Silksong and The Right Kind of Friction

Silksong brought back Difficulty Discourse in force. We've got all the usual hits: accessibility, artistic vision, and a thousand memes. When a single boss inspires a hate subreddit with thousands of visitors, you've struck a nerve.

Clearly, there is some mismatch between the game Silksong is and the game that many players wish it was. Did Team Cherry do anything wrong? Is it up to players to respect the vision?

"What's the difference between good friction and bad?" is one of the most foundational questions of game design. The ability to navigate it gracefully is one of the attributes that sets amazing designers apart from the merely competent.

We often collapse friction into "difficulty," a much-discussed topic already. However, difficulty is not the only type of friction. I'd like to step back and look at the philosophical underpinnings behind these dynamics.

Expectation vs. Reality

Before a player picks up Silksong, Elden Ring, Cuphead, or any difficult game, they already carry a vision of what kind of experience they're going to have. This vision is shaped by genre, marketing, studio reputation, and community talk.

Reality rarely matches the vision. Games are complex objects and will always contain rough edges, and Silksong is no exception. Players might be excited to "test their skills and mettle against The Last Judge," only to suddenly find themselves "testing their patience in getting back to The Last Judge." Hope you hit all the wall jumps!

When the test changes shape enough to break the player's mental model, the contract between player and game feels violated. Cognitive dissonance follows, and the easiest way to resolve it is to blame the game. That impulse can lead to a familiar critique: "artificial difficulty."

To developers, this phrase is tautological. All difficulty is artificial. The whole game is artificial! However, under the surface, players are pointing to something real: their expectations have been violated. Often, the violated expectation is about what kind of effort the game is supposed to reward.

Valuable Means

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in Games: Agency as Art (highly recommended!) defines a "game" as an inversion of typical human activity. We typically chase results by any means, while in games we adopt arbitrary ends because the means are valuable.

Consider a mountain with a lifesaving herb at its peak. A doctor climbs to save their patient, while a hiker climbs for the experience itself. The doctor will take whatever available means to get to the top: cable car, helicopter, whatever is available. However, the hiker is playing the game of mountain climbing: being at the top is only valuable because they have hiked there.

Difficult video games follow the same pattern: we enjoy them because the process of overcoming these arbitrary challenges feels valuable. That value could simply be experiencing the emotional arc of challenge, frustration, despair, and then triumph. Or, it could be more instrumental: maybe it helps sharpen your reflexes, or maybe it helps you relearn how to use your own body.

But the line between valuable and useless means is both thin and personal. A test of a valuable skill that is too difficult or too easy ceases to be valuable. Every single player has different skills, expectations, and ways of learning than others.

Mark Brown's difficulty framework defines "good difficulty" as a state where the player can understand their mistakes and see a path forward. But intuitive for some doesn't imply intuitive for all. Something that might be obvious to an experienced video game player, or someone from a similar culture to the developers, may be invisible to others. It's not the player's fault for missing a signal sent in a language they never learned.

This is another source of the "Artificial Difficulty" complaint. Generally, when players are being tested to the correct degree on something they find valuable, they enter a flow state where it's just them and the game. For many, this is the peak gaming experience. When a mistuned or unwelcome test slams them out of that state, the culprit feels like an unnatural intruder.

The Designer's Role

So, what does this mean for designers? Listen to players.

Although repetitive, Difficulty Discourse is a valuable signal of community expectations and values. In Silksong, we see fights that are universally praised (Clockwork Dancers) or reviled (Beastfly). While it's important to have your own take as a player, you should also pay close attention to how players are reacting to different moments and why.

Players are excellent at indicating the presence of a problem, but poor at diagnosis. When you encounter buzzphrases like "artificial difficulty," look past the wording to the feeling being expressed. Player sentiment is incredibly valuable, even if you shouldn't take it literally.

When it comes to your own game, ask yourself:

• What are players likely to infer from your title, art style, studio history, and marketing?
• Are these inferences setting you up for success?
• Your game will reward a certain set of behaviors. Is it rewarding the behaviors you think it is?
• Will players find those behaviors valuable?

Ultimately, the distinction between the right and wrong kind of friction exists in the player's head. And if designers don't understand that experience, they will make incorrect decisions.