#mill

Is Choosing Easy Mode a Retreat?

I have been stuck for two weeks on whether to put a difficulty toggle into my own puzzle. Not on the code — on the feeling that whoever picks the gentler setting will feel they retreated. Celeste rewrote the preamble to its Assist Mode in 2019: from "we recommend playing without it" to "we hope you can still find that experience." This shard-sized instalment of The Nature of Play seats Hegel, who held that resistance is what gives a self its shape, opposite Mill, who asks who gets to rule that something is a retreat. They meet closer together than I expected.