If It Feels Too Hard, You're Doing It Wrong

Design and process

My wife and I have a Nintendo Switch, and we’ve been playing video games many nights (including the new Zelda game!). I never played those games as a kid—I had the idea they were too difficult, that you would get stuck at some kind of puzzle element and that would be it. That happened to me with some games. There was hardly an internet to search, and certainly no industry of walkthroughs and YouTube videos showing you exactly how to solve every little thing in the game.

Now a really well-done game will give you more than one way to solve a problem. For example, in Mario Odyssey, you had to dodge or jump over boulders on a narrow rock bridge. Instead of doing that, I got Mario to drop down and hold the top of the ledge and then shimmy along to the end of it, without ever actually standing on top of it. The “right” way wasn’t the only way, and probably not the easiest way.

But in many cases, and many things, there is a right way.