My old man always criticized video games as being unable to prepare anyone for practical application. Pressing a button isn’t going to help you drive a car better, for example. In a sense, he was correct. A button is a binary device that registers an affirmative or negative response. Cars require more precision in steering, pressing the gas and hitting the brakes.

One can argue against this point, that gaming has actually prepared one for the required alertness the road demands. Or even that modern games now use analog sticks which make use of the same sort of precision. However, I can’t help but feel that same sense of “on or off” permeates the games industry still. I’ve mentioned the love-hate relationship gamers and publications have towards game titles. There is no middle ground anyone dares to tread, and for anyone that’s actually bothered to enter adulthood it’s a pretty frustrating mentality.

Yet this binary sense of adjustment even permeates game design. The latest criminal? Mega Man 10. When I was a child the difficulty of Mega Man didn’t bother me. My intent wasn’t always to beat the game when I played. Sometimes I just wanted to kill time. Plus, a lot of the fun came from gradual improvement. Now, however, I’m an adult. I have other obligations in my life to deal with. I also have other games I’d like to move onto. So when I played Mega Man 9 I was pretty irritated that it was designed to try and kill me. The game wasn’t built to provide an even challenge but to be ridiculous. As a result, I stopped playing it. It still goes unbeaten, and honestly, I could care less.

Yet good news everyone! Mega Man 10 will feature an easy mode!  Let’s take a look…

To skip to Easy Mode, go to 1:40

Now, this is easily the sort of thing one can make too big a deal out of, but it seems Capcom is missing the point. Just because you don’t want to spend thirty or forty hours of your life memorizing patterns and discovering the proper order of the Robot Masters doesn’t mean you want your hand to be held, either. In the normal mode Mega Man must navigate some mechanism to cross over the spikes, but in Easy Mode they are merely covered up. There’s also whispers across the Internet that the presence of foes will be fewer.

There are ways to make the game easier without having to resort to such drastic measures. Removing spikes from some parts of the environment is one. Reducing damage taken is another. Those disappearing blocks? Have them last longer in the air. In fact, replace some of them with solid blocks to stand on. Heck, even making extra lives infinite would be a small enough change to make a difference.

At first an easy mode was reassuring. However, the implementation is questionable. It doesn’t look like small adjustments are being made for a greater whole. Instead some environmental changes are made making it impossible to get killed by spikes, which is the only reason the number of foes was a problem in the first place. It’s as if Capcom doesn’t even realize why people were dying so they took away the only possibilities they could assume.

The more I play games the more I’m convinced no one in the industry has a sense of moderate adjustment. Particularly in terms of difficulty. Yes, this is going to be something tough to tweak for everyone to enjoy, but by having a super-hard mode or super-easy mode you’re only pissing more people off. Focus tests should be made of various sections of the game designed at different levels of difficulty. Have players of varying degrees of skill participate.

One level segment could be the current default. Spikes everywhere, enemies out to knock you into them, and the regular amount of damage taken. Jump to a regular map intended to be easy. No spikes, no disappearing blocks, just a couple of enemies. Then have a new segment that is similar to the first, but make small modifications. Fewer spikes, reduced damage, but no change in enemy count. Go to a disappearing block puzzle next, then jump back to the first map where the player took as much damage and had to avoid as many spikes, but this time reduce the number of foes.

The idea would be to take the player through ten to twenty small, single-screen rooms of similar challenges with small tweaks, with a few control maps intended to be easy. Heck, sprinkle a couple of E-Tanks or 1-Ups so they feel as if they can accomplish something. Record how well different players do on different sections, have them evaluate each one after they complete it, and compare results. In the end you’ll have a sense of how you should tweak the game’s difficulty and begin building it. Then you can do focus tests on the maps as you build them, but since you have a sense of difficulty to shoot for you won’t have to do as much tweaking.

Yet somehow anyone involved in Human Computer Interaction with video games only has a sense of interface design. No one seems capable of modifying things like difficulty, or suggesting by what variables they can be changed. If they do exist, then they are clearly doing an absolutely terrible job and ought to be replaced.

With luck I am over-reacting to Mega Man 10’s easy mode. After all, not a lot was shown. However, it hasn’t given me reason to play it, either. I may just stick to the Mega Man X series. In those games they didn’t intentionally try to kill me, but instead simply challenged my abilities.

Which is, after all, the whole purpose of playing games. To have fun facing a challenge, even if it’s to lose weight on a Wii balance board.

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