People’s ability to deal with problems these days does not inspire any confidence, if I’m being honest.


Bedrotting trending in a massive way makes a lot more sense when you understand how people respond to these kinds of issues

As I continue to make my way through the Silent Hill 2 Remake (SH2R), there exists a simultaneity of both woe and wonder; stuff I run into that I’ve forgotten about, vs stuff I’m pleasantly surprised exists within the remake. As per my comments yesterday, one of the downsides to having gamed for such a long time (and possibly due to poor memory overall), I simply forget a lot of the minutia involved with a given title upon replaying it, which does negatively impact my analytical process, as I’m unable to parse on the fly what the remake does or does not do that the original either did or did not do better, even when I’ve beaten the source material multiple times. I’ll remember big beats: what a miserable piece of shit James is, for example, or how absolutely fucking yoked Pyramid Head is, but the nitty-gritty certainly alludes me.

Which definitely contributes to the puzzle factor of any given game involved, as I will likely have forgotten the solutions to any given puzzle the game throws at me. I’ve just made it past the Hospital (I’ve been really bad about consistently playing, hence the glacial like movement throughout SH2R), and the multiple puzzles that lay within, I genuinely can’t remember what they’ve added or altered, as they all seem brand new to me. Once I finish the game, I might check out a video highlighting the differences once I’m done, as playing through the classic version of SH2 immediately after the remake might be a bit overkill for me, but it would be fun to contrast the differences for the sake of argument, to see what they may have changed due to how they perceive the average gamer’s abilities to solve them in our modern times, for better or worse.

This next bit is quite subjective, and I usually like to posit a theory or discuss a happening with a slightly more objective sensibility in terms of data I’ve harvested, but no such luck this time, so it is what it is. My initial reaction to the puzzles in the Hospital have me somewhat surprised Blooper Team went as cryptic as they did (on normal difficulty at least) with some of the solutions, as I feel as if the average gamer does not have the patience for this level of nonsense at this point. I’m glad they did, mind you, as the flavor of survival horror across the board, not just Silent Hill, is greatly strengthened by the contrast of tense, spine tingling moments of bloodied combat and freight, contrasted with the slow moving, more methodically paced instances of investigation and inquisition, a yin and yang process that has both polar opposite elements complimenting the other for their distinct differences.

Culling data for how difficult the puzzles are as well, or to put it another way, finding out how many players struggled with any solution, is a far harder set of information to acquire, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the puzzles do change with the difficulties, but more importantly, unlike combat challenges which players can’t always “cheese” their way through, it is extraordinarily easy for a player to just straight give up and reference the solution on the fly, with their smart phones able to provide the answer within mere seconds, so knowing who genuinely solved which puzzles on their own is basically impossible to ever really know. One could scour social media and see what everyone is talking about, and maybe even watch list videos on Youtube, with the outliers topping the lists as being the obviously more problematic puzzles on average to deal with, but it only gives one slight insight, with no harder numbers to parse through. This makes discussing the ideas behind who can or cannot do them infinitely more difficult, as opposed to what I was able to do with say, Silksong, where you get a feel for just how steep the difficulty curve gets, based on the percentage of players who were able to bypass a certain fight (by peering at achievement/trophy data), for example, and this is especially true for Silksong in particular, where you can’t just downgrade the difficulty at a moments notice, or cheese your way through a fight all willy-nilly like.

The cynic in me leads me to believe many gave up almost instantaneously, and while that sounds quite damning, I do have some frame of reference with gamers just…generally speaking, having both worked in the industry, but also having played multiplayer, competitive and otherwise, and cooperative games with a number of people across decades of play. The number of times I’ve played with another or others that basically threw their hands up at a moments notice when they immediately didn’t understand something or couldn’t figure an element out is so ridiculously high, if given just that as the evidence of how one is able to cope with the issues or stresses of the everyday, it would leave one to think that they’re surprised the human race doesn’t just curl up in a ball and die when the first sign of trouble crops up in someones everyday for how pitifully helpless and lacking in critical thinking so many seem to be.

My guess is, an extreme minority of players did it completely blind, based on my own anecdotal experiences, but there is simply no way for me to know within any framework of objectivity either way. I mean, quite sadly, even beyond puzzle solving capabilities or critical thinking skills, I’ve encountered a ridiculous lack of basic literacy skills in recent years, even to the point of great concern about the general cognitive capability of by and large, the common American in general, so I hold almost zero amounts of confidence in the common persons ability to think their way through problems, video games or otherwise. Definitely an interesting moment I could follow up on with in a number of creative methodologies of research, like investigating social media for example, or even watching live streams of people playing and see how hung up they get, if I wanted to gather far more concrete evidence in building a case for a theory I may have, as being a man of science, I yearn for the data, but as of right now, I’m more than comfortable with my vague abstractions where anecdotal evidence is concerned.

I have more to say, but there is plenty of article here already, and I may need more time to concoct a more thorough thought process, as it still remains just a germination of an idea in my head.

Perhaps tomorrow, then.

~Pashford