Steve Bannon recognized exactly this and harnessed it for fascism.
Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks
TipRing@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We should definitely talk about how levying criticism, especially thoughtful criticism, is treated as a personal attack by other people playing the same game. It’s a bizarre form of tribalism.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
XM34@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
We should also talk about how “Difficulty is part of the game and if you find it too difficult then this game is not for you” is not a personal attack, but a perfectly valid response to said criticism.
TipRing@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If the criticism is limited to “It’s too hard.” then I would agree. But that’s not a valid response to criticisms about specific design elements like “these power ups feel like they do nothing”, even if it’s a perception issue at hand you need to address the actual observation and not jump on with ‘git gud’.
I was learning a game a few months ago and struggling with understanding a specific character, so I went to the official discord and asked for advice, not complaining it was too hard, just asking for what kinds of strategies work and I was met with endless ‘try harder, scrub’ responses and literally no actual advice. I quit playing the game because the community was so up it’s own asshole.
And for sake of clarity. I don’t play HK, it’s not my preferred genre and my favorite game (that I can replay) is Noita so I am familiar with reviews that complain about difficulty. It’s fine for games to be hard and it’s also fine for people who find the games too hard to leave a review saying they found it too hard. That is part of informing buyers so people can only pick it up if they desire that kind of challenge.
It’s just a trend that is all too common in gaming. People like a game or a developer and become incapable of seeing an opinion that they disagree without taking it as a personal slight. It’s weird.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Part of that is definitely gatekeeping.
But a lot of it speaks to… people are REALLY stupid these days. You notice it a lot when buildcrafting comes up. If it is more complicated than “raise strength to the soft cap” then people start making up massive excuses on how it is too complicated to explain and you are a fool for asking and MAYBE to go watch their favorite youtuber and so forth. When I feel particularly trollish I make a “like bags of sand” joke but the reality is that they just do not have the ability to actually learn what they are talking about. They can barely even regurgitate what an influencer told them.
And that has more or less broken fighting game discourse online. Because it is no longer “oh yeah, so and so has a super easy 20 hit combo” and inherently has to be “your crouching light jab is a +4 but your crouching light kick is -2” because EVERYONE is an expert in frame counting and so forth.
Souls gamers more or less broke with Elden Ring. The base game is probably the most accessible any Souls game has ever been and most people learned fast they can just beat Malenia by doing an arcane bleed build or getting a big fricking hammer to stunlock her, but they felt like they were super cool for it (which is the point of a Souls game). Then the DLC came out. And people felt the need to shit on the games media folk saying “So… this shit is kinda hard?” before rapidly getting their poopy pushed in by silver knight equivalents.
And it very much broke people. The discourse went from “Git gud. But in all seriousness, Capra is a boss that is designed to make sure you know when to block and when to dodge” into “Git gud you fucking loser. I beat it with no problems”. And we are seeing similar discourse with Silksong as a lot of us talk about how some of the runbacks are REAL bad and get responded to with “That is just what Hollow Knight is”… even though there was like one bad runback in the entirety of that game (Mantis Lord).
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This excuse stopped working the day I opened a tough-as-nails game like Furi, saw it had a difficulty menu, said “That’s nice”, and went back to challenging myself against the bosses on default settings.
It’s such a huge cop-out of self control, and especially falls to acknowledge that the forms of difficulty in a game are often varied - and someone might suck at only one of them.
HubertManne@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
thanks. I hear a lot about this game and was wondering about it but Im a relaxagamer though so its good to know.