I’ve come to believe that when it comes to gaming, “difficulty” comes in two forms. The difficulty can stem from the design of a level or from the opponents that we face within that level. Personally, I much prefer to play a game where the difficulty stems from the design of the level as opposed to the enemies that occupy it. It has to do with a perceived sense of fairness. The level doesn’t change. Therefore, any failure would naturally be my fault, but in a game in which the difficulty stems from the enemies themselves, my failure can come from any number of random elements inherent in combat. One form of difficulty is predictable, the other is not.

Guacamelee encapsulates this dichotomy. It’s a 2D Metroidvania game that evokes both types of difficulty and the stark contrast between them.

I once moved to the U.K. for an extended period of time.  I can recall very few situations more stressful than that customs line: Did I have all my papers?  What questions were they going to ask?  What would happen if I got waived through but my wife didn’t?  In terms of “immigrations,” it was a relatively mild one. We had given up our apartment and jobs in the U.S., but if we got denied, we still had friends and family to help us out.  We weren’t going to be secreted away by fascist goons, and the laws of both the U.S. and the U.K. were fairly navigable in the grand scheme of things.  Still, watching the border officer review all our paperwork was tense.  The seconds it took for her to reach for her stamp felt like years.  What was going through her mind while she looked at our documents? 

Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please offers one possible explanation, albeit one set in a much more dramatic environment.  It’s a game where you play as an immigration inspector who has to process paperwork and make the decision whether to allow people to cross the border.  Your job is simple: grant or deny people passage to the country.  However, as the game goes on, the human cost of of your decision for both you and those you evaluate becomes apparent, leading to some uncomfortable realizations about the power of social structures.

This post includes spoilers for Bioshock Infinite.

In the medium in which the audience’s choices are supposed to matter because interactivity is key, Ken Levine just seems to keep coming back to the notion that, shucks, no choices really don’t—not even in video games.

When Andrew Ryan declares that “A man chooses.  A slave obeys” in the original Bioshock, he declares that the player, despite all his seeming autonomy, is a slave.  That is much of the point of the “Would you kindly?” twist in Bioshock.  Despite seemingly having chosen to aid Atlas or to aid Tenenbaum to save Little Sisters or to destroy them, ultimately we have been as programmed as the game itself.  We follow the arrows that point us in the right direction in video games.  We follow that disembodied tutorial voice without ever asking why.  And even when we don’t, when we insist on attempting to ignore those prompts, we find that ultimately we are handcuffed (or chained as is the case in Bioshock, whose main character has chains tattooed on both wrists) to the elements necessary to drive the plot forward.  Or else we give up in exhaustion to play something else.  But to get to the end of most games in most instances, we find that we must jump through the predefined hoops that the developer deems essential to forward motion.

A recap of part one and part two: the Expo Hall is an over-crowded high stress environment with little reward, whereas the Tabletop area is a calm arena of interest and wonder. The panels are hit or miss, but either way, you have to show up early to get in. And being a game journalist at one of these events isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, except when it is. Oh, and there are lines for everything.

That last one doesn’t go away as we reach the end of this little guided journey through PAX East. In fact, I think it stands as probably the single common denominator for all PAX experiences. I got to experience much at PAX East, as I generally try to see everything I can at least once, but it isn’t possible. Going in you have to know what you are at the convention for and must be steadfast in what you want to do there. Wavering costs you time, which in turn leads to waiting in lines even longer. A dreadful fate indeed.

Normally, we don’t concern ourselves too terribly with spoilers on the podcast.  However, given the rather essential and emotional twists and turns of Bioshock Infinite, we did make an effort to save most of the spoilers until the end of our discussion.

This episode we will be discussing Columbia, Elizabeth, Comstock, Booker, and what that infinite in Bioshock Infinite signifies.  However, we’ll give you fair warning as we approach discussion of the bigger potential spoilers.