I’m Frustrated As Hell And I’m Not Going To Take It Anymore

I’ve recently had something of a personal revelation, I despise the idolisation of difficulty that typifies the attitudes of many ‘hardcore’ gamers. I simply don’t have the time or patience to put up with an even remotely frustrating game anymore. It may seem like an obvious point but frustration seems to rear it’s ugly head even in modern, big budget titles. This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate challenge or a game which requires me to learn specific techniques. I just can’t bring myself to suffer through pointless, repetitive gameplay out of some grim sense of obligation anymore.

The first inkling of this feeling arrived when I recently introduced an old friend of mine to Gears Of War 2. I’d played through the main campaign but he was, in the parlance of our times, a ‘n00b’. I naturally selected the hardcore difficulty setting and he plumped for casual. By the time we’d completed a few chapters it started to become glaringly obvious that he was having infinitely more fun than I was. In the grand scheme of things, he had won and I had lost. Whilst I was forced to play cautiously he was playing with the kind of reckless abandon my difficulty setting prohibited me from indulging in.

Soon after this experience, my desire to play for the sheer fun of playing grew and grew. Red Faction: Guerrilla was transformed from an exercise in repetition to a playground in which my inner vandal could run riot. There are some who insist that the normal, or in many cases hard, difficulty setting is the ‘true’ way to play a game. Certainly any videogame critic should play on the standard difficulty. However, I’m starting to ditch the notion that anything I accomplish in a virtual setting should be considered an achievement.

The simple fact of the matter is that frustration is an unacceptable emotion that I should not feel obligated to endure whilst gaming. I recently revisited Call Of Duty 4 on the ‘Veteran’ difficulty setting. I made it through the first couple of levels and even though it left me feeling utterly miserable, I still felt a perverse sense of accomplishment. I had to ask myself where this sensation came from. Am I a better person for making it through those levels? Am I more intelligent, kinder, wealthier, happier or more knowledgeable? Of course not, I’m just someone who’s pissed away a couple of hours of their valuable leisure time.

There are people out there who place an objective value on their gaming accomplishments. They spend hours and hours grinding away at games to boost their gamerscore, fill out their trophy collection or simply acquire bragging rights. These people are no longer hobbyists, they’re sick and I no longer want to have anything in common with them. I fully understand the desire to learn the intricacies and strategies of a game, I just don’t consider those who do so to have accomplished anything.

In short, the difficulty level at which you have completed a game isn’t a badge of honour. It’s a modifier that enhances your experience. If you genuinely love a particular game so much that you’ve played it to death and it no longer satisfies you, by all means crank it up to ‘hard’. Just don’t do it out of a misplaced sense of pride because frankly, you’ve nothing to be proud of.