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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."
If You Can Always Undo, Do Your Choices Still Mean Anything?
The night I added an undo button to my own puzzle, my hand froze — especially since what I'm making is a Baba Is You–style game where you rewrite the rules themselves. If you can undo, was the decision ever a decision? This third "fragment" of The Nature of Play sets Sartre and Nietzsche arguing face to face: Sartre (commitment, anguish), for whom a choice declares who you are, against Nietzsche (eternal recurrence, amor fati, style), who asks whether you could will it to return forever. In the end they point at the same single line under different names.
