I had demos.
As a result, I learned to play games a bit differently. Being limited so severely meant that I began thinking of games as smaller, bite-sized experiences—miniature worlds to poke and prod until I’d seen everything they had to offer. As I played, over and over and over yet again, I got better. Satisfaction came from mastery over a situation—from becoming so good with the tools at my disposal that any situation became a cakewalk—rather than constant newness or endless repetition. Discovery and exploration were all-important, but instead of discovering new abilities while exploring new maps, I discovered new ways to tackle old challenges. I’d try to do things in ways the designers had never intended.
This is me, pretty much. I played hundreds of demos in the 90s and it definitely helped me get a sense of taste that I think, you don’t really get as well by playing much less games for a much longer time. Testing new things, new gameplay, all the time.
I don’t much like difficulty. I don’t really see the point. If I fail repeatedly, I get bored. Sure, I might beat a section one time after a dozen attempts, but it’s not as if I want to go back, and it’s rare that the difficulty actually helped me become a better player.
I could almost write a full post called “Dark Souls, you guys” with people LOVING its difficulty. To me spending dozens of hours of painful enjoyment is like doing crack all night and being like “that shit ain’t so bad after all”. Of course everything you spend time on is going to feel valuable, but like the author I get bored if I fail repeatedly because the designer made it this way. I have always questioned their decisions.
So the fact that we design games this way -remember, that was to make money through arcades- always has been a problem to me. The sweet spot for the perfectly balanced challenge is so rare and so personal. The technology that allows following of your play style, raising the challenges you want is going to become huge, critical tech.
This is where games are so close to music and that between what you want from it, the difficulty of entering it and what it actually does to you is different for everyone. Fascinating. Hard.