Difficulty Settings: Good Business, but Bad Art

The developers of The First Berserker: Khazan announced today the inclusion of a new “beginner” difficulty setting, the reclassification of the previously-defined “easy” to “normal”, and of “normal” to “challenge” or hard mode. This is, they note on the game’s steam page, in line with their design philosophy: “we believe that game design isn't something set in stone. It's something we shape and refine together with our players”, they say. Each player comment (presumably on Steam and other prominent forums, like reddit,) is “thoroughly reviewed”, and gameplay data is “closely monitored” to “identify where future adjustments may be needed”[i].

This is probably a sound business decision. Months after release, dedicated soulsborne players have likely completed their first, or even second NG+ run, through the game; sales from this (already niche) demographic have slowed to a trickle. As of June 2025, average concurrent players (at least on Steam) are down from 30k+ at their peak in late March to 1-2k on average[ii]. The decision to tone down the game’s default difficulty might entice potential buyers who view the typical effort required by the genre as a barrier to entry. This adjustment also leaves intact the previously existing, albeit renamed, normal difficulty and associated gameplay experience. Players still have the option to traverse the game as they would have prior to the update.

Why, then, would anyone oppose such a decision? For the simple reason that it takes for granted that video games are, in the first place, consumer products, and not self-justifying works of art. This latter view is no doubt unpopular and would be opposed by most self-professed video game consumers. Why make games if not to please players? Who would make a game without wanting to make money from it? Online commenters are keen to extol allowing anyone to play the game as they please[iii].

To our estimation, there is an irreducibly metaphysical view of what it means to make something at stake in this discussion. Does the artist create for the good of his own work, or to satisfy his audience? In video game development, where vast sums are on the line and the ability of the artist to return and work on a future project depends on the reception of his current offering, tension will undoubtedly arise between these positions. But, in theory, the status of the artwork as an independently existing thing, possessed of meaning and value in itself, is jeopardized by the predominance of the latter view.

The work of fine art is, as Jacques Maritain explains in his famous Art & Scholasticism, gratuitous: it exists for its own sake, and its signifying matter, all its playable elements in the case of a game, exist for the sake of its represented form. The “whole formal element of art is the regulation [the artist’s conception] imposes on matter"[iv]. Here this means that the parts of the game the player interacts with ought to be precisely selected and arranged to best convey the virtual world conceived by the designer. What this designer represents is not (or at least should not be) mere window dressing for the player’s enjoyment. It is the reason to pick up a controller in the first place: to play a role in the world, events and characters represented by play.

The ideal player, as much as the reader of a book or viewer of a painting, should endeavor to enjoy the work for the autotelic goodness of what it represents, not for its effects upon them. Art is not “ordered to the service of man”[v]: it is not to be used as a means but enjoyed as end[vi].

Difficulty settings, based on this conception, compromise art in a twofold sense: they jeopardize the regulation of expressive matter by artistic form, as well as the self-sufficiency of the work.

In the first sense, they require looseness and adjustability of formal regulation; the ludic matter of the game must lack a determinate organization and offer no specific resistance to the player. While difficulty should be an expression of the work’s formal cause, the virtual world the designer seeks to convey with gameplay, here it becomes an adjustable and indifferent material element unregulated by that form.

In the second sense, the inclusion of difficulty settings amounts to a sacrifice of this formal regulation for the sake of appealing to the reader. The material element which should exist for the sake of the work is dissociated from its form for the sake of the player’s satisfaction. At least in these terms, the work no longer exists for its own sake and instead exists for player appeal. We can appreciate Miyazaki’s historical insistence on ensuring all players experience his games in the same way and according to his precise intention[vii].

We should not be so quick to treat expressive works, video games included the way we treat fast food and toilet paper, as mere tools for meeting bodily desires and requirements. If games possess intrinsic merit as creations of their designer, players would do well to seek the merits they exhibit and disregard personal preference to the extent possible. To attain, Maritain says, the intelligible content of an artwork, “previous, tentative consent to the work and intentions of the [artist]” is required, without which “we cannot be taken into the confidence of the [work]”[viii].

Unfortunately, this all means that not every work can, even in principle, be enjoyed by everyone; personal taste or ability can very feasibly impede the player’s capacity to tolerate the decisions of the designer. The tension we mentioned earlier between business conditions necessary to produce games, and the gratuitous expressive end of art, is felt here. But this should not stop us from recognizing and harboring distaste for the reductive treatment of video games as mere gratification-inducing commodities.