What Difficulty Level Are You Playing?

I enjoy playing video games with my kids and by myself to relax. Playing Fortnite has allowed me to experience them "on their turf" in a unique way. It's also a very humbling experience as two of them are far better than me. I contribute best to our squad through encouragement and carrying heals for our team far more than my ability to take down the likely preteens who are often destroying me.

But my two younger sons also play Fortnite, and I'm still better than them. I've noticed that when I play a game with them, the lobby (the group of other players randomly assigned to our game) is a far easier level of players. I feel like Rambo when I play these games, and I sense the pressure my older boys carry when playing with me. I must lead us.

The difference is the difficulty level.

Or consider another game I play called MLB The Show. As the name implies, it's a baseball game, and it's a big hit in our house. The video above shows one of the greatest catches I ever made as I scaled a wall (I mean, seriously, the timing has to be perfect to pull that off).

While some of my kids also have this game, we usually play solo games. I often turn the volume off and play a game while listening to audiobooks. As with many games like this, you are asked to pick your difficulty level before you start a game. You can start with the "rookie" difficulty or move up a few levels to the "Hall of Fame" difficulty. 

And here's my honest confession... I play most of my games in rookie mode. It's not because I couldn't win a game in the other modes. It's just that destroying a team 27-0 and launching home runs all game is more fun. This is super subjective, as many gamers today crave insanely difficult games now where they die over and over again in a slog to make it through a game slowly. As a case in point, I bought a game named Elden Ring that basically won all the awards when it came out, and I realized I didn't want to spend so much of my time dying and trying again over and over for hours.

I recently finished a fantastic book called How to be Perfect (see Amazon link) that connected my video game practices to real life. The book explores philosophy and ethics from the writer of the show "The Good Place." It's both profoundly brilliant and hysterical, a rare combo in a book. 

In the book, he referenced a 2012 blog post by the writer John Scalzi, who set up a parallel to life as a video game.

Imagine life... is a massive role playing game... where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World.

With this framework in mind, he invites us to consider how we would play a game like that.

You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it? Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is. This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

I realized I live my life like I play my Xbox. I'm perpetually in rookie mode. It also means that for many readers of this blog, you are too. But what a brilliant analogy to privilege. And that's just considering I'm straight, white, and male. There are countless other variables we could add to this criteria when making a real-life difficulty setting. We would also factor in the kind of parents you have, how much money you have been given, where you were born, etc.

Here's an interesting game-related observation: when you play a game of higher difficulty, the game usually rewards you with higher experience or rewards. It's a way of acknowledging you had to put more skill and effort into it. But this isn't as clearly the case in life. Instead, as Barry Switzer argued, "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple."

I wonder how many problems we'd see differently if we had an objective difficulty level system and could see which mode others were using. I suspect we'd be far more humble and considerate of others rather than defending what we have with built-in assumptions of merit every step of the way. 

If you want an in-depth perspective on a video game, you probably won't spend much time asking the person playing it on the easiest difficulty. If you want an in-depth perspective on life, might the same thing apply? Maybe we should give less influence to the billionaire on rookie mode and instead seek out those voices on the margin of society playing it on Hall of Fame difficulty. 

You can often tell which difficulty level someone is using based on the depth of their ideas. There are aspects of our lives that determine many of our difficulty settings which we can do nothing about. I continue to be a straight white male. But we can choose which voices we listen to and which ideas we support.

It's time for many of us to level up.

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