games are hard: friction, fluency and meaning
books, when they're hard, ask you to make meaning out of the abstract.
movies, when they're hard, ask you to experience unpredictable images, sounds and places.
videogames, when they're hard, ask you to learn to live as an alien in an unknown world. in their extremes, everything we know about life (or indeed, other videogames) no longer applies. videogames ask us to live as children again, vulnerable and curious, and find our way through them.
I'm hesitant to lightly make comparisons between storytelling mediums, and this is an at least somewhat-simplified one, but what I hope to demonstrate is that videogames are, at least to me, exceptionally challenging by nature, both emotionally and in ability.
I can't help but think that this is, at least in part, why there's been such a push to make games easier or more accessible as long as they've existed. or all the different explorations on how to make them worth the personal investment they ask us for what value to our lives they give. perhaps that's even why games lean on genres as heavily as they do--genre fluency helps a new game be a less unknown world, and then one can navigate it in a more confident and 'adult' manner.
in this way to me, videogames feels like a language in and of itself (one I might even speak better than english), where genres might be dialects or even their own languages altogether. I have a certain 'cultural fluency' in, say, RPGs that doesn't feel unlike any other kind of language or cultural fluency.
this fluency changes how I interact with these games, how I interpret and speak to them. when I see a new RPG, from speaking its language I can immediately recognize many of the things it might be trying to say, the things it might be saying relative to its genre, the history and context that carries. but for someone who's never played a game before, it might all look like pixels and digits, and they would be right. just as much as an unfamiliar language seems like random sounds before one understands it.
to me, this is one reason why we might seek out novel or challenging games. when a game is easy, it's often because we're no longer a traveler to unfamiliar, enchanting worlds. there is little to enrich ourselves or grow with.
in this sense, just as much as a game can be 'too easy' it can also be 'too hard', relative to our fluency with the language it speaks and our tolerance/enjoyment threshold for stress and confusion.
and to me, this is why games are so wonderful - I yearn to be a curious stranger in a world I am (my physical self) safe in. I love to wrap my head around the unfamiliar, to study something closely and become intimate with it. this is why, even if a game has friction, I may not be able to resist it: that friction is a promise of an opportunity to expand myself.
but there's still such a thing as too much, for me and I imagine everyone. this is also why it's wonderful for games to be easy, like being a child in wonder guided through an amusement park by an encouraging parent. if you're a child, that's not 'handholding', that's 'just right'.
it's tricky, then, and maybe even impossible to convey meaning through one's game despite the player's fluency in the game's language. difficulty options are often an attempt at this, but I've found that any even small change fundamentally changes the qualitative experience.
there are various conclusions to this, but my own is to let go of trying to so carefully calibrate how meaning is derived from my games. in so many ways it's not something within anyone's control, so contextual and so personal, whether it be a matter of fluency or otherwise. I think even, aiming to control so closely how a world is experienced can only lead to reducing the meaning of existing in that world, like the infamous "quantum ogres" problem in TTRPGs. and beyond my own games, a conclusion that how others interpret games may be, in part, relative to the language through which they try to understand it.