Quote Originally Posted by Shauna View Post
I don't think comparing video games to school is fair either. Videos games are entertainment. Fun. It would be great if school was also those things, but that's not its primary function. I am not saying that everything has to be super easy and people should get passes on every walk of life regardless of skill/effort.

A lot of people seem to approach this subject with "I wouldn't find X fun, so I don't know why anyone else would either". By saying this, you are dictating what people should find fun based on your own opinions. If that person feels an appreciation for a game, you can't say that they didn't appreciate it because they played it in a certain way. You may think that in some cases they are cheating themselves out of a "better experience", but that's up to them to make those choices based on what they want. Their experience doesn't affect yours, and if they got everything they wanted out of their experience, then good for them.
The problem I have here is that you're doing the same thing you're accusing some gamers are doing, which is creating a value statement of what a game should be and arguing that people who see it differently are somehow wrong about it because it's less inclusive to your ideals. I'm simply arguing that games can be more than mindless entertainment and can have value beyond the play period. I simply point out that by relegating all of the medium to this ideal of mindless fun subverts the medium's potential to be something more. I'm not arguing about inclusiveness, I'm arguing that games have the potential to make us into better people and that by reducing it to mindless fun is not the answer, because some people don't want games to be anything more than mindless fun. My question is that how is reducing everything to the order of people who play purely for "mindless fun" any better of a solution than people who argue games should be "balls hard difficult"? Either way you're still faced with the dilemma of reducing the entire medium to favor one kind of player over another. Adding difficulty modes is obviously the best solution and I feel everyone is pretty much in favor of that as a solution.

Now if you're angry cause people may judge you for playing games a particular way then I would argue that his is simply human nature. One should understand that people are by nature cliquey and view reality from a contrasting filter, so it really shouldn't be surprise you'll find people who may act all high and mighty one way or the other based on views. That's just our nature, it's not the system that's the problem it's the people who are running it. It's our nature to judge the world around us as an "us vs. them" filter, it's how we discover who we are and build our identities. The fact we can't leave it at that but instead try to enforce our own feeble and pathetic attempts of placing objectivity on a chaotic subjective existence is simply the fault of our own meager evolution as a species. You'll be judged by assholes, just realize they're assholes and move on knowing their ideal world is not the same as yours.