What does my love for difficult video games say about me? | games

MMost people who really love video games have the potential to be nerds. Losing weeks of your life to Civilization, World of Warcraft or Football Manager is something many of us have experienced. Sometimes, it’s the numbers-spiking dopamine rhythms that attract people: playing a game like Diablo or Destiny and gradually improving your character while picking up shiny loot at set intervals can send some people into a manic trance. Meanwhile, compulsive games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley take hours of peaceful, relaxing repetition of rewarding tasks.

But what excites me is the challenge. If a game tells me I can’t do something, I resolve to do it, sometimes to my own detriment. Painful repetition bores me, but challenges hijack my mind.

The first games I became obsessed with were music games, when I was a teenager. I played Amplitude, where you play as an alien DJ and blast tunes from your sonic spaceship; Gitaroo Man, a comic book-style story about a guitar-wielding superhero; And of course, Guitar Hero with his plastic axe – you were forced to master each song on expert difficulty. Guitar Hero is ostensibly a party game, but I mostly played it tucked away in the cupboard under the stairs of my rubbish flat in Bournemouth (I couldn’t play it in the living room because it annoyed my housemates too much), and I practiced More Than a Feel 30 times in a row until I mastered the note.

A few years later, I discovered FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls while living in Japan, a game that’s hard to hack and seems designed to keep you away from it. You’ll take three steps into any of its levels and be instantly killed by a skeletal swordsman or a poisonous swamp creature. But I sensed something interesting behind all this punishment, and there is quite a lot He was. Demon’s Souls ended up giving birth to a massively popular and challenging game genre with its sequel, Dark Souls. You could only Discover what’s so amazing about these games if you’re ready to invest time and energy into mastering them. It didn’t matter how skilled you were – you had to share knowledge and collaborate with other players to have a chance.

My persistence has been beneficial in my life mostly because I have been able to channel it well. There are plenty of life and professional challenges where an inability to give up comes in handy. I applied ridiculous determination to learning complex fingerpicking patterns for a particular song on the guitar, and writing books. However, when it comes to games, I sometimes get stuck playing them when I should be doing something else.

The most recent example of this for me was Baby Steps, a very difficult and painfully funny game about trying to walk the world’s biggest loser up a mountain. There are many places in this game where making a single mistake can cost you an hour of painstaking progress. I was trapped inside a sandcastle for four hours one evening, sliding down the same sandy spiral slope over and over again. My kids kept coming into the room and groaning at the sight of me Still Playing with it and failing to get anywhere. It was 1am before I finally managed to emerge victorious from this sand trap, hours after everyone in my house had gone to bed. The adrenaline was so high that I couldn’t sleep for another hour.

The sensible thing to do was to simply put the console aside. Baby Steps always teases you with this. that it Bold You have to give up. The most famous challenge, a winding trail up a sheer rock face, is called Manbreaker, and there is a spiral staircase right Next to him.

The other game I spent the most time with this year was Hollow Knight: Silksong, a fantastic exploratory action game whose difficulty ranges from hilariously mean to downright brutal. There are very difficult bosses that you cannot avoid, and each of them probably requires hours of training. One of them, the final judge, uses a burning incense burner that generates columns of noxious flames. If that’s not bad enough, the path back to his room is full of dangers: flying insects with drill heads, perilous drops, and aggressive guards. Your nerves are fraying as the final judge’s battle begins. But all this made me more determined to overcome it.

The challenge is the delicate balance that game developers must strike: conventional wisdom says you want players to be entertained, not frustrated. For a long time, the trend has been to move away from difficulty and toward eminently beatable open-world games that never put a roadblock in the way of your progress. It was Dark Souls that proved that there was still a huge market for people like me for whom it was somewhat challenging. I am inexorably drawn toward mastery of things that don’t make sense objectively.

Maybe mastery is the goal. You can’t control life. Things will always happen that you can’t control. Difficulties come out of nowhere, and you don’t always know how to deal with them. In video games, at least you can expect a challenge. And if you try hard and refuse to give up, you can always overcome it.

What are you playing?

I’m completely amazed at how much I enjoyed it Hyrule Warriors: Age of Prisona spin-off of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that follows what Princess Zelda was doing when she time-traveled through Hyrule’s past. It turns out she was beating up hundreds and hundreds of men. It’s a combat-focused game where you wander the battlefields of ancient Hyrule, or the dark depths with its many monsters, dispatching everything you see with flashy, screen-filling attacks from Zelda’s subtle magic to the automatons of the world Mineru. It doesn’t look like Zelda at all; Instead, it’s more of a cinematic action game featuring the familiar iconography and mechanics of Tears of the Kingdom, and a story that fills in some of the gaps in Hyrule’s history and gives the princess a more starring role.

Available on: Nintendo Switch 2
Estimated playing time: 15 hours

What are you reading?

• grand theft auto VI It was postponed again from May to next November. The last time this happened, the gaming industry was scrambling to avoid its impact, so we may find a strange dearth of games towards the end of next year – and some games’ release dates may be pushed back.

• In a leaked presentation to employees (via Game File), Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot supposedly confronted haters of Ubisoft’s game. Shadows of Assassin’s Creed. The game got into a culture war because it starred a black samurai and a female ninja. Instead of retreating, Guillemot said, “We had to stop focusing on those who hate us. We had to start shooting at our allies.”

• Game prizesrun each year by gaming hype man Geoff Keighley, has shut down its Future Class program, which selected a group of developers each year to represent the “bright, bold, and inclusive future” of gaming. Now former recruits are speaking out about how they feel let down by the programme: “Don’t get some of the most brilliant activists in the industry together, treat us like crap and then expect us to do nothing about it.”

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