Invisible Walls

A thing about video games that I wonder sometimes if people really understand is that they’re made to be completed by the player. Dark Souls is made to be completed. Cuphead is made to be completed. The most challenging (or even unfair) game you could possibly imagine is still almost certainly made with intent to create a complete experience for the player. A lot of players never finish most of the games they play, but still, that intent, that structure, is there.

This makes difficulty a kind of odd concept. We offer challenge paired with the assurance that the challenge is possible to complete – which makes it completely unlike most of the challenges we’re likely to face in our day to day lives, which might easily turn out to be impossible. Perhaps impossible for anyone, due to some fundamental law of nature, but more often circumstantially impossible – impossible for us because we don’t have the resources to make it happen. Some of these resources are external, such as wealth and social power; some of these resources are internal, such as mental and physical health. Either way, some of us are born with more of one or the other, and this can make some tasks others consider to be easy impossible – and others some consider impossible to be easy.

I worry sometimes that the structural assumptions, taken from games, that challenges are inherently completeable has helped to reinforce the ever-popular just-world fallacy, the belief that what is sown is reaped, that we all get what we deserve through our own merits and demerits. This belief is extraordinary popular both because it absolves the wealthy and powerful of responsibility for caring for the less fortunate and reassures those less fortunate that if they only try a bit harder, try to be a bit better, than a commensurately better life awaits them.

In games, when we make every goal set out for the player achievable, we communicate, over and over again, that those who cannot achieve their goals are not working hard enough. When you believe that natural advantages and disadvantages simply make achieving those goals easier or harder, when you think of having or not having privilege as merely being playing on easy or hard mode, you are convinced that anything is possible for anyone. If you regard physical and mental ability as simply being the quality of the player, and if the player can’t improve their play then they deserve to lose, you are convinced that anyone who won did so because they were a better player. It becomes a meritocracy where the ability to avoid starving or dying of exposure is defined as merit.

What’s curious though is that games are full of things that are actually impossible. Invisible walls constrain you to the constructed play area, you only get a few dialogue choices at any moment, your hands are built only to stab and shoot and fight. You aren’t made to live like a person, but to be played by the designer until you complete his or her obstacle course. That’s fine: It’s a good time, it’s a fun and interesting experience if it’s made well.

But I think sometimes about what it would be like to do the impossible. To break beyond the level boundaries, insert new dialogue options and game commands. We have words for this: Cheating, modding, hacking… And these, as well, may be what we will need to do to break down the boundaries that channel us, that let us be played by our designers, in everyday life. Cheat, mod, hack, and turn the world into something its owners never intended it to be.

• Art
• Challenge
• Difficulty
• Game Design
• Games as Art
• Just-World
• Narrative Design
• Privilege
• Problem Machine
• Video Game
• Video Games
• Writing