Patreon Letter: 14th April 2019

Hi everyone, 

It’s Sunday, it’s time for the Patreon Letter! Hello, hi, I’ve missed you. This letter is going to seem like it has missed the window somewhat, it’s my contribution to a discourse that I’m fairly sure everyone is sick of but I still want to write it and I know it will come around again. That’s right, I’m going to talk about the Difficulty/Accessibility/Artistic Intent/Easy Mode thing. I’m gonna be talking about big Historical Trends in games so please understand when I say “then this changed” that I obviously don’t mean for every game, there are counter-examples on every side. I am talking about big picture industrial trends in AAA production. I hope this letter is readable.

So watching the discussion spread like wildfire across online has been breaking my brain in a small way. Lots of very passionate people are arguing very intensely, almost entirely at cross purposes, with not that much progress being made in terms of attempting to grapple with the core of the issues that are at play here. Shout out to the Waypoint podcast that dropped in the middle of this and helped me get a handle on my thoughts, it’s good if you want more context on the discussion, you should listen to it.

Anyway the thing I wanted to talk about was the need to - as ever - place these discussions in an industrial context, because it’s often being framed as an issue of artistic intent vs accessibility, which is both a false and largely irrelevant binary. They’ve also been framed around the question “Should Sekiro Have An Easy Mode?” which usually leads into arguments of definition about the term Easy Mode, and whether difficulty and accessibility are the same things. With all these points of friction it is easy to see how this discussion has become so heated and confusing so quickly, combined with the fact that it’s not new it’s just a repeat of a discussion that only comes up due to the cultural identity around From Software’s games and doesn’t for the myriad releases that might deserve it more.

Because difficulty and accessibility are linked, deeply so, but Sekiro is probably the last game I would want to build that argument around. I don’t care much about Sekiro and I think it’s a pretty bad example of the wider position and role of difficulty in Big Games in 2019. Instead take a look at Assassins Creed Odyssey, a game built around a long treadmill of RPG content, allows you both to purchase in-game currency and multiple doublers for your earning of in-game currency. If you try to play that game without going through enough side content, the game will rapidly get prohibitively difficult and either you will need to spend time you may not wish to spend grinding through sidequests, or you will need to make a purchase. I picked that game out of a hat but the point is clear and widely known, that in a world with games as a service designed for perpetual monetization, any points of friction within the game are opportunities for companies that monetisation.

With this being the mode of production for the majority of AAA game development these days, questions of difficulty and questions of accessibility become fraught very quickly. Outside of PCs - and with always online games, increasingly on them too - cheat codes essentially disappeared with the advent of achievements. After the dominance of arcades - where difficulty within design was fundamentally linked to extracting money from players - games were products that were sold, and once they were sold that was it. And because they were products, cheat codes were additive to the value of a game. You bought the game, so letting you get infinite lives, letting you unlock all levels, letting you play with low gravity, all of this made the game more accessible and less difficult but more importantly than that, doing those things was both in the interests of players and in the interest of capital. Some people wanted the game to be difficult to feel justified in their purchase, some wanted the opposite. This approach made the product more appealing to buy, to the most amount of people. 

Achievements changed all that pretty much overnight. They served, in a sense, to codify games. Elitism within gamer culture is nothing new it has been around literally forever, people definitely on my playground would boast about never using cheats, but it was just the informal language of the culture. Achievements made that into a real system. Some games still allowed you to cheat, but then you wouldn’t get the achievement. They functionally brought the idea of arcade scores back to video games, but to all of them. 

The point where we’d start seeing skinner box gambling services for children was a long way off, but this represented a fundamental shift. There was now a structural, financial incentive, to not allow people to fuck about with games on a granular level. You have to beat level one, before you beat level two. If you have an achievement, and someone else does not, then your accomplishment is made real (it isn’t, this is why achievements are bad, but i digress). 

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey cannot exist without this shift into a world where companies can codify and control the game experience in order to extract as much money as possible. They would not be able to sell you XP Doublers if you could enter a cheat code. We often think of difficulty as something inherent to the game that the player most actively confront, but in games such as this it is more productive to think of difficulty as something done by the game to the player. Perhaps a hard sell, but pan the camera left to basically any mobile game where the gloves are all the way off on their predatory nature and this becomes obvious. Think of how Candy Crush gives a few easy levels in a row, and then you always run into one where all the drops never seem to go your way. You can wait, but you can buy your way past this wall.

Now I want to say something a few of you might be yelling at me: cheat codes are obviously not actual Accessibility Modes what are you talking about. And this is true! First of all Cheat Codes were never standardised as features, there was no expectation of what a game would let you unlock or change when you bought one, and uh, second of all they were called fucking “cheat codes.” Accessibility isn’t letting people fuck with random stuff that got put in the build and never removed, accessibility requires active and thoughtful work from developers, and it requires the investment of resources and the consideration of a wide variety of abled players from the project’s inception. Games need Colour Blind Modes, games need better fuckin’ subtitles, games need audio description, they need custom input remapping, they need whole alternate control schemes for alternate devices. This is a short, nowhere near complete list. AAA Games cost a lot to make. An unsustainably large amount. These features are not unaffordable as standard, and working them into a project’s scope is easily possible. But the incentive is not there. It might not cost a lot to implement accessibility features when done correctly, but it takes a whole lot more money to change entrenched development pipelines. 

I only called both of these things accessibility because I think these are both ways that games put barriers between themselves and their audience that should not exist, and fundamentally the route of both ills is within a broken, exploitative industry. I know it sucks being the “the problem is capitalism” person but you really can't separate these things, and it's almost always true. Every Text exists alongside contexts of its own Production.

In a world in which so many games are treadmills, accessibility is not just making sure everyone can engage with the treadmill in the same codified way. The treadmill is also the problem. Accessibility is not the belief that people of all bodies and abilities have the right to be equally monetized. It is the belief that people’s needs be considered actively and at all times, that a player can expect when they load a game that they can engage with it as equally as anyone else, and also that a worker can expect not to do 70 hours a week and then get let go after ship date. Objects are the way they are because of how they are made, and the games industry is a dystopic capitalist nightmare of exploitation for both its audience and its workers. Gamers review bombing over Epic Store exclusives, workers furious at incompetent management, disabled players just asking for a little more consideration in games designs, and audience members wanting greater consideration of artistic intent: none of these positions are in any way actually contradictory.

And so watching these discussions proliferate is always saddening. It only takes a a couple of bad faith posts getting elevated enough and then my whole timeline becomes people who want the same thing trying to tear each other apart. This article is a bit rough, it’s really a topic bigger than the scope of letters we’re meant to write in a couple of hours can cover, but I hope it was a good read. 

-Jackson