![]() Speedrunners do not suspend their disbelief just so they can see the game for the giant computational machine it is. That doesn’t mean that suspending your disbelief is required to enjoy your games, with speed running being one of the most beautiful examples of that available. Your high score? That number might as well be any random value unless you choose to accept that the score the game assigns you and the high scores around you do matter. That quest-line? It’s only important if you accept our suggestion that it’s important. That world in danger? It only matters because you accept our suggestion that it matters. We create a game to make suggestions about where you are, what you’re doing, and why that’s important – and you, the player, you either accept or reject those. The game is taking place in your head because the game is nothing more than computer code, rules, and assets. While developers do the heavy lifting during development, as a player you’re doing the heavy lifting while playing. You will always experience it as what it is: most likely you’ll be someone somewhere experiencing a bunch of pixels on a screen and sounds from your speakers that you can change in ways defined by code and rules by using some sort of input. If you go into the most immersive game in the world with an intent to not believe it, no amount of effort or care we put into the game will make you suspend your disbelief. What’s important to note here is that we, as creators, have no control over whether you grant us that suspension of disbelief in the first place – we can only try our hardest to help you maintain it. Bugs, animation clipping, texture pop-up, bad music transitions, different lines of dialogue talking over each other, bad writing – any noticeable reminder that you’re sitting at a screen damages that suspension of disbelief. The game has make sure that it doesn’t “pull you out” of the experience. In games, that commonly means that you’re going to believe that you’re a character, in a world, that can do certain things and needs to do complete certain goals. ![]() It basically means that, despite you being fully aware that something is not real, you’re going to pretend it’s real. One of the most critical parts of making any fictional work of media work is called suspension of disbelief. A huge part of my job as game designer is to trick you into believing you came up with a solution on your own, and that you did a great job figuring it out, even though we’ve been signposting and carefully preparing you to figure out the solution for hours. That might sound preposterous, but it is actually fairly critical to understanding why we’re having this discussion. Seeing a lot of the discussion that flowed out of that, I thought it might be a good idea to explain your average developers’ view on difficulty, and the problems with the term. In the days around that, John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun released an article arguing for skippable bossfights, and before you know it, games internet was on fire again. ![]() This time, two things happened at once: Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed Origins” announced a tourism mode that has no challenge in it, and StudioMDHR’s beautiful indie release “ Cuphead” was really hard. Time and time again, difficulty comes up as a subject in the internet discourse, and time and time I see various misunderstandings about how our understanding of games and difficulty interrelate. I love making and playing games that are both a test of skill and a world players can immerse themselves into. I’ve dedicated the majority of my last decade to making hard, punishing games. I spent more time making maps and scenarios for both “Age of Empires” and “Starcraft” than I did playing it, and I spent all my years since then making games and learning about games as a craft. I spawned photon laser troopers amidst Greek armies in “Age of Empires.” I cheated to reveal the map of Starcraft so I could study what the AI did, as the level of English I needed to understand the tutorials would elude me for another year or two. Many of my favorite childhood games I learned using cheat codes. With the two cheat codes, I ran through the levels causing mayhem. It took me a while to realize the string of letters was actually two separate cheat codes: IDDQD for invulnerability, IDKFA for every key, weapon, and ammo. I was seven years old when I first cheated in 1993’s classic “ DOOM.” The game came on a floppy drive, and the label said “DOOM – IDDQDIDKFA”.
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