Games are the only real challenge for youths who don’t live in high-stress school settings like Japan, or who don’t practice sports. Even more so now that school is even easier than 30 years ago. When the challenges of adult life kick in and you don’t have as much time to game, you tend to lose interest in challenging games. Yeah, there’s 40+yo people who still play every single action game at max difficulty and still performs like a champ, but that’s not for me.
The issue isn’t necessarily the difficulty. It’s that the time required to get to a certain level of skill means that I’m very likely to drop the game, because my gaming time is very inconsistent. If I can’t play a skill-based game regularly, it’s useless to even try. A more relaxed game is more of an incentive for me to play it even when I’m not feeling top form, which is often.
This doesn’t mean I like to play cinematic games at normal difficulty, though. I’ve been enjoying retro games and more arcadey games where there’s little down time. Sitting in front of the TV also doesn’t feel right to me these days, so I love my Switch for its portability. I do play every game on normal, like I always did, and if it’s good I may be tempted to replay it at higher difficulties. Starting on hard will typically ruin a game for me, for the reasons already discussed.
Even if I had a whole day to game, I probably wouldn’t game all day. It’s a rare game that makes me do that. Only the two latest Zeldas and Elden Ring glued me to the screen like that in the last several years. The gameplay loop must be that good. Otherwise, I can manage two or three hours before my unproductiveness alarms start going off in my head and I have to do something else. Being a responsible adult does that to you.
