Hello again, after the long delay. I was moving in to my college place. Then I was being in college for my sophomore year. Now I’m not. The first two sentences of this paragraph show how long since I’ve started on this draft.
There are really two meanings behind being a gamer – a boring, mundane one, and one that’s actually worth thinking about. Let’s save the best for last, and do the boring one first.
Here we are with the age-old discussion of violence in video games. The problem is that violent video games may or may not cause violent behaviors; this Crash Course Games episode describes it well in a nutshell. And I am here to say that maybe we have been looking at the problem incorrectly.
In one corner, we have many people, especially parents understandably, who believe that violence in video games influences people to enact violence in real life. They reason that
I decided to write this one in light of the recent Pokemon Go’s difficulty slope beginning at level 20. Everybody has a fairly common conception of the ideal difficulty slope which, naturally, looks like y=e^x for 0<x<1 on a graph (pun totally intended). But as we all know, difficulty curves don’t always actually happen that way. As we don’t all know, there are sometimes good reasons, or at least understandable reasons, for this. Oh, and if the math joke didn’t tip you off, I’ve been watching way too much Numberphile lately, so things are going to get mathy.
All graphs were made in Desmos.
Back in the bad old days of the arcades, many games would begin easy,
This article is a bit shorter than usual for three reasons:
So, what is artificial difficulty? Sometimes, a certain mechanic will be flawed in a certain way:
There is one fallacy that I tend to hear once in a while. It goes something along the lines of “It’s not that bad; it’s actually pretty difficult.” The problem that we have here is that this argument assumes that a game’s difficulty is always proportional to fun (including fear or rage-inducing, for horror or rage games, respectively), and that the relationship is causal (not casual) where difficulty always increases fun. That isn’t always true.