Tom Russell, “Purposeful and Arbitrary Difficulty” in Russell’s Quarterly, issue 1 And instead of making the game hard in a fair way, they do it an easy way, by heaping one impossible obstacle after another onto the player in a manifestly arbitrary fashion. But very few of them actually understood the reasons why Tarantino made his film the way he did.Ī lot of video game designers are like that: they know that Contra is really hard, and so they make their game really hard, without understanding why Contra is hard. At a very basic level, this approach misunderstands the entire point of game design and the use of extreme difficulty.Īfter Pulp Fiction was released, there was a slew of witty, violent crime thrillers that fractured time. But I would still call it arbitrary difficulty because it is difficulty resulting from very bad design decisions, difficulty created for its own sake, just to be frustrating. All of these things would make a game harder, yes, and they could be the result of a conscious design decision on the part of the creators. Any idiot can flood the screen with enemies and make power-ups/health-ups scarce beyond all reason. Or, to put it another way, purposeful difficulty is the result of the programmer’s competence while arbitrary difficulty is the result of the programmer’s incompetence.Īnyone can give a boss hundreds of hit points and the player just a handful. Arbitrary difficulty is the result of bad game design, and thus is arbitrary. Purposeful difficulty is the result of a finely-tuned and well-balanced game mechanic, and thus is “on purpose”. On the face of it, this appears to fly against conventional game design wisdom. Hearing more of Foddy’s commentary becomes the reason to climb higher.Īt one point, Foddy mentions that while he was building the mountain, he’d invariably make sections of it ludicrously difficult, but then upon playing them feel that rather than having made the game too hard, he just wasn’t a good enough player. Whenever you mistime a swing of your pick and fall all the way back to the bottom of the mountain (this happens a lot), he’ll also pop in with a misattributed quote and a song will play. At certain points of the climb, he’ll comment on the design of a section, the design of the game as a whole, on failure and frustration, and many other things. What makes Getting Over It more than just an exercise in pure masochism is Foddy’s commentary. How did this game keep me interested for a whole hour? As you climb higher, the mountain becomes less of a natural rock formation and more of a random pile of mismatching 3D detritus, much of it seemingly taken from some or other indie game asset store. In Getting Over It, Foddy purifies (no arrow-key movement or arbitrary saving and loading here) and expands on Sexy Hiking while keeping the same essential spirit. It has the same outsider art charm as contemporary Game Maker games like the La La Land and Johnny games. As this contemporary-ish review notes, Sexy Hiking is not a slick or polished affair, but its unique pickaxe mechanic makes it an interesting and compelling experience, if not necessarily an all-around pleasant one. The game is intended as an homage to Sexy Hiking, an obscure little Game Maker production released in 2002. The catch is that there are no other controls – you have to move forward and later scale a mountain using just the pickaxe. Getting Over It bears those inspirations, although its control scheme is not quite so bizarre – rather than needing to co-ordinate different leg muscles with carefully planned and timed keystrokes or play Twister with your fingers, you move the mouse to swing a pickaxe in a fairly intuitive manner. I was hurt.įoddy is responsible for the infamous QWOP and other games in the same vein such as GIRP and CLOP.
The game’s Steam description says it all.
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is also about laboriously climbing a mountain in what feels like a painful quasi-religious pilgrimage. This practice is a core ritual in the book’s fictional religion of Mercerism, meant to encourage empathy. Through this device, he and thousands of others see and hear what the climber sees and hears and more importantly, feel what the climber feels as he is hit by falling stones. There’s a scene in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which protagonist Rick Deckard uses a VR device to experience the feeling of climbing up a mountain. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy Steam store description Review: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy 30 December 2017Ī game I made for a certain kind of person.