The Chicken Hat, or: Difficulty in Video Games
11This video considers a common feature in modern gaming that I call "the Chicken Hat." It's named after a mechanic in Metal Gear Solid 5, where the game lets you put on a so-called Chicken Hat if you die too many times in a row on a mission; and it makes the game trivially easy, so you can basically just skip the mission and get on with your life. This mechanic functions as a kind of escape hatch, allowing players to avoid frustration or skip gameplay problems altogether if they can't solve them.
Lots of games have Chicken-Hat-Like accessibility features. Most commonly, they simply let you toggle the difficulty in the middle of your playthrough from hard to normal or from normal to easy; and I call that putting on the Chicken Hat. But other games have more creative Chicken Hat style mechanics, like the accessibility rings in Final Fantasy 16 that automate certain parts of combat.
This video asks: Should every game include Chicken Hat style accessibility features? Or is it okay that some games simply do not allow the player to turn down the difficulty when the player gets stuck? Some games, like System Shock or Divinity: Original Sin 2, let you choose your difficulty at the beginning of a playthrough; but if you choose to play on hard you can't change your mind half-way through. And those games can be quite unforgiving on harder difficulties, so that you can easily find yourself stuck in a room full of enemies with no health or ammo, and no way of clearing the room and progressing the game. That seems harsh! But this video considers the reason why I actually like it when games treat me in such a brutal way, and aren't afraid to make me simply quit from frustration.
Other games considered include: Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, the Last of Us, and Uncharted. I think that FromSoftware’s Soulsborne series and Naughty Dog’s output since the PS3 era are great paradigms to think about diametrically opposed ways of approaching difficulty in games.
Most of the footage in this video was captured from my Steam Deck, PS4, and Xbox Series S, with the exception of footage drawn from the Last of Us and Uncharted, which I pulled from some great walkthroughs by @theRadBrad.
...
SOCIAL MEDIA
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Chumpy_Games
...
BUSINESS INQUIRIES
Email: contactchumpy@gmail.com
...
#systemshock #fromsoftware #eldenring #divinityoriginalsin2
00:00 The Chicken Hat
01:50 The Good Kind of Difficulty
04:02 Pushing Through Frustration