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In the 1990s a group of Japanese video game designers were faced with a curious problem. Most games at the time came with three difficulty options, escalating in arduousness from "Easy" through "Normal" up to "Hard." In this way, a player could match the game's challenge to their skill and the potential audience for the game broadened from the talented to the talentless, and all of us who muddle away betwixt. The shoot 'em up designers at Toaplan, Cave and Psikyo, however, wanted to work with a finer, wider scale. Their games began to come in six or more shades of difficulty. The problem: what to call these new modes? So began a lively if short-lived literary tradition in which designers would compete to find the funniest and, often, most disparaging terms for the lightest difficulties. DonPachi's designers opted for the cutesy "Little Easy" for their game's most accommodating set-up, while Battle Garegga's crack game-makers offered the dignified "Training" for theirs. Psikyo was far crueller. Gun Bird 2's options descend, in hurtful steps, from "Easy" to "Very Easy" to "Child" to "Baby." Strikers 1945, the World War II-themed shooter recently re-released for the Switch, is even coarser: its easiest difficulty is named, abusively, "Monkey".
These terms are loaded with a witty scorn that obscures their raison d'etre. The range of difficulties was not principally included to flatter or shame players, but to give arcade operators options that could be tweaked in order to maximise their profits in the wild. With arcade games, as the novelist David Mitchell once wrote, you pay to delay the inevitable. In other words: failure is certain. But an arcade game that is too challenging produces players that feel short-changed and resentful. A spread of secret difficulty levels enables an arcade operator to calibrate a game's challenge behind the scenes, and, having monitored the effects on his public, maximise profits. For this reason every Neo Geo game comes with no fewer than eight difficulty levels.
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