Video Games: Fun, Difficulty, and Cooperation vs Competition

If you tuned into the Nintendo Spotlight during E3 2017, you’ll probably recognize this image.

This is where then-president of Nintendo of America said one of his most famous quotes:

“If it’s not fun, why bother?”

It sounds cliché, and may seem like nothing more than a platitude, but this quote has dictated my philosophy on gaming for years.

Growing up, “difficult” video games were never really my taste. No Dark Souls, no Celeste, no Touhou, no Call of Duty games on Veteran, and for the longest time, no Terraria on Expert.

I won’t deny that I’ve tried to play various difficulty mods for some of my favorite games, or mods that are meant to be more difficult than the base game. I’ve been able to do full playthroughs of a few—I beat Terraria’s Calamity Mod on Revengeance, and I got to Level 72 OP8 in FFYLands, a difficulty mod for Borderlands 2 (this was before the Fight for Sanctuary DLC). Other things however, like the various difficulty mods created for Plants vs Zombies (mostly made in China, interestingly enough), or the aforementioned Dark Souls games, I simply do not have the time nor patience to play through.

I have never beaten a loud heist in PAYDAY 2 on Death Sentence with One Down activated. I have never beaten an Elite Boss in Bloons TD 6, and I have never beaten The Plutonia Experiment.

Does that make me a bad gamer? No. These games, these mods, they exist for people who want the challenge. I play video games for fun. If I feel I’ve mastered a game, know the ins and outs of it, but still want more, then sure, I’ll take these challenges on.

If a game’s difficulty is one of its selling points, though, I probably won’t be playing it. And that’s okay! Not everyone has to be good at video games. That’s not to say they’re bad games—there’s a reason FromSoft games are so popular—but challenge typically isn’t what I seek from video games. I don’t want to play a video game that will make me scream and make me break my headphones. At least, not anymore.

I think the reason there is always such a stigma against “bad” gamers is due to the popularity of multiplayer games—especially because most of the major ones on the market are competitive. And I don’t just mean the strategic, more tactical games, likeCounter-Strike 2 or Rainbow Six Siege, I mean games that are based around Player versus Player (PVP) interaction. Think Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty, even Minecraft Bed Wars. Even if you’re on a team in their game modes (like in Team Deathmatch), you’re still competing against other players, and as a result, you must be better than them—in other words, you must “get good.”

It is because of the popularity of those games, I believe, that this “winning” mentality, almost a sort of elitism, bleeds into how people believe they should play single player games: to be as good as possible. Now, this mentality makes sense in the context of speed running, but it shouldn’t be forced upon others who are trying to learn the game or just want to have a good time.

As a child, I was very impressionable. It will come as no surprise, then, that I fell victim to the aforementioned mentality quite often when playing multiplayer games. Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty, especially, tended to upset me, to the point that I have gone through numerous headsets and have often been reprimanded by my parents for my behavior.

Realizing my destructive tendencies, I stick towards more PvE (Player vs Environment) games than I do PvP games nowadays. I will always come back to Team Fortress 2, though. I mean, it was part of my childhood, my DJ name is based on it…

Every other game I’ve played recently, though—Minecraft, Bloons TD 6, some Plants vs Zombies fangames, even Grand Theft Auto V—have almost been exclusively PvE. And wouldn’t you know it? I’ve managed to wear the same headset for the past two years and video game-based incidents with my parents have been reduced to a minimum. Why? Because I’m playing games that don’t stress me out.

That’s my belief when it comes to video games. You should be playing them to wind down. To relieve stress. To have fun. So if you’re playing these games that consistently upset you, that have led to broken hardware, that make your already terrible mood worse…why bother?

This isn’t even taking into consideration games with toxic communities. And boy are the communities of some of the games I’ve listed above toxic.

If we break it down to the fundamentals, we, as humans, do better cooperating than competing. There is more collective gain when you work together on something rather than compete for it. That’s why there’s games like Lethal Company, Risk of Rain 2, PAYDAY 2, and once again, Bloons TD 6. It is for this very reason that I realize that I prefer not just PvE games, but co-op PvE games.

I won’t deny that stuff like Super Smash Bros Ultimate (SSBU) or Valorant can be fun. But maybe, if you’re feeling down after losing a bunch of games in a row, maybe stop playing those games, and pick up something more cooperative. Hit up a friend and start a survival Minecraft world. Maybe play through the Left 4 Dead 2 campaign. Something where rather than actively fighting against other people, you are working with them. And overall, something that doesn’t make you hate yourself.

Thing is, at the end of the day, fun is subjective. Play what you like. If you can get the same amount of enjoyment out of playing 10 games of SSBU in a row as I can playing a few hours of Warframe, then more power to you. But just keep these things in a mind. Video games don’t make us violent–we have proven that time and time again—but, speaking from experience, it’s hard to deny that some are easier to get mad at than others.

And no, I TOTALLY didn’t write this as an excuse to show off my video game knowledge. It’s not like I had my Steam library pulled up on my second monitor while writing this… :)