a collection of thoughts

It's a recurring theme in a lot of art forms about power corrupting the greedy, the wealthy, and the sadistic people. There is no coincidence that this theme keeps repeating itself, it keeps repeating because it's true. Power indeed consumes, power indeed corrupts, so is the nature of power.  But, the interesting thing to me about this is that these thematic events usually happen to the greedy, the privileged, and more often than not the wealthy people. Usually, it's a captivating plot, but Dark Souls 3 did something different and it's very riveting. To talk further about this, let me give some context. Dark Souls games usually revolve around a very basic plot, with the exposition being something like this: In the beginning, there was the age of darkness, where gigantic creatures like dragons ruled over the world. Eventually, a flame appeared which started engulfing the darkness with its bright light. The first finders of the flame also found inordinate power in it, and...

I love playing games, and that is evident to anyone who knows me. So, today we are gonna go over a core concept attached to games: difficulty. Games, like other art forms, have a huge amount of subjectivity attached to them. Every player is different, and in the end, prefer/want to have a different experience with whatever game they are playing. Traditionally, games were very hard. If you look back to the NES era, every game is obscenely difficult, so difficult that it makes Dark Souls look like a game made for infants. Mind you, this difficulty was not arbitrary, it was deliberately made to be hard because, back then, harder games = more time spent playing the game, and also an 8 KB cartridge can only hold so much content. Even though I look back at a lot of titles from that time with a lot of fondness and appreciation, in reality, it may be my nostalgia glasses and I wouldn't be able to beat a single level of Contra if I tried today.  Now that we have established how games used t...