4

Games Lower Their Own Difficulty Without Telling You

Choosing your difficulty in a game is like choosing a college career. You are expected to make a blind decision right off the bat that will affect the entire experience, and if you overestimate your abilities, you will be punched to death by cyborgs, ninjas, or cyborg ninjas. OK, so it's not a perfect analogy, but this one might be: For many gamers, choosing the Easy difficulty is like being intimate with the gaping, lifeless mouth of an inflatable doll. It's kind of fun, and it gets the job done, but it's still embarrassing. Sometimes even the games themselves mock you for taking the easy way out.

That's why many games don't bother with the choice at all. Everybody gets the same difficulty, and hence the same experience. R-right?

Maybe not. If a game doesn't let you choose the difficulty, it might mean the game is making itself secretly easier every time you suck at it. This is what's known as "dynamic difficulty." Resident Evil 4, for example, starts to get very generous if you're a clumsy gunfighter.

If too many cultists hack you up, some of them think "This neighborhood is getting crazy" and move away. And they leave all their ammo lying behind so you can find more of it. The developers never even told people they were doing this, and it was only discovered when players started comparing notes. Here's how the game looks when you're a good player, versus when you only think you're a good player:

Mark Brown/Capcom

Mark Brown/Capcom"He's failed 17 times. I'm taking a piss break." -- the balcony guards

3

"Coyote Time" Has Screwed Up Your Understanding Of Platformers

When you're committing Goomba genocide in exchange for cake, having Mario jump from ledge to ledge is a common activity. But developers found that players were constantly hitting the button too late. So they added something called "Coyote Time" (in reference to Wile E. Coyote, and how he would often hang in mid-air after running off a ledge). It's why Mario can run a little bit out in the air and still jump, which is almost always preferable to falling to your death.

Nintendo

Nintendo"I break-a the physics, like I break-a the grammar."

2

Games Lie About Probabilities To Make You Feel Better

Humans are quite terrible at judging the odds of just about everything. This is why casinos and lotteries rake in profits with their cunning business model of "Give us money and you probably won't get it back." Some of this is plain old stupidity, some of it is naive optimism, and sometimes we simply don't understand how probability works.

Let's say you're playing X-COM, and the game tells you that you have a 20 percent chance of hitting your target. Yet you hit it five times in a row. Don't run out and buy a lottery ticket just yet; the software is indeed using a variety of factors -- distance, gun type, training level, and cover -- to determine your chance of hitting. But in the sequel, those numbers lie to try to accommodate our own inherent misunderstanding of statistics. So if it tells you there's an 85 percent chance to hit, it might actually be closer to 95 percent, because the game doesn't want you to miss an "85 percent chance sure thing" and throw the controller against the wall.

2K GamesX-COM: Dignity Unknown

1

Even Single-Player Shooters Use "Aim Assist" To Make You Feel Better

If you ever see a game option called "aim assist," that basically means that your crosshairs slow down when they are passing over an enemy. Sometimes they will even "lock on" and automatically track them. You'll find it in Halo, Call Of Duty, and Destiny, among many, many others. Here are some of the developers of Halo explaining it: "If we do our job well, you won't have any idea this is happening ... it just feels like you're that badass."

Some assists are less subtle, like in Gears Of War, in which beginners are given massive strength boosts to make sure that they get a kill during their first match. If you've ever wondered why you, a seasoned pro, are getting stomped by the new guy, the game might literally be on their side.

Microsoft StudiosWasn't an entire star system's steroid supply enough?

But even single-player shooters have little tricks to make you feel better about yourself. For example, Bioshock enemies will always miss their first shot when they see you, presumably because those creepy masks really limit the peripheral vision. Bioshock also had a secret system that made you invulnerable for a few seconds at the end of a hard firefight, just to increase the drama.

Other games, like Doom and Assassin's Creed, fake this same effect, but in a different way. They make the last tiny bit of your health bar many times more durable than the rest of it. Even if you didn't want to be coddled, you've still been coddled. There is secret coddle-code, coddling you -- even in COD.

Abraham is your friendly neighborhood Mexican writer. He is also very humble, and got named top writer 2018 in Quora! You can follow him there here, say hi to him on Twitter here, check his terrible drawings here.

Forget all this stuff and pre-order Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that'll actually make you feel good about yourself.

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