A

Thanks!

I know just about everything sucks now but please hang in there. The world is a better place with you in it

People will yell about accessibility, but accessibility is a braille translation, not a book rewritten as if it was a simple english wikipedia entry. Sometimes the friction is needed to appreciate the art, and sometimes you have to build your fluency up to appreciate something. That's just culture!!

Lol. What would "natural" difficulty even look like through this lens? That art team balance the game?

Sparknotes is a whole industry. "Inception Ending Explained" is a whole industry. How many people have you heard get frustrated over not being able to engage with Abstract Expressionism. The problem is certainly not unique to games

I can't think of a medium where that isn't true

But if "The Citizen Kane of Games" signifies the first entry of a medium that really establishes what's possible and which elevates it to an art form (whether Citizen Kane actually did that for movies aside) it's hard to think of a better candidate than Xevious. It even has two plane focus lol

Less trying to make a direct parallel and more trying to make the point that if we really think games are art, which I do, that we should be elevating the art of gameplay itself and the things that are unique to the medium rather than shape it into something it's not.

A lot of talk about the art in games focuses on turning games into movies. And from this lens gameplay is a gate keeping people from experiencing the true art of the cutscenes between the gameplay. But the art is the gameplay. The Citizen Kane of games isn't Last of Us, it's Xevious.

And like to be clear I'm all for training modes and god modes. It's not too much to ask to let the player tinker with the component parts. But I really don't think people realize that an easy mode is a second game. You're asking an artist to make a second work of art. It's wildly entitled.