What Gamers Call Hard

Get Good, Actually

1.

Elden Ring is hard, right?

When people talk about difficulty in games, they’re usually talking about punishment.

Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Lies of P—these are the games that throw you back when you fail. They slow your progress and make you walk. You die, and they push the win further away.

This might be obvious in the Soulslike genre, but it’s not exclusive to it. Osu!, Cuphead, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Spelunky—in all these games, the alleged difficulty comes from how harshly they respond to your failure. The idea of a “hard game” to The Gamer is defined by repetition with consequence. When a boss beats you, it costs you time, progress and resources. The punishment is the difficulty.

But imagine losing to that same boss, only to be revived mid-fight with the boss now at half health. You’re still doing the same fight. But suddenly, it doesn’t feel hard anymore.

Isn’t that funny?

The task is the same. Your moveset unchanged. Mechanics untouched. You’re being asked to perform identically, but when the punishment vanishes, so does the “difficulty.”

Difficulty, in these cases, is derived not from what you are doing, but from the psychic distance placed between you and the win. When you finally grasp victory, you call it hard because most games would never make you take the same walk twice.

But the actions themselves—the timing, the reactions, the reads—aren’t especially demanding for the Gamer who’s been playing action games for a while. These games don’t ask you to learn anything new. They don’t teach. They just ask you to endure.

Is that difficult?

2.

If you want to know what difficulty really looks like, notice what The Gamer avoids.

The YouTube reviewer sees it once, maybe during Summer Game Fest. The chronically online poster doesn’t bring it up at all. The mainstream critic hands it off to a niche freelancer, someone who’s fluent in its language, but whose value is always for rent.

This is not the prestige game or the emotionally rich indie. This is the game that asks for more than The Gamer is willing to give.

Street Fighter 6.

League of Legends.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

These are the games that come with qualifiers. When they do get reviewed—if they get reviewed—the writer must first confess their skill level. “I’m no expert,” they’ll say. “I’m not competitive.” Then they’ll pivot to safer territory: how well the game onboards new players, how accessible the single-player content is, whether it feels “welcoming.”

These games are not part of the assumed cultural conversation around video games—not because they’re obscure, but because they resist victory. So they’re siloed. Everyone knows these games are popular. So why doesn’t The Gamer rise to face them?

Because they’re difficult.

Not punishing. Difficult.

They’re not designed to make you feel heroic just for showing up. They don’t offer the narrative of “eventual triumph.” There’s no walkthrough to look up. No build to exploit. You can’t “get good” by listening to someone tell you what to do. There is no shortcut to fluency. The game is the learning, and the learning is the game.

And learning—really learning—is hard.

That’s why so many of us quit piano. Why we don’t understand our microbiomes. Why billionaires still exist, I guess. Learning is incremental, humbling and inconvenient.

Learning is hard.

Fighting games, in particular, demand that kind of learning. They demand your humility. To play them at all, you must fail. Embarrassingly. Loudly. You will be bodied, publicly. You will get a message from a stranger telling you to stick to unranked. Then you’ll watch yourself lose—frame by frame, inputs displayed, your idiotic instincts made legible. You will see your panic. You will see your patterns. And you will have no one to blame but yourself, you big idiot.

And unlike the Soulslike, there is no walk back.

There is no hallway to retrace or resources to recover. The fight is the game. The repetition is the practice. There is no performance outside the performance. No space to recompose yourself. No game to massage you into believing you are making some kind of progress.

Because fighting games are instruments you learn to play.

Maybe at first you’re just trying to make the sound right. Then, you learn some chords and can string together something like a basic melody. Eventually, something clicks. You stop thinking. You start playing. You reach a threshold. Then another. And another. There’s always further to go in pursuit of mastery.

Fighting games are not here to punish you.

They are here to teach you.

When was the last time you learned?

3.

What does it really mean when The Gamer says a video game “feels good?”

The shooting in Destiny feels good. It feels right. You’re thinking of other games. Other games that we say feel good.

It reminds me of when I was in undergrad and I learned about Heidegger’s “ready to hand” philosophy. The idea was that you don’t really think about your tool, what you’re doing, or how it works. Everything works exactly how you think it should. When you drive a car you don’t think about the pistons firing. There’s no friction between desire and result.

The guns feel good.

The guns are engineered to flatter me.

The guns made me feel good about myself.

The gunplay is tuned just so—the aim assist is so aggressive, the feedback crisp. I feel competent the second I pick up the controller.

And why shouldn’t I? I am The Gamer.

Sometimes I see people point to Crash Team Racing as a game that doesn’t “feel good.” The drifting is too tight or too technical. When compared to another racing game the distance between desire and result is far too wide.

So it’s clunky. It’s bad.

It didn’t immediately validate my status as The Gamer.

4.

Mario Kart World is easy, right?

When you put your hands on the controller, it plays more or less how you expect a Mario Kart game to behave. Sure, you can jump now. And ride walls and grind rails. But have you ever needed these tools to win before? Absolutely not. You’re good at drifting.

Between traditional three-lap races, you drive along these open-world intermission tracks. The flow is less choreographed and the expectations are looser. These roads are wide, straight, and relatively quiet. But beneath them, there’s a hum of desire.

You might come across one of these routes while moving across the overworld map. But there are no quest icons. No arrows. Nothing telling you what to do. That low hum returns.

Figure it out.

Sure, if you collect a Peach Medallion or complete a P-Switch challenge, you’ll get a sticker. A reward. But what if you spend your time studying a piece of track? Memorizing a sequence? Practicing a new route? What do you get then?

And then you're back to racing online.

You hope the game selects a familiar three lap track. You’ve seen Reddit threads and BlueSky posts begging for a “Classic Mode” that removes the interstitial segments entirely. And you get it. You’re competing and you want the part of the game you already understand.

But the vote lands on the intermission track from Acorn Heights to Boo Cinema. You sigh. You race, begrudgingly.

You start off doing well. You have done a good job of collecting coins early on. You’re ahead of the pack in first place.

And then you’re stranded. You find yourself on a long stretch of highway with no options. There are no corners to drift around and no mini-turbos to build like you had done before in Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart Double Dash, Mario Kart Wii, Mario Kart Super Circuit, Mario Kart 7, Mario Kart 8, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Then, the items attack.

A blue shell arrives.

This game is cheap! You are punished for being good! Punished for being in first place when a stupid highway came along with no options!

You finish in 5th. You wonder why Nintendo would make a dumb, bad game like this.

But I play with people who are actually good at Mario Kart.

They memorize tracks. They knowingly manage their placement in the race. They inspect courses and invent strategies. And you know what else they do? You know what I notice every single time I play with a group of actually competitive Mario Kart players?

They win.

They win spectacularly.

They win in a way that makes me realize how serious the game can be.

They win in a way that tells me there is still so much to learn.

Because Mario Kart World is hard.

Will you figure it out?

Thanks for reading all that.