It was hard to convey what I wanted to ask in the title so I'll try and elaborate:
Firstly I want to be clear that I don't think there is anything wrong with playing games on easy, or only/mainly enjoying easy games. I know not everyone has the time or patience to spend hours learning boss patterns and a lot of people only care about a games story
Story is all good and well, and I love a game with a compelling (or at least interesting) story, but there are certain things games can do that other mediums can't, one of them being creating challenges that need to be overcome
I love the feeling of finally toppling a difficult boss after a dozen attempts, where you go from ”how the hell is this possible?" to dodging every attack a few attempts later, or having a slither of life left and managing to make it out alive and find a save point or healing item.
If you only play easy games, or only play games on the easiest difficulty setting do you not feel like you are missing out on this element on the medium? Or do you find that the sense of frustration that often goes hand in hand with the elation of overcoming a difficult challenge enough to put you off?
Edit: To clarify as I'm not sure how well I worded the OP
Firstly I want to be clear that I don't think there is anything wrong with playing games on easy, or only/mainly enjoying easy games. I know not everyone has the time or patience to spend hours learning boss patterns and a lot of people only care about a games story
Story is all good and well, and I love a game with a compelling (or at least interesting) story, but there are certain things games can do that other mediums can't, one of them being creating challenges that need to be overcome
I love the feeling of finally toppling a difficult boss after a dozen attempts, where you go from ”how the hell is this possible?" to dodging every attack a few attempts later, or having a slither of life left and managing to make it out alive and find a save point or healing item.
If you only play easy games, or only play games on the easiest difficulty setting do you not feel like you are missing out on this element on the medium? Or do you find that the sense of frustration that often goes hand in hand with the elation of overcoming a difficult challenge enough to put you off?
Edit: To clarify as I'm not sure how well I worded the OP
I think a lot of people are looking it this differently to how I intended, which is maybe my fault for not wording it well
Challenge is something games can do that is unique to them, just as exploring huge worlds is too
If you don't like challenge that's fine, if you only want easy games then that's fine too
Maybe there are some people that don't like exploring in games at all, or dislike that element of games, but if so, I'd also say they're missing out on an aspect of the medium that games excel at
I don't think you can flip the argument because I don't think there any many people who exclusively play hard games, or only want to be challenged all the time.
Most people prefer a mix and play a variety of games that are varying in difficulty
But there are people (as you can see in this thread) that ONLY play easy games, or dislike challenge at all, and again, that is absolutely fine and more power to them. I completely understand how and why people would just want to play to relax, but at the same time, if you only ever play easy games, then you are missing out on something games are great at
Not everyone (also evidenced in this thread) likes to overcome challenge, which again is cool
If we want to flip it to another medium, I'd say people that only watch soaps are missing out on how great scripted TV can be by never watching great scripted drama or comedy, which is also fine because a lot of people love soaps and don't care about anything else
Personally this was just a subject that interested me as I enjoy all aspects of gaming, from exploring vast open worlds to getting high scores to playing something to relax. I'd just feel like I was missing out if I dropped or ignore one of those aspects and never engaged with it