#rawls

Is Difficulty Unkind? The Philosophy of Fairness

A friend playtesting the hardest stage of my puzzle looked up and said, "Isn't this a bit unkind?" Is making a game hard an act of cruelty, or a gift? With the old Sekiro "easy mode" controversy in the corner of my eye — a game with no difficulty settings at all — this fragment of The Nature of Play seats two philosophers who would answer opposite face to face: Rawls, who argues for fairness from behind a veil of ignorance, and Nietzsche, who affirms the wall with "what does not kill me makes me stronger." Bit by bit, the two stop kicking at "difficulty" and start kicking, side by side, at "unfairness."