Poll: Should difficulty be regarded as part of the art?

[Vegosiux]

No, it should not, it is a separate aspect. After all, what's "artsy" about managing to infect Madagascar before they shut down everything?

So no, I have nothing against a game being difficult, but that's simply nothing to do with the "art" of the game. "Oh but this is ART!" is just...more often a cheap cop-out than not.

 

[Xman490]

Art is designed to incite some kind of emotion, right? Well, then that includes difficulty. That difficulty can even be intertwined with the literary story.

 

[Beat14]

I read that article and it spoiled something for me

I think variable difficulty should exist, however I guess it becomes hard to include that when the setting of the game is meant to be very over bearing and punishing or the opposite.

 

[The_Echo]

I think that if a game has a set difficulty, as in no difficulty options, then yes, it is an integral part of the experience and therefore part of the art.

 

[NightmareExpress]

Would that mean that any given game would be more "artistic" if the highest available difficulty is chosen?
The only time I can see difficulty translating to art is if you didn't have a choice and you had to abide by the game's principles.

 

[Rednog]

I honestly wouldn't consider difficulty of a game on it's own to be art, sure it can be a part of many pieces of a game that makes it what it is and that game as a whole can be considered art but I wouldn't call the individual pieces art. And let's be real here, most games do difficulty poorly. For example I usually play games on Hard, just because the Normal difficulty usually ends up not being any sort of challenge for me.

For example I tried Max Payne 3 on hard and there were just so many occasions where I'd be blind firing from cover oh no my arm got shot I go from full health to last man standing...da fuck. If that was hard I sure as shit don't want to play "Old School" where an enemy farting in my general direction will probably send max pirouetting through the air.

Or there's the ever comical difficulty of various open world games where you crank up the difficulty to max and maybe the first hand full of missions are hard but once you start getting more items/cash/health the game is a joke.

 

[EverydayHeretic]

I think it depends on the context, but the short answer is mostly yes.

In a game like I Wanna Be the Guy, there's not really a tone that is established by the difficulty, it is difficult as an extension of old school game difficulty. It's taking that sort of game design and cranking it up to it's logical extreme, to the point where it evokes nostalgia and maybe some absurdity. Hell, the main character is constantly smiling while everything is trying to kill him.

With something like Dark Souls, the difficulty absolutely informs the tone the developers were going for. The narrative is essentially about the end of the world and everything is dying around you. The difficulty of the game (on your first run, anyway) reinforces the hopeless tone, using gameplay to communicate as only games can.

As for difficulty as a barrier of entry, I think a lot of developers worry if their game is too hard because they are thinking of their game more as a product than as a piece of art or creative work. They want that barrier to be as low as possible to sell as many copies as they can. This is certainly true of other mediums, but there are many more examples of difficult works there. There many movies and books that are "difficult" to get through for one reason or another, be it the language used or the concepts they present. Should there be an easy mode for those books or movies? I would argue no.

I wish I could remember who said it, but one of the comments for the similar Jimquisition episode really sums it up for me: "Altering Moby Dick to read like Jack and Jane would destroy the original intent of the work."