The other day the a team member at Studio Blanc threw up a LinkedIn post in our channel talking about Hollow Knight: Silksong's difficulty and it made me want to sort of express my thoughts. This isn't a new conversation to me per say, I've had many late nights at IHOP talking about this topic with other game designers at DigiPen. This is the direct lifting of my response since I think it makes for good blog style content:

I've kind of come to equating difficulty/skill mastery demand with the concept of different restaurants serving varying degrees of spicy food.

Spicy is inherently tasty - our brains just chemically wired to enjoy it, it's to what degree really that matters. Some people think a ghost pepper isn't spicy enough, some people think Sprite is spicy (lol).

Some places really pride themselves on being super spicy and all they serve is the spiciest food - any they develop a following/routine client base that aligns with that pride of having the spiciest food around. The spiciest place optimizes their food in tandem with the assumption it'll always be super spicy. Games that really demand "skillful" (in the context of that game) play to progress/succeed are experiences designed as such.

Other places give the option to be spicy but you can opt out or have varying degrees - mild, medium, etc. While they aren't optimizing their food the same way as the spiciest restaurant in town, their following/client base comes from other factors and due to a level of customization/personal experience. While it might not be the spiciest food around objectively, to me it might be perfectly spicy. Games that allow for a modal wiggle-room range of user-defined difficulty/skill mastery to progress/succeed are experiences design as such.

Though I think the discourse of “let skill expression ring true” has a lot more nuance than “make things a hard-gated learning curve”. I think it’s certainly a valid way of designing when you just want to create a “git-gud” experience but I think there’s a super fascinating middle space of variable success that isn’t just “I somehow hobbled my way thru an experience” or “I set the game of easy mode”. Mgsv pops to mind - I've been kind of glazing the game as of late but it’s been a really interesting experience kind of paying attention to what the game does. 

The game (most of the time) allows you to basically do what you want to complete missions. Whether it be extremely skillful “european extreme no cqc no tranq” runs all the way to “the entire enemy army is on my ass now” successes. It uses soft motivation loops (money, resources, score) to promote this. The game is obviously pushing towards the player to play extremely skillfully and massively rewards it but instead of hard gating experiences at “you die over and over until you figure stealth out” they let players hobble thru with a caveat: that “poor tactic” you used - the enemies will now adapt to that. If you are stupid loud and actively not engaging with stealth, things like tanks, body armor, and advanced weaponry is a thing. It’s not that you can’t beat those things via your “poor tactic” you used before but it’s now EXTREMELY inefficient. It’ll take double or triple the time to beat a mission like that and much more resources.

By doing that it now skews opportunity cost instead of outright gatekeeping it into pushing playing to adapt in ways a loss screen over and over doesn’t do. The game then already has ample things available and modes to approach a mission that with some minor thought/willingness to deviate some prior strategies it works out. It follows a carrot method of developing skill rather than a stick.

I think many “git gud” games focus on the stick in the hopes it makes the carrot taste better - it does to a degree but man does that stick suck. I’m really fascinated in what that middle space looks like for a lot of games. Psychological pushes vs hard boxes players need to solve their way out of. Textbook learning vs critical-thinking learning. Both result in the same thing, just different curve.