Key Principle
Game culture has fixated on mechanical difficulty while neglecting interpretive and affective difficulty. The taxonomy's purpose is diagnostic: it allows critics to locate where and how a game is difficult, rather than asserting difficulty wholesale. The three types are not equivalent in ideological significance. Affective difficulty is irresolvable — it arises from "what players bring (age, gender, ability, history) and from the relational dynamics between player and system" — and is where "ideology does its most devastating work . . . where we come to know the contours of ourselves, our bodies, our sense of soul." (Jennifer Doyle, Chapter 5: Difficulty)
Why This Matters
Game criticism's disavowal of affect mirrors art criticism's "cool, distanced, and anti-emotional stance" — driven by disciplinary legitimization anxiety (Jennifer Doyle, Chapter 5: Difficulty). This disavowal masks how games structure and limit affective practices of play. Without attention to affective difficulty, criticism can decode everything a game means while missing how it operates on its players.
The allegorithm (Alexander Galloway) names what is at stake: allegory achieved through mechanics rather than figuration. The rules themselves carry ideological meaning. When games generate affective difficulty through their mechanics — not their narrative — they operate below the threshold of content critique. This is the level at which ideology is most powerful and most resistant to conscious analysis.
Good Examples
- Game, Game, Game and Again Game (Jason Nelson, 2007): All four of George Steiner's difficulty categories, adapted: (1) Contingent — requires "homework" including platformer history and the "leap of faith" design convention. (2) Modal — horror vacui Flash aesthetic that persists as designed resistance to "clean lines and definitive choice" even after references are decoded. (3) Tactical — deliberate challenge to medium assumptions: unreadable score, absurdist final video; "belief is not win, win, win." (4) Ontological — the fundamental contradiction of using video game form (complicit with military-industrial-entertainment complex) to critique that form from within. (Chapter 5: Difficulty) The ontological category maps directly to the book's complicity thesis.
- Loved (Alexander D. Ocias, 2010): Affective difficulty through the allegorithm. Obeying the interlocutor mirrors the conventional player-designer contract — learn the algorithm, follow its logic, receive reward. Resistance algorithmically allegorizes resistance to game conventions, but offers no liberation: "masochistic suspense without the relief of climax." (Chapter 5: Difficulty) The binary question "Are you excited or frightened?" cannot capture the player's actual affective complexity — the very attempt forecloses it.
- Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, 2012): Affective difficulty as irresolvable and relational. The game produces difficulty from the encounter between player and mechanics, not from the mechanics alone. What players bring to this encounter — their own body history, social position, relationship to medical systems — determines the texture of the difficulty. No amount of mechanical skill resolves it.
Counterpoints
- Mechanical difficulty as misapplied criterion: Dark Souls debates in game culture apply mechanical difficulty standards (execution, reflexes, pattern recognition) to a category of design where they are largely irrelevant. The question "is this game too hard?" forecloses asking "what kind of difficulty is this, and what ideological work does it do?" (Chapter 5: Difficulty)
- Interpretive difficulty without affective difficulty: A game may be decodable (its references legible to a literate player) while remaining affectively opaque. Resolving interpretive difficulty does not resolve affective difficulty — the latter is constitutively irresolvable. Treating meaning-decoding as the terminus of game criticism is the error Steiner's framework is designed to prevent.
- Dark play and the porous magic circle: Dark play (Richard Schechner/Gregory Bateson) designates situations where some players do not know they are playing. When the magic circle is porous — as it always is — external identities and histories enter. Racist and sexist attacks in networked games collapse the boundary between game-space and social reality. Addiction transforms fun into involuntary compulsion. The porousness is not a failure of design; it is the condition that makes affective difficulty politically significant. (Chapter 5: Difficulty) If the circle were truly sealed, what happened inside would stay inside.
Key Quotes
"Ideology does its most devastating work . . . where we come to know the contours of ourselves, our bodies, our sense of soul." — Jennifer Doyle, cited in Chapter 5: Difficulty
"Difficulty signals a problem not with you the reader nor with the poem but with the relation between you and the poem." — Charles Bernstein, cited in Chapter 5: Difficulty
"Video games can make better problems. They are important, particularly in a US culture that too often promises easy solutions." — Patrick Jagoda, Chapter 5: Difficulty
Rules of Thumb
- Always identify which type of difficulty is operative before evaluating whether a game is "too hard" or "too easy" — the categories are not interchangeable.
- Affective difficulty is relational and irresolvable: it cannot be patched out, balanced, or tutorialized away without destroying the design intention.
- The allegorithm test: ask whether the mechanics — not the narrative — carry the ideological claim. If removing the story would remove the critique, the game is working at content level, not form level.
- The ontological difficulty category (Steiner adapted) is the live wire: it names the irreducible complicity of using a medium to critique what that medium instantiates.
- Dark play is not an edge case — the magic circle's porousness is the default condition. Design for it by assuming players will bring histories the designer cannot anticipate or control.
Related References
- Nonsovereignty and the Control Society - Nonsovereignty as the designed condition that produces affective difficulty
- Affective Choice vs. Rational Choice - Affective choice as the prior condition that makes affective difficulty irresolvable