Has the industry sold its soul to the 'casual' gamer?

Who says you have to actually play a game to beat it?

Everyone's favorite Nintendo employee (at least of the non-animated variety), Shigeru Miyamoto, has confirmed that New Super Mario Bros. Wii will include a 'help' feature - essentially an autopilot switch that allows gamers to let a game play itself when it gets too difficult. 

...players will be able to pause a game during a particularly difficult level and let the game take over to complete the level. Press a button at any time to resume playing. This will help reduce barriers of entry for new or younger players – without purchasing a strategy guide or resorting to websites that list cheat codes.

So the next time you struggle against Bowser, simply flip the switch and all your troubles and frustrations simply go away!

While Miyamoto contends that this "feature" is intended strictly as an aid for casual gamers, it's the culmination of a trend that seems to have been going on for years - the "skilling down", as it were, of video gamers. And apparently it's not going away, as Miyamoto has said that it will be included in future Nintendo titles. 

We were once skilled...
So how have we gotten here? Well, once upon a time when arcades were all the rage, it was the goal of game makers to entice consumers to play their game and drain all the quarters they had. This usually led to high difficulty levels - there's an obvious correlation between addictive gameplay, deaths, and an overflowing quarter till.  In case there's any doubt, exhibit A would be the arcade version of Gauntlet, the epitome of a 4-player quarter-consuming monster.  

Obviously, the goal of the gamer was to get better, so that they didn't have to keep walking to the bill breaker for more quarters to feed into the machine.  From the gamers' perspective, most single player and co-op arcade games rewarded skillful players who could stay alive. Even multiplayer competitive games, such as Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, allowed players to play infinitely on a single quarter if they could continually beat the competition.  

The game maker/gamer relationship was very cat-and-mouse... makers would create more complex games that would munch on more quarters (or require more quarters to play), and gamers were getting more skilled, making it more likely to breeze through a game on a single play.

However, with the popularity of console gaming, that relationship had essentially disappeared and been replaced with a much more simple one:  entice the consumer to our game, whatever it takes.

Game difficulty is a large barrier of entry for game publishers - if they make a game too difficult, the 'casual gamer' won't give their game a second look, or is less likely to buy the sequel because the original was so difficult - resulting in lost sales.  So publishers offer up games that aren't too difficult, instead focusing on creating an 'interactive experience' that the gamer will enjoy while it lasts, while trying not to break up the flow of the experience with annoying difficultly.

Ironically, when games are too difficult, 'hardcore' gamers also bitch and moan (see: Ninja Gaiden Black), so the publishers really are in a no-win situation.

Why do we play?
Video games at their very core are adversarial competitions - player versus the game.  As such, the basic pleasure gamers get out of gaming is the sense of accomplishment of conquering the game. The 'help' feature gives the gamer an easy out and numbs them to any sort of difficult. It's akin to calling timeout and asking Beckham to take the game-winning penalty kick for you. Or having Alex Rodriguez pinch hit for you in a tie game, so that he can hit a quick home run and your team can go home winners. 

Accomplishments and trophies can also be blamed as culprits to the "skilling down" of games. The experience is no longer necessarily about beating a difficult game - but rather, it's about the number and "quality" of accomplishments the gamer can collect - so developers can get away with lax game difficulty and just slap on some difficult accomplishments instead.  In some scenarios, obtaining certain accomplishments is more difficult than the game itself (see: Mile High Club in Modern Warfare - an achievement that may take some longer to get than to beat the entire game).

What's the point?
While at face value the premise of getting a game to the consumer at all costs seems innocent enough, the problem comes when publishers attempt to expand the market, as we have seen in recent years with Nintendo's Wii - and a primary reason why the Wii's sales have well outpaced those of the 360 and PS3.  Others in the industry take note when something is a financial success - if you don't think Sony and Microsoft haven't taken notice of the Wii's domination of the 'casual market', you must have missed the presentations of MS's "Project Natal" and PS3's "Motion Sensor Technology" - the latter which takes its queues directly from the Wii. Smart money is on the publishers watching Nintendo's execution of this 'helper technology', with an eye towards implementing it should it become a success.

Now that autoplay games are on the horizon, where do we go from here?  It's entirely possible that autoplay will give Nintendo some incentive to ramp up the difficulty of their games, since gamers now have an easy-out when things get too hairy, but that's unlikely since Nintendo's games have never really been difficult to begin with.

The very worst scenario is that sales of Nintendo games that implement the 'help feature' increase significantly enough to warrant other developers to offer similar enhancements to their games.

So is there anything that can be done to change the direction the industry is going in? Most likely not. Money talks, and the trends dictate that the 'casual gamer' is a bigger market than the 'hardcore gamer'. The only way this trend changes is if enough of the hardcore market becomes disenchanted and starts to disappear from sheer disinterest.  This scenario isn't necessarily out of the question - just look how quickly Nintendo's lost that market.

One suggestion would be for game publishers to give gamers various difficulty levels to choose from, and unlock the highest difficulty of their games right off the bat. While many games offer difficulty selection, the most difficult is usually an unlockable - which is extremely annoying to those of us who really don't want to play a game twice, but who breeze through the highest difficulty available by default without breaking into so much as a minor sweat. While not solving all the problems with difficulty balancing, it would certainly be a step in the right direction. 

But really, when even the simplest games play themselves, we must ask ourselves... what's the point anymore?

EDIT (6/18): Ironically, Kotaku points to a Kombo.com article where former Tecmo producer Hideo Yoshizawa explains why Tecmo used to make their games so difficult, and why they no longer follow that path...