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Game Journalists and Their Ilk: “It’s ableist to have a game be this hard!  It’s exclusionary!  It’s keeping people out of the hobby!”

Actual Disabled Gamers:

Stop using disabled people as a cudgel to spare your own ego and push your own agenda.  If you actually cared and respected people with disabilities, you’d not be advocating for ‘easy mode’ or ‘story mode’ under the guise of “ableism”, you’d be advocating for better control functions.

It’s not ableist and we do need better control systems for people who are disabled

BUT

There’s no damn reason not to put in an easy mode. After All, what if grandpa wants to play, or maybe a kid wants to have a go?

You should have an easy mode as an option. It doesn’t take away from other people’s experiences, it helps them enjoy the game more and most importantly it lets them practice for if they ever want on a harder difficulty.

What if a grandfather wants to play a horror game, but his heart and blood pressure won’t allow it?  Shall we just remove all the horror elements from horror games?  All the tense moments?

Some games have a required skill level.  Sometimes you’re not going to be able to reach that skill level.  Or you may have to work hard to do so.  

How does an easy mode even impact you. Don’t like it? Don’t play it.

It is literally that simple.

Adding additional options makes games accessible to a wider range is that really so bad? If more people buy the game then that increases the likelihood of other similar games. Now more games is a definite benefit.

Shadow of the tomb raider has pretty good difficulty customisation.

Find the puzzle solving boring and want to get on with the action and difficult fights? That’s an option. Want to work though the tombs with limited help? Go for it. It put the control into the hands of the player.

don’t like it? don’t play it. there’s entire hundreds of games that are not sekiro that you can play.

why does sekiro have to compromise their artistic vision to appease you and people like you?

the director of the various souls series and the spiritual successors and games like that has said that his games are intended to reflect a distinct experience, and that they’re like a stew in that they’re slow cooking and about the journey.

if you just pummel your way through it on an easy mode, you’re going to miss a bunch of the intended experience. it’d be like fast forwarding through a dvd to try to watch a film (which would not work at all).

these games are built around a loop of getting beaten down by something difficult, and then approaching it again, engaging a major foe, and slowly working out how to defeat it as you go.

you come up against something difficult and then, you eventually conquer it and feel euphoric in your accomplishment.

and people keep mixing up “accessibility” with “difficulty”, which is frankly really insulting towards disabled people.

when nintendo makes the headass choice to make motion controls mandatory, nobody says shit about that.

when there’s no colorblind options in a game, nobody says anything about that.

when there are no subtitles in place for the hard of hearing, people that have trouble distinguishing or disentangling words or even just people that like having subtitles, nobody says shit about that.

I hadn’t thought about high contrast/making games colour blind friendly before. I think that’s a great idea.

Let’s push for greater accessibility as well! Think about how big of a difference it could make for gamers.

I agree that accessibility and difficulty are different, but they are not completely separate issues.

Game Journalists and Their Ilk: “It’s ableist to have a game be this hard!  It’s exclusionary!  It’s keeping people out of the hobby!”

Actual Disabled Gamers:

Stop using disabled people as a cudgel to spare your own ego and push your own agenda.  If you actually cared and respected people with disabilities, you’d not be advocating for ‘easy mode’ or ‘story mode’ under the guise of “ableism”, you’d be advocating for better control functions.

It’s not ableist and we do need better control systems for people who are disabled

BUT

There’s no damn reason not to put in an easy mode. After All, what if grandpa wants to play, or maybe a kid wants to have a go?

You should have an easy mode as an option. It doesn’t take away from other people’s experiences, it helps them enjoy the game more and most importantly it lets them practice for if they ever want on a harder difficulty.

What if a grandfather wants to play a horror game, but his heart and blood pressure won’t allow it?  Shall we just remove all the horror elements from horror games?  All the tense moments?

Some games have a required skill level.  Sometimes you’re not going to be able to reach that skill level.  Or you may have to work hard to do so.  

How does an easy mode even impact you. Don’t like it? Don’t play it.

It is literally that simple.

Adding additional options makes games accessible to a wider range is that really so bad? If more people buy the game then that increases the likelihood of other similar games. Now more games is a definite benefit.

Shadow of the tomb raider has pretty good difficulty customisation.

Find the puzzle solving boring and want to get on with the action and difficult fights? That’s an option. Want to work though the tombs with limited help? Go for it. It put the control into the hands of the player.

Games are an interactive medium and an art form.

In some games, like From Software games, the difficulty is part of the story on a meta level.  You are supposed to struggle, strive and eventually overcome.

Demanding that games change is somewhat selfish.  Other hobbies have skill gaps as well.  Sports, skateboarding, board games.  Sometimes, you’re limited by your abilities.  You need to either accept that or get better so you CAN get to a ‘higher level’.

The Souls games were not made with people like you in mind.  The fans have a long history of enjoying the studio’s difficulty, the studio wants to give those fans that difficulty. 

The point of the game is the difficulty.  It is the skill required to play the game.  If you lower the difficulty, the entire point of the game is compromised.  If you want to see the story, there are letsplay channels that allow you to indulge in that.  

And I say this as someone who is a gamer, yet who isn’t a GREAT gamer.  I don’t play high skill intensive games because I know they’re not for me, I’m not up to snuff for them and I don’t particularly enjoy them.

I play more tactical games.  X-Com, Civ, Stealth Games, RPGs, etc.  And yet I don’t feel the need to tell From Software to add an easy mode to their game just so I can beat it, because I understand that IF I want to beat it, I have to accept my limitations and learn to push through them.  To get better.

Game Journalists and Their Ilk: “It’s ableist to have a game be this hard!  It’s exclusionary!  It’s keeping people out of the hobby!”

Actual Disabled Gamers:

Stop using disabled people as a cudgel to spare your own ego and push your own agenda.  If you actually cared and respected people with disabilities, you’d not be advocating for ‘easy mode’ or ‘story mode’ under the guise of “ableism”, you’d be advocating for better control functions.

It’s not ableist and we do need better control systems for people who are disabled

BUT

There’s no damn reason not to put in an easy mode. After All, what if grandpa wants to play, or maybe a kid wants to have a go?

You should have an easy mode as an option. It doesn’t take away from other people’s experiences, it helps them enjoy the game more and most importantly it lets them practice for if they ever want on a harder difficulty.

What if a grandfather wants to play a horror game, but his heart and blood pressure won’t allow it?  Shall we just remove all the horror elements from horror games?  All the tense moments?

Some games have a required skill level.  Sometimes you’re not going to be able to reach that skill level.  Or you may have to work hard to do so.  

How does an easy mode even impact you. Don’t like it? Don’t play it.

It is literally that simple.

Adding additional options makes games accessible to a wider range is that really so bad? If more people buy the game then that increases the likelihood of other similar games. Now more games is a definite benefit.

Shadow of the tomb raider has pretty good difficulty customisation.

Find the puzzle solving boring and want to get on with the action and difficult fights? That’s an option. Want to work though the tombs with limited help? Go for it. It put the control into the hands of the player.

- phenomena

- encephalitis

- Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis

- febrile seizures

- liver infection

- optic neuritis

If got while pregnant it can cause

- miscarriages and stillbirth

- baby being born prematurely

- baby born with low birth weight

Femininity is not empowering for women, never has been, and was never meant to be.

High heels (and a lot of other “women’s shoes”) are uncomfortable, make it hard to walk, and cause a plethora of foot and back problems in both the short and long term.

Hair removal, no matter which part of the body it’s on, is painful, often expensive, time consuming, and unhealthy (many women end up with infections on waxed or shaven body parts).

Makeup is also very time consuming, and eats up money that could be better used on books, food, (comfortable😌) clothing, or other more practical things. Spending years putting colored chemicals onto the face has adverse effects on health. The makeup/“beauty” industry profits off of making girls and women feel ugly and insecure so they will buy products.

Dresses and skirts make it more difficult to move and often slow down walking.

Tight and revealing clothes such as crop tops and booty shorts are uncomfortable, restrict movement, and expose skin to scrapes and bug bites.

Perms and weaves, which many black women get for our hair, may cost hundreds of dollars per year, may take hours to get, and also fill the coffers of an industry that profits off of our self hatred.

Nail polish is (get the theme here?) time consuming and costs extra money. Painted nails also make it harder to do the most basic things with the hands, for fear that the polish will smudge or chip off.

Ripped or “distressed” jeans, which have become a trend among teenage girls and young women, are easy to rip apart if not handled properly and also expose skin to injury.

Jewelry is simply a waste of money, and liable to getting stolen or broken.

I could go on, but y’all get the point. Femininity is a set of behaviors and practices imposed on women to make us weaker and pretty to look at. You could see it in the clothes (and hobbies) marketed towards women and girls. By contrast, “men’s clothes” are often practical and comfortable (jeans, shorts, shirts, etc). Individual women “choosing” to preform femininity doesn’t make this any less true. All of these industries - makeup, beauty, fashion, etc - profit off of making women and girls feel ugly and insecure in their natural state so that they will buy their products to “improve” or “fix” themselves (not to mention the fact that most of these big companies are owned by men). They’re the ultimate embodiment of capitalist (and often white supremacist) patriarchy. It’s not a feminist act to engage in femininity and/or support these industries, and it’s actively anti-feminist to refuse to acknowledge how femininity harms women.

Preform femininity and be aware of the consequences of doing so. Just because you call yourself a feminist, or are a woman of any sort, it doesn’t mean everything you do needs to be “empowering”. Nobody needs to burn their makeup kits or throw away their dresses, just stop pretending that any of these things are empowering to women as either individuals or as a class when they actively drain us of our power.

I can’t STAND this third wave neoliberal “muh choicy choice” rhetoric. On my Instagram I (re)posted something that said “makeup isn’t empowering”, and all hell broke loose in the comments. I never even got the same kind of vitriol on my gender critical or anti sex industry posts. Many women, whether they even call themselves feminists or not, will take any criticism of femininity so personally and it’s very concerning. It’s not about you, sis. Some fatherfucker in the comments even said that being critical of femininity is “white feminism”, and the funniest thing is that she was white herself🤣🙄😒