"Easy" Modes in Games

[Pheesh]

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.

I don't understand how you correlate difficulty with a game's ability to transcend the genre or excel. The game that immediately springs to mind when I think of gaming carrying over from "beyond the play period" is The Last of Us. It's not my all time favourite game, but after I was done with it I could take a step back and say "that is an example of what games can accomplish at their best." It has the emotion and storytelling of a great book or film, coupled with the long, "your struggle is my struggle" investment that games provide better than any medium. Those things combined make that game what it is and changing the difficulty setting doesn't diminish either one. Some people simply prefer to get through the game without breaking a sweat and others want an extremely challenging experience. This is another reason why gaming is a potentially superior medium; it allows itself to be catered to a wide ranging audience.

Chances are that a lot of people also have a different viewpoint to me on what constitutes an influential experience from a game. That guy who played Dark Souls with a guitar hero controller probably had a similar feeling of unforgettable accomplishment as the grown adult who beat The Last of Us on easy, and both are equally valid and can't be diminished by other people.

Games are meant to be fun. Mindless fun, thought provoking fun, stressful, relaxing, emotional, shared, all of those and more depending on the game played and who played it. What I find stressful other people may find easy, and what I find emotional other people may find boring. It's not up to any one person to dictate how a game should be received by everyone (not even the developer), which I feel like is the ground you've been treading very close to. Honestly, who cares if people cheat their way through a game? You enjoyed it, if they didn't and you feel they could have then simply feel sorry for them and move on.

Also, in regards to ffnut's point about asking for help and being told to lower the difficulty; it takes less than one second to ignore bad advice. The internet is full of it and it's probably not worth giving everything you read on it credence.