Corporations Are Creating Games to Be Way Too Easy, and That's a Bigger Problem Than You Think

Why? Interactivity and gamification. You learn from doing and doing with a purpose. 

There's also an unspoken benefit to video games as well. It can help you fight depression and give you hope.

However, if you were to play mainstream corporate games nowadays, you wouldn't understand that latter aspect at all. In fact, you'd likely receive the exact opposite feeling. Despondency, apathy, and even anger. 

It's partly the content of the games that would do this to you. The themes in corporate video games right now are heavily leftist, and that comes with what leftist infections come with. A sense of moral nebulousness, a message-first story containing beliefs and values you don't agree with, but also an unforgivable lack of difficulty. 

Insomniac recently released a Wolverine game that had consultation from the radical leftist group "Sweet Baby Inc." and you can see their influence all over the game, including ugly characters, uncharacteristic behaviors from characters you know and love, and, of course, a striking lack of difficulty. In fact, as many gamers have pointed out, you practically take your hand off the controller at various points, and the game will just play itself. Worse than that, you don't even have to play it correctly. Mash the wrong buttons and the game will still act like you pushed all the right ones. 

you already know you dont have to press the qtes in wolverine but did you know you can also just press the wrong one
left or right makes no difference 💀 pic.twitter.com/3mURoReq3s

— 39daph (@39daph) September 17, 2026

Now, why does this cause mental damage? Why is this so bad for people? 

It's an interesting effect that isn't often talked about, but it's something more important than you might think. Not just to gamers, but ultimately to all of society, and to explain this, I need to introduce you to a game called "Dark Souls."

If you go on YouTube right now and type in something akin to "Dark Souls saved my life," you'll find people having a very fascinating discussion, or giving testimony, about how they were suffering from intense depression, but that playing the game "Dark Souls" actually helped them deal with their darkness and taught them how to remove themselves from it to live a better life. 

It's a weird thing to have your depression fought back against, because the Dark Souls games are, themselves, incredibly depressing. It takes place in a dying world where everyone is either dying, on their way to a tragic end, or slowly going insane. 

But interestingly, that's the soil in which the seed of fighting one's depression starts to grow. The water for this seed is that the game is incredibly difficult. You will die in the game repeatedly and often. You will fail again and again, but where Dark Souls shines is that it displays to you, nakedly, your own willpower. In a world where everyone is giving up, you keep going. Failure isn't stopping you. You're fighting and fighting, growing stronger, until eventually you overcome the challenge that had been holding you back. 

Playing Dark Souls teaches you something about yourself that you might not have noticed otherwise. You're tougher than you think, maybe not physically, but mentally; you're stronger than you thought. You're more patient and capable of clearing hurdles than you previously believed. All those punishing mechanics and seemingly insurmountable odds were something you worked to overcome, and you succeeded. 

And again, the effect this has had on people isn't an outlier. This is a repeated phenomenon among players. Dark Souls helped lift them out of their depression and gave them a new perspective on life. It handed them tools to fight back the darkness and made them deal with life in a new way. 

Funny enough, the difficulty of FromSoftware's games — the company that made Dark Souls and created the "Soulslike" genre — has created controversy with people who tend to lean left politically. They complain that the difficulty doesn't create a very inclusive environment. People with disabilities, for instance, can't play through the game because their handicaps prohibit them from enjoying it. 

Of course, that's nonsense. Every once in a while, a video will pop up of someone with a disability beating the game to prove that a disability can't stop them, and these people are full of crap. 

FromSoftware, for their part, receives this backlash every time they release a new game, and in their polite Japanese way, they've told these leftists to kick rocks. They understand the value of difficulty, and that there's a very real sense of mental health that comes with it. 

Difficulty is a good thing. It's good for you. It can teach you self-sufficiency or, at the very least, to learn how to seek help and form social bonds to overcome difficult tasks. These are two key ingredients to a better life, and it's something that people learn in various ways, sometimes through a job or a situation, but even sometimes through a video game. 

What modern Western video games attempt to do is remove difficulty for the purpose of "inclusivity" and then end up delivering a product that gives you no fulfillment at all. It was, for all intents and purposes, a message delivery system. You come away with nothing but a hollow experience. You feel hollow for having sat through it, and that in itself is a hollowing feeling. 

Despite what some will say, video games are not a bad thing. They're wonderful for a host of reasons, but what corporate Western studios are pumping out right now isn't just bad; they're unhealthy. Video games, like anything, can be very substantial and good for you in the right place, at the right time, and with the right level of consumption. 

But no one should be consuming what is effectively pig slop in digital form.