Hacker News Reader

Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

The point is that "doing hard things" is required to be a successful adult. Meanwhile, the bar for what constitutes a "hard thing" is dropping fast.

View on HN

When I used to read for pleasure, I did it because it was pleasurable. Not because it would be the hard thing. It was fun and easy.

What this particular chain of thoughts shows is that adults don't read for pleasure either, they associate it with an uncomfortable hard thing one should to do "build character".

Everything is easy when you've done a lot of it, that's how the brain works.

That's coasting though, or at best flow. Neither state makes you better. The entire point of making something easy is to be able to build on it.

I don't think this is accurate. In basically every single game or sport with measurable outcomes, doing things are relatively simple to you (and often enjoyable) endlessly - drives improvement.

If you want to make the argument that it's muscle memory in e.g. shooting freethrows in basketball, then you can see the exact same thing in doing chess tactical puzzles. There's even one successful learning method called the Woodpecker Method where you endlessly repeat over the same series of tactics working to get the time it takes you to do them down to essentially instantaneous. And it works excellently for improvement, and I obviously don't just mean improvement at doing that set of tactics.

This is conflating hard with unpleasant. A child just learning to read is going to find it hard to do, yet through adults pushing them to do the hard thing, they learn to read and sometimes begin to find it to be pleasurable. Building most skills is hard, yet that doesn't exclude taking pleasure in it. Many of us taught ourselves to code, the fact that we enjoyed it doesn't mean it wasn't also hard.

We've all learned the lesson that sometimes you have to struggle through something hard, to be able to access better pleasure.

I said it waa easy, because it was easy. I am not conflating hard and unpleasant, you ignore my experience that reading for fun was easy.

You did not struggled and it was not hard. Kids books were written to be easy at age they were targetted at.

If the issue was just "hard" videogames woulsndo the job.

I mean it’s obviously not just that otherwise we’d make every kid play the original Donkey Kong and call that a success

The original donkey kong is pretty difficult compared to some of the wide-audience games that have been coming out. As far as I can tell, if the audience of a particular franchise includes younger generations as a majority or near-majority, the difficulty plummets. I don't think "plummets" is even that sensational. See pokemon, kingdom hearts, mario games, final fantasy games. Some franchises and genres have survived but not all of them.

I might be missing some other reasons why this could be happening, like increases in game balance and coordination.

Play Mario Odyssey for an hour or two then play Super Mario Bros 1, 2, or 3 as one startling example.

That's mostly the MBAification of games that I think is completely disconnected from what most kids want. But the MBA logic is about maximizing market reach. Relatively few people will choose not to play a game because it's too easy, but ostensibly the same isn't true of games that are seen as difficult. Of course Elden Ring, Dark Souls, et al completely proved this to be nonsense (to say nothing of pvp games), but who's gonna let a bit of reality get in the way of pie charts, bar graphs, and powerpoints?

In the world of games outside the big money AAA MBA stuff, there's plenty of highly challenging franchises that maintain true to themselves and thrive, even with plenty of kids playing. E.g. - I suspect the median age for Binding of Isaac is well below the age of consent.

Mario games have reduced the difficulty a lot, although you should probably compare Mario Wonder with SMB 1-3. Odyssey is more comparable with Mario 64.

One of the things though is when most peopley play SMB 1-3 today, they're playing with input lag. Mario Wonder was designed with input lag in mind, SMB 1 was not and it increases the difficulty.

Mario Wonder lets you choose to use invulnerable characters, etc. There was only one level I remember needing to try many times to beat. OTOH, there's lots of difficult levels in smb 1...

The bar isn’t dropping, it’s shifting.

Shifting to a position below where it previously was? I don't get your point... Is there's a new bar? What would you say the new expectation is that doesn't build on previous core skills?

As in, these kids are crushing tiktok reels?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com