Are video games getting more difficult?

Here is a data visualisation from The Economist on the difficulty of video games over the past forty years, with higher values indicating greater difficulty. The key conclusion to be derived from the chart is that "games were tougher in the 1980s and 1990s".

I am not sure we can say a lot about difficulties in video games based on this chart. The main issue, as always when discussing charts from The Economist is the lack of details about the data. These charts are made to be shared on social media with a minimum of attention given to the context or the data. The only information we have here is that we are looking at "rankings from GameFAQs—a website where users can rate the difficulty of games, from one (“simple”) to five (“unforgiving”)—for the most popular titles released in the past 40 years."

What are the most popular titles? That is, how do we define a popular title? And is the popularity of a title in a given year correlated with the difficulty? How many games are we looking at here? Where are the PC games? Why are we looking at the past forty years? The article says "Arcade games had long been deliberately difficult, as designers wanted to coax coins from competitors", but we also have early arcade games not included here that are from before 1985 (an obvious example is Pong from 1972, that has an average of 2.73, i.e., "Easy/Just Right").

There are several reasons why games from around 40 years ago, on average, show up in the data as being more difficult (in addition to the possibility that they were indeed more difficult of course). First, a survivorship bias where games that we remember as being more difficult are more likely to be of interest years later (relative to games that were a walk in the park). Second, a memory bias where games we played when we were younger come off as being more difficult. That is, it is important to keep in mind that the data on the older games was not collected when the games came out.

The broader challenge is that it is not clear what we mean by average difficulty. There is both difficulty between and within games. As the article itself notes, many "games allow players to select their preferred level of difficulty." I am currently playing Cyberpunk 2077 and the difficulty level you decide to play on can mean the difference between a very easy game (where you do not need to put a lot of thought into your actions but just experience the story) and a very difficult game (where you need to consider most of your moves twice).

Or consider a game like Tetris with a score of 3.16 ("Just Right"). A lot of people might say that it is relatively easy (align the shapes and score points), but the game becomes more difficult until you cannot keep up with the speed. That is, Tetris is not an easy or difficult game on average, even if people have different experiences with the game that can be categorised as easy or difficult.

And do we talk about game design or player skill when we discuss difficulty? Consider, for example, multiplayer games. Counter-Strike has a rating of 3.38 ("Just Right/Tough"), and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a rating of 3.74 ("Tough"). However, there is a world apart between playing against easy bots and playing against FACEIT level 10 players. While it can provide useful insights to look at the average difficulty as rated by the players of the video games, it is not necessarily the game itself that is difficult, but the people playing the game who make it difficult (or easy).

The first video game being discussed in the article is Hades II. I am playing the game a lot these days and I disagree with how it is being described: "Like Sisyphus, most will end up doing the same thing over and over again (though pushing buttons rather than a boulder). Every time you are killed, you go back to the beginning. Failure is part of the experience; some gamers have been complaining that it is vexing." This is a misunderstanding of Hades II (and the first Hades game for that matter). You will not be doing the same thing over and over again. It is like saying that chess is like Sisyphus. You never end up doing the exact same thing again in Hades. First, you become stronger throughout the game (that is, you will almost never begin a new run without having a stronger character). Second, there are a lot of choices in each run, meaning that two runs will never be identical. Who are the gamers who have complained that it is vexing? I see nothing but good reviews (and if anything, my main criticism of Hades II is that there are too many new items to collect - i.e., more different experiences rather than doing the same thing over and over again). Well, Hades II is many things, but it is not necessarily difficult.

Are video games getting more or less difficult? I don't think this question makes a lot of sense in the first place. It is like asking "Are movies getting better?". There are so many video games being released every year, and there is something for everybody in terms of difficulty, and it is much more interesting to discuss the variation in difficulty within a game rather than the average difficulty of a game (and try to compare this average difficulty year-by-year). For now, I would not make any strong conclusions about changes in video game difficulty over time (or lack thereof) when looking at the chart in The Economist.