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This is, to be blunt, a character flaw and not a good argument against difficulty settings. If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.
I find your other arguments flawed as well (though I don't want to go point by point because I find that kind of obnoxious). I think that the "it doesn't affect you" argument for lower difficulty settings is correct, and that your arguments don't really counter it.
Nonsensical. Are you proud of breathing? No, because everyone can do it. Are you proud of knowing how to swim? No, because it's extremely common to be able to swim. Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?
I'll tell you why: The value of something is directly proportionate to how rare it is and how much effort it takes to produce. This is as true for achievements as it is for physical goods.
The near future is going to be strange, computers and robotics will be superior to humans in every endeavor. Will you still take pride in beating other humans? People that play chess do, even though a computer can win easily at this point. Will you be proud of a PhD when an AI has made your PhD worthless as a possible contributor? How about when a human can be augmented to do anything at the best "human augment" level?
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This has nothing to do with how many other people can do it. It's reasonable for, for instance, someone with some physical disability to be as proud at completing a comparatively short run as someone else is at finishing an ultra-marathon, if equal effort was demanded of them. If swimming suddenly and totally fell out of fashion as a thing to learn recreationally, such that fewer people could swim at all than had a PhD, that would not then imply that if I went off and learnt to swim to a bronze certificate standard it would be an achievement to be proud of.
Why wouldn't it? If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do, then being able to swim to certificate standard when that is rarer than having a PhD is something relatively few people can do, and so is something to be proud of.
If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?
The cachet of a PhD might be that, but that doesn't mean that's why one ought to be proud of it. It's only correlated. You should be proud of it because it's hard, and not many people can do it because it is hard. But you shouldn't be proud of it because not many people do it, that's getting the chain of causation the wrong way round. Hence;
No, but not because everyone has one, but because you didn't have to do anything to get it. Which again are correlated - everyone has one because it comes with their cornflakes - but not the same thing.
Here's a perhaps clearer example. If I decided to learn to a very basic level some conversational phrases in an ultra-obscure language for a couple of hours, that would already get me to a level of knowledge rarer in the the general population than having a PhD. But that obviously doesn't mean that I should be prouder of the former than the latter, if for instance I had both.
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This is the wrong comparison. You can feel pride in getting a doctorate degree, but does that mean nobody should be able to get a master's or bachelor's degree?
Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense. The fact that people can get bachelor's degrees doesn't invalidate your doctorate degree at all. Everyone understands that getting a doctorate degree is a bigger accomplishment than getting a master's or bachelor's degree. Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?
No, it's saying "we should not lower the difficulty of getting a doctorate to the level of graduating high school so that everyone can feel the accomplishment of getting a doctorate"
I'm not. They can go play other, easier, lesser games just fine.
No one is getting "the doctorate" (the hard mode completion) by "graduating high school" (completing easy mode). Besides, of course, blatant game state editing (cheats/hacks/mods).
It might as well be a whole other game.
There are no devalue fields being emanated by easy mode players that can somehow affect your experience of beating hard mode against your will.
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In fact, I am. Not being great at it makes me even prouder, because I can still do it despite being not that great. I never had any ambitions of being a Channel swimmer or Olympic medalist, but stick me in a swimming pool or the ocean, and I won't drown. Go me! Not everybody can swim even that much.
The fact that people like Michael Phelps exist and make me look like a rock doesn't matter one bit to me, and if Michael Phelps derived his sense of self-worth from "I'm way better than FarNear", I'd actually be kinda sorry for him. I'm so far below his level, him complaining that I was allowed in the same pool as he swims in would be less "I am a champion" and more "I am a dickwad up my own arse about how Great I am".
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No, it's because it isn't challenging for me. Whether other people can do it doesn't factor in.
I am in fact mildly proud of knowing how to swim, because it was challenging for me to learn. Less proud because I haven't swam in years and so I've lost the skill somewhat, but I still have reason to be proud of the effort I made.
It's not at all true for achievements.
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Can you give me an example of something that you are proud of, that everyone else can also do? The only stuff I can think of would be a depressed person managing to get out of bed in the morning and cleaning their trash or something. But what about everyone else?
Cooking. It's not hard to do, almost everyone can cook to some extent. But when I cook a dish that is challenging (for me), I'm proud of it no matter how easy it would be for most people.
I don't think most people can cook that well. Everyone can put a frozen pizza in the oven or cook Ramen. But you wouldn't be proud of that. Are you sure that your sense of pride is completely independent of your environment? I would guess that you would feel somewhat less proud if everyone else was a 3* chief. Then, being proud of what would be considered a moderately complex dish today would be equivalent to being proud of cooking Ramen.
Dude, I can manage to burn frozen pizza by getting distracted and forgetting how long I've had it in the oven. Not burning it is legit a source of pride for me. I think you're operating off a different level of how you value achievement; a lot of people just do things for fun, and easy mode on games is one of those fun things. After all, it's just a bloody video game, it's not like curing cancer or brain surgery.
There are games I'd never be able to play, because I'm not good enough, have not been playing for long enough and don't know the etiquette, as it were, and have nowhere near the hand-eye co-ordination needed (particularly as I'm getting older and the first traces of arthritis in the joints are appearing). That's fine, I'm never going to try playing those games anyway. But mass-market games? Why not an easy mode for those who just want to have fun, or who won't be able to get to complete the game without help? What are you losing? You still beat it on Ultra Hardcore Suicide Massacre Mode, you achieved that, you are the champion.
I'm one of those people who like story mode because I'm playing the game to find out the lore and explore the world and wander around (maybe I like plucking all those flowers for the herb garden for the villager side-quest) rather than the grind of following a guide to get the maximum build to power through the maps with the most slaughter. I'm not interested in the body count I rack up! So you enjoy yourself running through like a blazing meteor of death, I'll be pootering around chasing rabbits, and we can both have fun with the game.
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Yes, of course I'm sure. The pride is in the challenge I overcame, not because it makes me better than anyone else.
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Pride doesn't, or at least needn't, depend on your position relative to other people. English is a widely spoken language that doesn't require any special intelligence to learn. I learned it effortlessly as a child. But someone who becomes fluent in English as an adult put in a lot of work and has something to be proud of. To someone who is learning to ski, getting down a black diamond run for the first time without falling is a major accomplishment worthy of pride. Someone who skis regularly might do ten black diamond runs in a day and think nothing of it.
Becoming fluent in another language as an adult is an achievement that not everyone can do though. On the other hand, nobody is proud of learning their mother language because it's expected. It seems to me that this supports my argument. I am not arguing that pride comes solely from comparison with others, just that if basically everyone can do something, it's hard to be proud of doing that thing.
But you can do that thing well, or badly, which I think is part of the point you want to make. Learning to read and speak fluently your native language is an achievement, even if you can get by perfectly well with a level that is ordinary speech.
What your position comes across as is demanding that everyone should speak at the level of a university degree in literature, or else they're just loser time-wasters, and moreover they are devaluing your achievement in attaining fluency. But if everyone can play and win in hard mode, then what is the achievement to be proud of there? You need the lower-level players to contrast yourself with, otherwise "I won on hard mode" becomes the same "so what, are you also boasting about being able to cook a frozen pizza?".
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My point is that it's based on one's own situation, not others. You gave an example in your post of a depressed person doing basic tasks. Another example might be someone who had a stroke learning how to move their right index finger, something almost everyone can do. It is worthy of pride because it's an accomplishment for that person. By contrast, doing something that almost no one can do may not be worthy of pride. If Usain Bolt runs a race faster than 99% of the population could, he still may be quite disappointed with his time and feel no pride at all.
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This is a ridiculous stance.Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.
Yes, some people are better than others because of natural talents or gifts. But boasting about being good at video games? Yeah, OP could beat me because I have the hand-eye co-ordination of a turtle. Well done you, this is like Usain Bolt getting in a race with me and bragging that he beat an old, fat, out-of-shape, arthritic Irishwoman. At that point, people tend to think you're not so great after all.
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No it isn't. A person of good character strives to excel because excellence is its own reward, not because they can beat others.
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Not only is it not a flaw, it's a virtue! The fundamental axiom of all value is that it is destroyed by abundance. Ensuring that this knowledge is able to take root and flower in every mind that provides suitable soil for it is of vital importance.
No one, despite the great amount of effort exerted, ever got so much as a footnote in a history book for being born, having children, feeling great love or anger or jealousy, spinning out an entire hidden inner universe with the utmost uniqueness and specificity, being ground into ashes by implacable anxiety, or dying - experiences that are if not common to all lives then at least common to a great many of them. We do, however, give great honors to star NFL quarterbacks, and rightly so. Not many people can throw a ball like that.
Are the achievements of NFL quarterbacks diminished by the existence of beer league sports?
No, but they might be if you forced the NFL to sponsor beer league sports and give a bunch of time/resources to them.
At the very least, the prestige of the term "NFL player" would drop significantly. To bring this back to the original point, the prestige of being a player who beat *insert game* is significantly lower with games that have easy modes. You can be part of the group that beat *insert game* on hard mode, but human beings aren't great at modifiers, and I could see it dropping total prestige.
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We aren't talking about economic value here. We're talking about the virtue of overcoming challenges, which is not limited, and in no way requires an external reference.
I know.
Then I think your argument isn't very good because virtue is not lessened by lack of scarcity. Almost nobody murders people, but that doesn't mean it's not valuable to refrain from killing. And if someone really struggled with anger issues such that it was a real struggle for them to not get violent with people, I would say they should be proud at their success even though most people find it easy.
Hey, is it me who gets to be the C.S. Lewis quote poster today? I can't believe it.
This popped into my head from Mere Christianity:
Lewis is talking about God's judgment, but you can really substitute your moral framework here; he's talking about external actions vs internal choices, which is a cross-cultural theme. And I do think there's a tremendous difference between the two.
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I'm not convinced by OP's arguments either, mainly because as others have pointed out it's trivial for the community to define a bar that earns respect regardless of what settings the game allows. But this is going too far. It's reasonable and inevitable to seek a more objective lens on an achievement that feels substantial to you by comparing it to what others can do / have done. It's easy to say "measure yourself by yourself - if you sink 200 hours into beating easy mode because your thumbs just won't cooperate like a normal person's then you can be just as proud of that". But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.
That, too, is a character flaw. It's honestly not that hard to set reasonable standards for yourself which are genuinely challenging to you. If someone is lacking in character such that they aren't willing to do that, then there's nothing you, I, or anyone can do to help them.
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Not sure about that. Unbounded arrogance is a flaw, but people recognizing their own strong points is something that shouldn't vilify people if they find a way not to be obnoxious about it. I feel like these efforts are trying to enforce a Harrison Bergeron-esque experience for video games. If someone's a chess grandmaster, I expect him to feel some pride about it, otherwise it's just kind of sad.
I think there are at least two different mindsets here: one is the person who is competitive and wants to measure themselves against others. For them, having peers is important, because how else will they judge their own performance and ability save by striving against the best? Thus, including an easy mode is, for them, the equivalent of letting slobs who can barely waddle traverse ten steps of ground, then say they 'completed' and 'won' the same way as if they were running against Usain Bolt in the 100m.
The second mindset is doing it for fun, and not caring about anyone else's result. That view is okay, us slobs will waddle our ten steps over here, you get to race Usain over there, what's the big deal? I'm not stepping on your toes, you're not stepping on mine. I'm not competing with you, I'm not competing with anyone, I don't care if I rank first or ten thousandth on some leaderboard of game scores.
I'm not going to say either mindset is superior to the other, though as a waddling slob of course I'm more sympathetic to the second view.
I have still not seen a satisfactory answer to "so how do the slobs stop you from competing against your peers, anyway?". Right now, slobs can actually waddle ten meters and say they won. Why does that not "ruin" running for Usains but ezmodo ruins games?
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