this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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I'm not sure there's an agreed upon definition of "artificial difficulty". The whole game is artificial so I'm not sure what "natural difficulty" would be.
Many, many developers have figured this out already.
Can you share?
A list of every single game with difficulty settings? Or just one example, such as Death Stranding, which was explicitly referenced in the original post?
Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. I was asking what you mean by artificial difficulty.
Sometimes people use that phrase and they might mean anything from "you can't quick save" to "if you don't take a healer you can't heal"
It's literally all artificial.
What did you mean by
Then?
That is the point, games are artificial.
Gardening, and sports aren't. They have natural difficulty. Because they are in the natural world.
Sports are games and have some degree of artificial difficulty. The size of the goal and ball, for example, is arbitrary (within the bounds of practicality. No moon sized basketballs, for example)
But that doesn't really address what I was trying to get it. I feel like sometimes people online complain about "artificial difficulty" in video games, and it's unclear what they actually want. I've seen it applied to everything from "The enemies hide around corners" to "you can't quicksave". I think it's a kind of duckspeak thing that people say to just mean "i don't like it" while making it sound less subjective.