Difficulty levels have been around from the beginning, even Pong had them as well as Game & Watch handhelds and so on. The concept is simple: to ensure gaming enjoyment for people with different skills and add replay value there are typically few difficulty levels in each and every game or the game incorporates something more sophisticated like some simulators that allow tuning of the realism settings and behavior of the opponents and also there are games that can adapt the difficulty dynamically on the fly based on how the player is progressing.
Difficulty levels are for most part a good thing. There are annoyances however. The biggest problem is if difficulty is accomplished in an unfair manner and as an example rubber band AI in driving games is one of the worst offenders. Sure it sounds good on paper, but essentially removes need for skill in the game and replaces that with exactly nothing. No matter if you crash five times or have a clean race the final stretch of the race looks exactly the same, you are winning with a predefined margin. I can't understand who would think this kind of system is good for anything, yet it is quite common especially in racing games.
Back in the nineties I was a glutton for punishment. I tended to play on Hard or Insane or whatever the highest difficulties were named. I also had more time to dedicate to gaming. Endless retries and the high after getting through were the shit back then and I mocked those not so HC that had to resort to the Normal or *gasp* even easier difficulties. Then I woke up. At one point I realized I was not getting anything other out of that than a high blood pressure and also the pile of broken game controllers was growing fast. Games took much more time to complete and I also was traumatized a little bit if a game proved to be too difficult for me to sort out without cheating. I started to play on Normal and for known difficult games I started playing on Easy and I have not looked back since.
On average my gaming experience is nowadays very enjoyable and smooth and I have very little tolerance for unfair game design and artificial obstacles to make game last longer - newsflash, concise game design with tight storyline and least amount of gimmicky tricks to keep me playing for longer than necessary are infinitely better than the alternative. A very easy remedy to this is allowing free saves anywhere and as often as needed or some sort of checkpoint system or similar. There is no good reason not to include these unless the intention is just to give the finger to the consumer anyway.
A fairly recent encounter with a 'right' kind of difficulty level (but with a critical flaw in implementing the levels) was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I played it on Normal and there was exactly one point when I wished I had started on Easy: the two titans just before the final boss match. I know this game is perceived to be very easy on the two lowest difficulty levels, but for me it was just perfect. Had there been more occasions where I doubted my choice of difficulty I would have probably not played the game through especially since it did not allow changing difficulty level mid game. This was the only stupidity in the technical design of the game, why not allow changing it other than to piss the players off. My point here is that there should have been a choice for me to drop the level to Easy after 15 tries with the titans, I wonder why there was not. It was very close that I stopped playing then and there.
There are some trends to be observed in the market and among the players. First of all, games are getting easier. I am not sure if you even can fail in Heavy Rain or do you get through no matter how you mash the buttons and this is such a contrast to early days of gaming and the comparison I have in mind is Dragon's Lair. You had to know exactly the action sequence and there was zero room for error, life was lost if you made one wrong press. There are lots and lots of games where you can't fail at all and I suppose that is all well and good up to a point, certainly makes sure people get to see the ending credits which was a rarity back in the eighties. The problem is that at some point games start playing themselves reducing the interaction required from the gamer close to zero and what's the point in that? Movies are already a zero response required entertainment and majority of the scripts are better than in games so why play at all if that is where games are going. Secondly I believe I am not alone in being satisfied with shorter and easier games if I feel I had enough possibilities to take part into the events and things were 'fair' all around and there were no silly obstacles between me and the end. I used to prefer 100+ hour games back in the day and nowadays the game has to be something extrodinary for me to dedicate more than 20 hours to it (like GTA or Fallout).
I have somewhat schizophrenic view on difficulty levels and perceived difficulty in games and my attitude has changed a lot over time. As a broad generalization I draw a conclusion that as I have gotten older and more seasoned the tolerance for annoyances and wrong kind of difficulties during the game play has gotten lower and I demand a smoother experience but on the other hand I still want to play the games myself, feel that I am accomplishing something and not just watch from the sidelines. There are some tricks that are enough to help a geriatric gamer to get to the end that do not take the taste out of the drink and one of them is the free saving. Please put that to all games from now on. And checkpoints... and when I am stuck, give me a chance to cheat my way through, also include 100% of the game's content to all difficulty levels because a game is not so good that I would play it twice, kthxbye.
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