Hardcore gamer = someone who plays only cinematic grizzed white dude games and/or military fetishizing FPS
Casual gamer = anyone that is not a 15-25 yo male, and/or plays anything outside of the previously mentioned games, especially if those games are colorful.
So basically the gaming community is full of gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery. They make sure they’re the loudest voice heard when anything about games is talked about, and won’t be happy until all games a homogenous stream of bland, hyper-realistic but with a grey filter slog of mindless action with no heart or soul. And don’t you dare force them to read any dialogue or story.
How wide is the rim of the cup? How heavy is the ball? How viscous is the air the ball flies through? What counts as “doing it” or “not doing it” in any given system either involves an arbitrary line or error-bars of some sort. There’s no harm in having a setting to move that line slightly or to make those error-bars wider. Or must we bow to an auteur’s artistic vision (or a community’s bigotry) about these things? Perhaps if the artistic point of the thing is to make people suffer in some way, but otherwise?
It doesn’t have to be about making a player “suffer,” I’m just saying that being able to “lose” in a game doesn’t have to be ableist or done for the sake of masculine ego. And winning or losing doesn’t have to be arbitrary, I can imagine the size and physics of the ball being designed to mimic the real thing rather than being designed for maximum accessibility, which would be the choice of the dev. I feel kinda silly arguing about this now but this rhetoric about a game that might not be immediately accessible to all players being “masked ableism” and of “bowing” to artistic vision is surprising to hear. Risk of failure and design that takes advantage of mechanical depth can add to the fun, it doesn’t have to be interpreted as bigotry.
I can’t speak for Poogona, but balancing a game for different difficulty levels while still making the game enjoyable is going to be harder for some games than others. That doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be done, just that the task is non trivial. I imagine things would be better in this regard without booj cracking the whip on devs.
Yes! That’s it! You’ve hit the nail on the head. People don’t pay $60 to feel frustrated. They pay $60 to feel good. If the game doesn’t deliver what they paid for, why does it even exist?
People also don’t pay to be unchallenged, which is how we wound up with derogatory nicknames like “walking simulator”
People’s threshold for challenge and fun are all over the place and so are the games that do and should exist
But it doesn’t work that way. They get lowered to the level of the customers who don’t want to overcome challenges. All they want is a good feeling. And those brain chemicals that get released by being led by the nose around a level are real.
When you pay full price for a game, do you deserve to experience all of the content contained therein? Or do you have to spend hours of tedious frustration, feeling bad brain chemicals, just to get what you already paid good money for? You feel enough bad brain chemicals with your job and your family already, why are you spending your precious few free hours doing the same?
Because getting good at something and overcoming challenges also feels good?