner comes to mind. Not to forget popular culture and genre fiction have evolved immensely too - ishiguro, samantha harvey. So i would argue it isn't the praise of difficult books that is problematic but the idea of a genealogy of culture built on a conceit of great art that acquires a grandiosity independent of the specificity of any writer. Melville is difficult by any stretch-specially pierre and mardi, so is late henry james . Yet i know people who cannot abide a single page of proust or late james but can easily plough through spivak or judith butler . I guess their minds are trained to be at home in theory. Abstraction for the sake of abstraction is pointless for me - though it can have verve and linguistic play. But i also hearken to the prosaic idea that language must reflect the complexity of reality than be an end in itself or enmeshed in a self conscious reflection of its own processes of construction. Maybe that's why LLM's scare us wrt AI because language's self referentiality has made a feedback loop coiling itself tighter around its own meta cognition. Like you adam i like my easy and popular reads and i like my tough reads without being programmatic or portentous about it.
My contrary nature longs to cont but I fear my only comeback is that Shakespeare isn't a book, it's the trace of performance. The Bible is a bunch of difficult simple stories. Also performed. Indian literature, I seem to recall from a convo between G Grass and S Rushdie, celebrates complicated lingo (see what I did there (see what I did there)) because it has stong live reading roots. As does Dickens. Difficult work is context. I read a poem last night to a bunch of Glasgow Zs and Mils about bushfires (maybe not Beltane-appropriate but adjacent) that contained references to the Bidhawal people of East Gippsland, flathead and blue eye fish, the Last of Her Tribe notion, manna gums, mass beach migration, and the Australian Settler Wars. They seemed to get it. Their willingness was a big part of it.
I think at least part of our supposed lower attention spans is a kind of self-hypnosis, a mixture of X-es and Boomers noticing their faculties are quitting and the usual putting down of younger generations. I'm going to hell so the world is. Pathetic. Because their sons and their daughters are beyond their command.
We fuss a lot. That's partly US public discourse seeping into everything. Gives me the irrits. Sorry. Phones etc are no more corrosive than TV. Just a stage. In fact, I believe most people's consumption of the internet is pretty much the same as TV. Yes there is reply, but lurking, a kind of voyeuristic wallpaper, is far more dominant. There has never been a golden age of concentration. Look! A chip buttie! </rant>
I am on the cusp of X, so maybe it's my own facilities, but I worry a lot more about my brain on phone than my brain on TV.
The difference is individual engineering. Even cable TV, let alone broadcast, can't personalize to our tastes in the way the internet or phones can.
Scheduled social media / YouTube blockers were a big part of how I was able to get back more into books. So at 46 I am no longer the kids today and I am well aware of the ways I am not as sharp as I once was, but the constant reaching for phones I lament in kids I otherwise admire is a similar one to the impulse I lament in myself.
As someone who spends a lot of time working in both the novel and the video-game industry, I'd say the answer to your final question is relatively straightforward. These are people obsessed with "beating" things. Videogames allow this - you can and do literally "beat" the game by finishing it. And there is much provision for celebrating/scoring/comparing these wins.
But you cannot "beat" a book, a movie or a piece of music - that's not what it's designed for. (At best, you have to settle for ranting angrily about it online or posting one star reviews on Amazon/Goodreads etc - and this, I suspect, is the reason for so many of those angry one star rants).
And worse still, the more demanding the book, movie or musical piece, the less you are able to feel you've beaten it. Demanding art is usually complicated art, eschewing and resisting simplistic interpretation - a complex book habitually poses questions rather than answering them. How much more enraging, then, for someone who wants to feel that they have "completed" the art and, in some way, "won".
I think this is it. Gaming has an approved element of competition, either with another player or the game itself. A game's initial contract with you is 'See if you can do this!' Whereas books, music, painting etc, are, correctly or incorrectly (imo not totally correctly) seen as representative and communicative acts. Difficulty therefore is seen as, to paraphrase, @crambrookpublshing, assholish. Relatedly, and I think this applies a lot to science fiction and similar, is that narrative arts are perceived less as stories than as worlds for the reader/watcher to immerse in. And even tho resistance or artfulness might in fact provide a more vivid experience of that immersion than more generic or formulaic offerings if that's what you go to art for, nevertheless the less frictionless it is, the more it seems to shirk or jilt that expectation of the reader. They just wanna make believe they're getting a window onto a real Enterprise bridge or whatever. Which is fine, but you're talking at cross purposes if that's what you assume of all art. It's like instead of content warnings art should have rhetorical nature warnings: 'This artwork is a non-literal one, with content some escapists might find uncooperative.'
I would argue that this is more of a cyclical phenomenon. Setting aside music because i think ambient omnipresent music has different dynamics than long-form games, novels, prestige television, film, or music as an album or symphony.
Video games have beena relatively ascendant cultural form for a few decades. I did a little searching and one sour ce dates the current difficulty debates to 2009's demon souls. This is an oversimplification, see talk of Nintendo hard or criticism around games that made more money by eating quarters, but among my video game focused friends, difficulty is definitely seen as a tiresome topic.
I think the conclusion is off. People who talk a lot about difficulty in games are probably not engaging as heavily in critical discourse on other media. Whereas people who talk about accessibility in games may make the sane points another media.
The difference is that video games, fir all the cursed and labor crush modes of production, are doing well enough that fans can gatekeep for good (drive quality and some forms artistic innovation) and bad (personal prestige or exclusion or worse) reasons. Other media have publishers that are chasing fans to a greater extent. When video games are being surpassed by some new medium, I hypothesize difficulty becomes a lot less prominent in the discourse.
Ah v good point re audience as the driver. I wonder if we’ll reach / have already examples of ‘games for games sake’, totally indifferent to audience expectation or approval.
I would say there's a fair amount of room for that with small dev teams in the indie space. My time has been crowded out of the scene of late, but I will throw out the Stanley Parable as an dated but indifferent to audience expectation or approval that hit it fairly big.
That said, there's a real discovery problem because there's so much out there, including a ton of slop and the economics for game journalism are very punishing. So if you don't already have a big name, it is hard to break through if you are indifferent to your audience.
Surely what's difficult just depends on what you're used to.
I wonder how much nuance we're collapsing in comparing the difficulty of a boss fight with the difficulty of a book. Is the mental effort of understanding Finnegans Wake in any way similar to that of learning the attack telegraphs of a big demon?
If you'll forgive the self promotion, I've tackled this problem from a few angles in the past. Here's just one example https://theunderline.substack.com/p/gaming-is-the-mind-killer
Interesting piece. I would argue for a venn diagram. You raise love to learn, and I would put that in the intersection. I don't recall if Elden ring takes the same intentionally obscure approach to lore as Dark Souls does, but that also fits in the intersection as well.
But otherwise, video game difficulty may have more in common with audience performative arts, like dance or sing along music or I suppose acquiring new languages for literary purposes.
Optimization probably has less overlap and one may need to look to sports for analogies, or perhaps Japanese light novels with a strong economics bent.
I appreciate this reply, thanks for reading. I think you hit the nail on the head with your middle paragraph--to my mind the difficulty of video games and the learning they entail is somewhere in the realm of physical performance, sports, or language acquisition. There is real learning involved and real skill development for sure. But it feels different from the sort of holisitic "intelligence" that, say, high level philosophy does require
Yeah, I think the most comparable point of "difficulty" within Soulslikes wouldn't be the difficult gameplay, but rather the difficult *narrative*-- which does, we know, have its fans, but those fans are significantly lower in number than fans of the gameplay, who often ignore the story (and a significant number of its fans, rather than puzzle through the story on their own, engage with that story via the game equivalent of sparknotes: Lore Videos)
I sometimes work as a substitute librarian in a little New England town. A good deal of shelf space is dedicated to crime, romance, and fantasy fiction belonging to the simple class. I hear frequently from female patrons that if a book is too difficult they feel like the author, if male, is up his own arse and "mansplaining" to them. Of these patrons, one said she won't read Shakespeare for this reason. Another said she was traumatized by Chaucer and so won't read classic literature. Many avoid male authors all together.
Another trend I've noticed is that grandparents must read a book cover to cover before reading it to their grandchildren. They are looking for any offensive racial, ethnic, or gender content that their parent children insist on shielding the grandchildren from. For example, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan didn't make the cut for "readable" due to its references to Native Americans. My classic children's literature recommendations are most often ignored because of so called trigger content, as well as due to the difficulty of the language. They generally end up selecting board books about kittens rather than say "The Underneath," an example of sublime American children's literature by Kathi Appelt. I grieve the loss for all these children and shudder to think about the quality of mind of their good intentioned parents.
I think more than difficult /non difficult it is about the tools a writer uses . The problem here is literary criticism has become so recondite and granular that it overinterprets at times, or creates meaning out of loopholes in the body of ideas in a zeitgeist. Then there are those so rarefied in their sensibility that they just wax eloquent about something in a suggestive, associative way with grand rhetorical flourishes- a lot of george steiner comes to mind. Not to forget popular culture and genre fiction have evolved immensely too - ishiguro, samantha harvey. So i would argue it isn't the praise of difficult books that is problematic but the idea of a genealogy of culture built on a conceit of great art that acquires a grandiosity independent of the specificity of any writer. Melville is difficult by any stretch-specially pierre and mardi, so is late henry james . Yet i know people who cannot abide a single page of proust or late james but can easily plough through spivak or judith butler . I guess their minds are trained to be at home in theory. Abstraction for the sake of abstraction is pointless for me - though it can have verve and linguistic play. But i also hearken to the prosaic idea that language must reflect the complexity of reality than be an end in itself or enmeshed in a self conscious reflection of its own processes of construction. Maybe that's why LLM's scare us wrt AI because language's self referentiality has made a feedback loop coiling itself tighter around its own meta cognition. Like you adam i like my easy and popular reads and i like my tough reads without being programmatic or portentous about it.
My contrary nature longs to cont but I fear my only comeback is that Shakespeare isn't a book, it's the trace of performance. The Bible is a bunch of difficult simple stories. Also performed. Indian literature, I seem to recall from a convo between G Grass and S Rushdie, celebrates complicated lingo (see what I did there (see what I did there)) because it has stong live reading roots. As does Dickens. Difficult work is context. I read a poem last night to a bunch of Glasgow Zs and Mils about bushfires (maybe not Beltane-appropriate but adjacent) that contained references to the Bidhawal people of East Gippsland, flathead and blue eye fish, the Last of Her Tribe notion, manna gums, mass beach migration, and the Australian Settler Wars. They seemed to get it. Their willingness was a big part of it.
I think at least part of our supposed lower attention spans is a kind of self-hypnosis, a mixture of X-es and Boomers noticing their faculties are quitting and the usual putting down of younger generations. I'm going to hell so the world is. Pathetic. Because their sons and their daughters are beyond their command.
We fuss a lot. That's partly US public discourse seeping into everything. Gives me the irrits. Sorry. Phones etc are no more corrosive than TV. Just a stage. In fact, I believe most people's consumption of the internet is pretty much the same as TV. Yes there is reply, but lurking, a kind of voyeuristic wallpaper, is far more dominant. There has never been a golden age of concentration. Look! A chip buttie! </rant>
I am on the cusp of X, so maybe it's my own facilities, but I worry a lot more about my brain on phone than my brain on TV.
The difference is individual engineering. Even cable TV, let alone broadcast, can't personalize to our tastes in the way the internet or phones can.
Scheduled social media / YouTube blockers were a big part of how I was able to get back more into books. So at 46 I am no longer the kids today and I am well aware of the ways I am not as sharp as I once was, but the constant reaching for phones I lament in kids I otherwise admire is a similar one to the impulse I lament in myself.
As someone who spends a lot of time working in both the novel and the video-game industry, I'd say the answer to your final question is relatively straightforward. These are people obsessed with "beating" things. Videogames allow this - you can and do literally "beat" the game by finishing it. And there is much provision for celebrating/scoring/comparing these wins.
But you cannot "beat" a book, a movie or a piece of music - that's not what it's designed for. (At best, you have to settle for ranting angrily about it online or posting one star reviews on Amazon/Goodreads etc - and this, I suspect, is the reason for so many of those angry one star rants).
And worse still, the more demanding the book, movie or musical piece, the less you are able to feel you've beaten it. Demanding art is usually complicated art, eschewing and resisting simplistic interpretation - a complex book habitually poses questions rather than answering them. How much more enraging, then, for someone who wants to feel that they have "completed" the art and, in some way, "won".
I think this is it. Gaming has an approved element of competition, either with another player or the game itself. A game's initial contract with you is 'See if you can do this!' Whereas books, music, painting etc, are, correctly or incorrectly (imo not totally correctly) seen as representative and communicative acts. Difficulty therefore is seen as, to paraphrase, @crambrookpublshing, assholish. Relatedly, and I think this applies a lot to science fiction and similar, is that narrative arts are perceived less as stories than as worlds for the reader/watcher to immerse in. And even tho resistance or artfulness might in fact provide a more vivid experience of that immersion than more generic or formulaic offerings if that's what you go to art for, nevertheless the less frictionless it is, the more it seems to shirk or jilt that expectation of the reader. They just wanna make believe they're getting a window onto a real Enterprise bridge or whatever. Which is fine, but you're talking at cross purposes if that's what you assume of all art. It's like instead of content warnings art should have rhetorical nature warnings: 'This artwork is a non-literal one, with content some escapists might find uncooperative.'
I would argue that this is more of a cyclical phenomenon. Setting aside music because i think ambient omnipresent music has different dynamics than long-form games, novels, prestige television, film, or music as an album or symphony.
Video games have beena relatively ascendant cultural form for a few decades. I did a little searching and one sour ce dates the current difficulty debates to 2009's demon souls. This is an oversimplification, see talk of Nintendo hard or criticism around games that made more money by eating quarters, but among my video game focused friends, difficulty is definitely seen as a tiresome topic.
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/453039/video-game-discourse-has-become-stale-and-repetitive/
I think the conclusion is off. People who talk a lot about difficulty in games are probably not engaging as heavily in critical discourse on other media. Whereas people who talk about accessibility in games may make the sane points another media.
The difference is that video games, fir all the cursed and labor crush modes of production, are doing well enough that fans can gatekeep for good (drive quality and some forms artistic innovation) and bad (personal prestige or exclusion or worse) reasons. Other media have publishers that are chasing fans to a greater extent. When video games are being surpassed by some new medium, I hypothesize difficulty becomes a lot less prominent in the discourse.
Ah v good point re audience as the driver. I wonder if we’ll reach / have already examples of ‘games for games sake’, totally indifferent to audience expectation or approval.
I would say there's a fair amount of room for that with small dev teams in the indie space. My time has been crowded out of the scene of late, but I will throw out the Stanley Parable as an dated but indifferent to audience expectation or approval that hit it fairly big.
That said, there's a real discovery problem because there's so much out there, including a ton of slop and the economics for game journalism are very punishing. So if you don't already have a big name, it is hard to break through if you are indifferent to your audience.
I'd love to read your novelisation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason! Any chance of that?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thing-Itself-Adam-Roberts-ebook/dp/B010Q1FSFO/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1NIT5YBVLSD2U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.m_r8EHoMtkUrP40VGBz9SA.GdieKgnoOOJIZM0k4yrKZ0t4lepA2-ot8SW9qTKYDeo&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+thing+itself+adam+roberts&qid=1777673305&sprefix=the+thing+itself%2Caps%2C181&sr=8-1
Thank you! Can't wait to read it.