I hear plenty of people talking about how much easier games are these days. Is it true? Well, it's not really that simple of a question. Games have changed so much since they first popped up, it's hard to even compare their difficulty. I think there are many different topics and questions related to the change in difficulty of games.

How have games evolved?
What makes a game difficult?
The state of the video games industry
Casual vs. Hardcore (don't worry, what I mean here is accessibility, and it is tied in with the state of the industry)
Can a game be difficult, yet accessible?
Why aren't there any new retro games?
...maybe more will come to mind as I write

I may or may not come back and write about each of these topics, but for now I'm going to talk about how video games have evolved, and how that has affected the difficulty in games.

When video games first emerged, they were small, skill-based games. There was usually very few game mechanics, and each level simply added something to the same base 'level', whether it be more enemies, upgraded enemies, new movement patterns, 'environmental' obstacles, or any combination of these (and others). I'll use Tetris as example, simly because it's a pretty universally known game. The game barely changes at all from when you first start at level 1. The only change that happens when you get to the next level, from a gamelpay perspective, is that the blocks now fall faster. Often times, games didn't even have an 'end', theu just kept getting harder. The whole point of these games wasn't to 'beat the game' or to play through the story, it was simply to get the highest score you could, and if you were really good, to get on the high scores list.

If you look back at early games, if they even had a backstory it was generally one or two sentences long, just to give the player some sort of context. A shift seemed to take place during the 8-bit era, fewer and fewer games had a score, and more and more games started to take on a more modern approach: You play as the protagonist in a story, and have to fight your way to the final boss to beat the game. As technology improved, video games became more and more viable as a form of storytelling then they had ever been. Today, with the power of the XBox 360 and the PS3, developers are able to create huge, immersive worlds, with lifelike characters. This really allows us a much more in-depth and immersive, and sometimes even emotional experience. Games like Half-Life and Bioshock really set the bar in this regard.

So now we aren't aiming for scores, we want to play through a story and that's all well and good. But just because a game is story-based, it doesn't necessarily mean it must be easy, right? No, it doesn't have to be. This discussion leads to even more questions and topics, specifically accessibility in games, and the state of the video games industry. Will I come back and write about that on another day? Maybe, maybe not. You'll have to wait and see.

Whether you agree or disagree, or have something extra to add that I have completely overlooked, leave a comment!