Attending the difficult games session was an interesting experience for me. As someone who drastically fears difficult games, I easily quit a game or get distressed if I constantly fail or cannot figure out the mechanism of a (either considered difficult or any level of difficulty) game. To make things worse, I am not especially good at hand-eye coordination in games, which make it hard for me to truly enjoy action games like First Person Shooting games.
However, watching others play is another experience. Around each game device, a group of people gather around a same table or sofa. It was obvious that they shared the player’s feelings, gazing at the screen and holding their breath. I also noticed that the groups tend to rotate the playing turns so that all the people can get a chance to pick up from what the previous person has failed and continue the journey of difficult games. Conversation also arise within the social group of people focusing on the same game. Because the difficult games tend to place deliberate emphasis on making mechanics hard to control (especially hand-eye coordination, speed, reaction, prediction, etc.), people tend to give out suggestions to the player on how they could navigate these mechanics better. While this might induce more pressure to the current player of the game, it also spurred novel solutions that tend to crack the puzzles.
Participating as an observer gives me less stress and more clarity when encountering difficult levels within the games. To a certain extent, the observing process might have also provided me with a better gaming experience — while I might never be able to climb the first part of the mountain in Getting Over It, watching others who are better at it play eased my boredom and sense of failure, but at the same time provided me with similar senses of tension as if I was playing the game myself. Moreover, playing (or viewing) difficult games as a social group could potentially provide more vibrant conversations than playing a less difficult game. As the players were deliberately brought to failure by the mechanics of such games, there is a relatively bigger chance that the gaming process could be repeated and discussed. Such discussions could provide emotional and technical support without disrupting the flow and experience of the gameplay. The repeatability of the game is thus extended from a single player’s perspective to multiplayer’s collaborate experience.
This also stimulates the question of what it means to watch others play games and what does it take for someone to truly feel involved in a game play. But there is chance that difficult games can be the next best game genre for social gatherings and shared experiences (maybe frustrations???).
I really liked the connection you made between difficult games and creating a shared social experience, even if that shared experience is because of emotions like frustration. I also get frustrated if I fail a game too often. With the difficult games event, I think that even though there were times I was disappointed when I lost, I never really got frustrated. Part of the reason is because I knew the game was supposed to be difficult. I knew it’d be hard for me to pass any level on the first try, especially since I’d never played any of the available games before. Seeing experienced gamers fail as well and laugh it off definitely made me more comfortable with not winning. I think difficult games provide an even playing field for experienced and inexperienced players alike, so people like us can still manage to have a good time in some way.
I agree with the author and actually think shared social experiences are so important for a video game and are often overlooked. Take a gaming forum or community, the way in which players interact and play with each other helps establish a game’s presence online. I think many games that give significance to such aspects help build a better game.
This reminds me of the fact that we UChicago students always joke together about this school being “the place where fun goes to die”; there’s a sense of communal suffering we have. 😂 In a lot of ways, the difficulties of life unite people, and the importance of shared experiences helps people overcome those difficulties…or at the very least feel a little better about them. You could almost call being a UChicago student a difficult game…