Last week I wrote about how South of Midnight has added a way for players to skip its boss fights, and yet the very fabric of reality hasn’t crumbled apart around us. As with every other time I, and many others, have covered this topic, the reaction has been extraordinary hostility, pure hatred and venom, and occasionally coherent arguments. Today I want to address those arguments the best I can, to see if we can gain any progress in the discussion.
I realize what a glutton for punishment it makes me to keep harping on about this boss-fight-skipping topic, given the genuinely bizarre response it generates. I took a very brief look at the response to the Kotaku link to the previous article on X, and genuinely had an anxiety attack. It was the sheer volume of hate, just the unbridled disgust, that hit me, rather than any worldview-shifting ripostes that saw my logic left in tatters. Other game critics who’ve written about this topic shared with me the terrifying responses they received, including rape and death threats. It’s wild that this animates people so much. But given that each time this topic is raised, the same responses are given as if they wholly destroy the argument, I want to try to address them all in as good a faith as I can muster.
Let’s start off with the most common:
This once semi-ironic phrase used to tease someone who was struggling with a section of a game has long since been stripped of all its sarcasm. It’s now a philosophy, perhaps even a religion, where only the worthy are welcome, only those capable of matching some unspecified level of gaming skill are allowed to even play video games, and all others are outcasts, sub-humans to spit upon. You can’t win this fight? Git gud. Until you are better, you are unwelcome.
I hate that, for many and obvious reasons. I hate it mostly, however, because aside from being gatekeeping, exclusionary, and ultimately about pride and selfishness, it’s incoherent. What level of gud is gud enough? Do I have to be able to defeat Malenia with one hand playing on a Guitar Hero controller before I’m allowed in? No? Then what? Is there a Le Grand Boss Fight stored in a vacuum-sealed container in the catacombs under Paris, the measure by which all gudness is verified? It’s a crowd you’re in until you’re not—meet your upper limit for difficulty, and suddenly you’re gone from the echelons of acceptability to the underneath people.
What if you’re really really gud, but yesterday you shut your finger in a drawer? Now you can’t click that button as quickly, and that boss fight is rendered impossible for you. Are you at fault? Have you failed? Or, could you possibly have just experienced something that—given enough time and coaching—you could interpret as a metaphor for empathy? Someone else’s finger might always be this weak. Someone else’s reaction times might always be more limited than yours. They can no more “git gud” than you can today, with your owie finger.
Stick with me here, but some people are better at certain things than other people. Like, for instance, I enjoy a game of tennis, but I don’t think I’d have a great deal of fun if every time I played, I had to play against Roger Federer. I would lose, if not die, scoring not a single point. My inability to beat Roger Federer at tennis is, I want to argue, not a reason to suggest I should never be allowed to play tennis again. Further, even if I were to practice every day and try my very best, I still feel it’s just out of my reach to get as gud at tennis as Roger Federer. The point here is: people have differing levels of skill, but can still enjoy the same pursuit. So to tell someone that wanting to carry on enjoying a game they like when there’s one specific boss fight that’s too hard for them to win, is an affront of humankind is perhaps…really dumb.
Responding “git gud” is about gatekeeping, and when you recognize this as irrational, you begin to realize what motivates it. It’s born of fear. Fear that the really hard games you like will be taken away from you (which is clearly not happening), and fear that if other people can carry on enjoying the game you had to fight so hard to reach, then you aren’t as special any more. Which, as I say, is all pride and selfishness. If one takes one’s personal worth from their ability to win a difficult fight in a game, then the argument to let others skip them is a threat to one’s self-worth. That’s sad, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for a coherent argument.
OK, so here’s my best good-faith interpretation of this argument: Game X has had you learn how to do the three different punch attacks, and the four different kick attacks, and that special move where you send out a laser beam. You’ve used all this to beat the regular mobs in the game, but now it’s time for the real test: the boss fight that requires you to incorporate them all in a high-intensity situation. Have you mastered them enough to get past this? And why does the player need to pass this test? Because from here on out, things are going to get more difficult, the mobs will be tougher, and you’ll want to be prepared.
It sounds quite good. It’s not, however, something that generally seems to be the experience. The reality, in my 40 years of gaming, is that a boss fight is a test, but not one that’s representative of what’s to come. The best are, I agree, the coming together of what you’ve been taught so far, comprehensible when you apply the various skills the game has been at pains to teach you. But, even these are almost never representative of the next stage of the game. They are, by design, far harder. Remove the boss fights, and I’m left with increasingly difficult mobs to kill with my ever-growing arsenal of skills, and my improved ability to use them through practice. The boss fight, that isolated, deeply specific incident, is incredibly unlikely to have meaningful impact on this.
They are, instead, just tests. And like so many tests in life, they’re inherently arbitrary, designed to prevent someone from continuing forward if they cannot be passed.
In responding to lots of very angry people regarding skipping/cheating past boss fights, so many have attempted to use films or books as analogies. “You can’t just ask the author to not use difficult words.” “It’s like telling the director they have to make their film your way!” These are obviously extremely poor analogies, given they aren’t even vaguely analogous, but they do open an interesting door for comparison. Because what if we did make them analogous?
What if, instead, midway through the book you’re reading you have to take an English Lit examination? Pass that exam, and you can carry on reading the book. Fail, and sorry, you’re never allowed to find out what happens in the second half. Or what if every film stopped at regular intervals to quiz you on the director’s use of mise-en-scène in the first act, and asked you to appropriately compare this with the works of Elia Kazan, and if you didn’t give the response it was looking for, movie’s over for you, bucko.
This idea that I must be required to successfully complete this one deliberately far harder moment in a game, before I can return to the regular fun I was having earlier, seems just as ridiculous to me.
This is the third most common response I’ve seen, and it’s the one that’s surprised me the most. Because…it’s doolally. On its face, it’s almost always just not true. Most boss fights in most games (and I’m excluding Soulslikes) are difficulty walls. They’re super-hard moments you have to scramble over in order to continue playing the stuff that’s pitched at a more normal difficulty level. The very best of them are moments for implementing everything you’ve learned in the game so far in order to best a tougher enemy, but even these aren’t exactly narratively vital. In fact, almost inevitably (and ironically), the actual narrative and emotion punch of any boss fight sequence comes in the cutscene before it begins, and the inevitable one after that undermines all the bloody hard work you just did so you can watch your character actually kill it while your controller sits on the couch beside you.
Which rather neatly leads me to the larger point. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that boss fights are in fact vital narrative points in games. You’re bound to have some good examples, so let’s imagine those are the norm. Your concern is that if someone were able to skip or cheat past these moments, not engaging with the enemy in a way that establishes the antagonism that exists between you and them, then the storytelling of the game could be irreparably damaged, and thus all of gaming be destroyed. Then, I would really love to know how the fact that all games from all of time have let me skip all dialogue and cutscenes hasn’t already achieved this.
This passion behind the argument, that the story beat of the boss fight must be preserved for the internal coherence of the game, is so wildly ridiculous in a world where clicking past the story elements of every game is possible and commonly done. Even if it were true, even if each time I don’t shoot the glowing red blobs on the back of the dragon while it drops fireballs on me in ever-growing numbers, I am missing out on something narratively vital, it’s a drop in the ocean of what’s already accepted as entirely skippable by so many. If you consider it so serious an issue, then oh my goodness, you have a far bigger problem to contend with first. And if you aren’t going to do that, then you really don’t think it’s a problem at all.
This is the ultimate gatekeeping response, but disguised as some benevolent suggestion. “Hey, you don’t seem to enjoy these games, so just play something else! Come on, kid! Go have a nice time over there!” Honestly, of all the responses I’ve had on social media this week, and in the many years previously, I far prefer the droves who violently describes the way they want me to kill myself than this sanctimonious dishonesty.
But it seems to shine a light on the most vital aspect of this entire discussion that large numbers of people are incapable of grasping: this isn’t about not liking games that are designed to be about boss fights! This is about not liking games that are spoiled (for some) by the inclusion of boss fights! Again, no one is suggesting that Dark Souls or Elden Ring should just have skippable boss fights—it would fundamentally break the entire purpose of the game. That doesn’t stop me from believing it would be brilliant if they did it anyway, because it’d be fascinating to explore those worlds in such a wildly different way, while always acknowledging that it would of course break the entire conceit. But that’s obviously not the contention here.
The contention here is the vast numbers of games that are 97 percent one thing, and three percent boss fights. That is, to be clear, nearly all games that feature boss fights. Whether it’s a third-person action-adventure, an old-school RPG, a platform game, or an open-world explore-me-do, most of what you do in those games isn’t boss fights. So I don’t believe it’s the most contentious position to argue that if a boss fight prevents you from continuing on with the other 97 percent of the game you’re loving, it’s not ideal? And, even, something that might be sensible to address?
(Obviously, there are people who will think back to games and immediately remember boss fights they absolutely adored. Especially turn-based fights in RPGs, I suspect. That positive memory is, I’d suggest, perceived as threatened by this whole argument. So first of all, let’s re-establish that no one is arguing for boss fights to be taken away. Not one bit. It’s only ever about more choice, not less. But it’s also important to recognize this as confirmation bias. That one excellent fight, or even that one game that had so many excellent fights: that’s the one you remember. The tedious, the banal, the deeply frustrating ones that you finally beat and were relieved you could move on at last—those go forgotten.)
“Just go play a different game,” is such an empty-headed argument, because…it felt like I WAS! I was merrily playing that game until this stupid boss fight stopped me! I want to get back to playing it right now!
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is the best example of this that I can think of. The boss I couldn’t beat was Chykka. (Let’s get one thing straight immediately: it isn’t relevant that you could beat Chykka. Perhaps you beat this three-stage fight on your first try, and you were personally affronted by how easy you found it. The situation here is that I couldn’t. I’m sure there are plenty of games I could thrash you at, but it’s definitely not this one. You’re the King of Chykka.)
God, I loved Metroid Prime 2. I love all those games, even the DS one. I love the exploration, the battles, the scanning, the storytelling, even the wonky platforming. Up until this point in MP2, I had beaten nine of the game’s other bosses, some passably, some miserably, but considered all of them interrupting annoyances in the game I was wanting to play. I was sure grateful for the upgrades they rewarded, but not for the experience of battling them. I adored 97 percent of everything I’d experienced in Metroid Prime 2. And then I met Chykka.
And that was it. I spent so many miserable hours fighting that hateful insect. When I finally defeated its first stage, I was horrified to learn I wasn’t even halfway through, and worse, failure at this point when faced with all new attack patterns to learn meant returning to the very beginning again. I never even saw the third stage of the fight. I couldn’t do it. It was beyond my skills in 2004, and as such, I never got to play the second half of one of my favorite games ever.
So, being told, “Just go play something else, these games aren’t for you!” really makes me cross. It’s so spiteful, so selfish, and perhaps more than that, so deeply insecure. What is it that you fear will happen if I got to see some more of Metroid Prime 2? What terrible consequence would there be if, after I’d failed 27 times in a row, the game said, “Look, you obviously can’t do this bit, so let’s just make it easier for you”? Because obviously there aren’t any. It’s just that you think I don’t deserve it.
Whether stated outright or not, this, I believe, sits under the surface of nearly every negative response. There are so very many people who love boss fights. There’s a reason they’re in games, and there’s a reason an entire genre that’s almost entirely focused on them has become one of the most popular in the world. If someone other than you can now just skip them, will developers still bother to create them?
Yes. That’s the simple answer, for sure. They’ll continue to make them because of the vast numbers of people who love them. “But if you can just skip past them, surely they wouldn’t want to put so many resources into making them great?” Well, all evidence would suggest otherwise. Think back to “But It’s Important To The Story.” Dialogue and cutscenes have been skippable in the vast majority of games for as long has games have featured them, and yet this once under-valued aspect of gaming is now receiving unprecedented levels of effort and craft. Motion-captured, lip-synced, professionally voiced and stunningly rendered cutscenes are better than ever before, but all of them will tell you to hold B to skip.
Plus, in my ideal world, it’s not like you reach the section of the level where the boss appears and, before you even see it, you’re asked to hold B to skip to its death scene. You play it, find you just cannot do it, and are then offered a route past. The best universe is the one in which the game offers me an alternative path, a way to puzzle past it, or platform around it, or talk it out of fighting me. The more realistic universe has the game say, “Here, let me make this easier for you,” or even, “Would you like to just skip past this now?” The boss is still there, still created, and will still be enjoyed by everyone who wants to enjoy it.
What I’ve discovered in some really quite extraordinary conversations with people on this subject is that it really seems to come down to something quasi-religious. Developer intent as holy text. Questioning of the text is heresy. Wanting to not complete the game as written in the scriptures is blasphemy, and all who question this must be stoned.
I realize this is the most controversial position in this somewhat flippant (albeit deeply heartfelt) article, but I don’t care about developer intent. That’s not because of some bizarre denial that it exists—of course it does—but as a Barthesian, I don’t think it matters. Nearly 60 years later, Barthes essay “The Death of the Author” (pdf) remains very misunderstood, too often interpreted as claiming that the reader’s understanding supersedes the author’s intent, as if the receiver of the text is of greater “value” or “importance” than the creator. It’s not about that at all: it’s about the absolute irrelevance of the author in the moment of the interpretation. It’s not a value judgement, or a claim to correctness, but just a statement of fact: when the text is interpreted by the reader, the author is dead.
If nothing else, this frees us from the need to rely on extraneous information when interpreting a text: in this case, when playing a game. We do not need to know the author’s biography or inner mind in order to form our own understanding of the work. To put it plainly, if the author writes a book about love, and the reader understands it as a story about grief, neither and both are “right.” If a developer has created a game in which every three hours or so there’s a boss fight that they deem to be essential, and I play that game and every three hours or so I turn on invincibility so as to bypass the spike in challenge of the boss fight, I certainly haven’t played the game as its creator intended. But I don’t care. I don’t think it matters at all. I am experiencing the game my own way, entirely divorced from the developer, and that’s fine.
There’s an ironic riposte to the boss skip argument that says “Why don’t you just watch the game on YouTube?” Ignoring that this is reductio ad absurdum, given—again—we’re only talking about missing three percent of a game, if anything this response fits far better to those who believe a game must be played only as its developer intended. You want to be a puppet, pressing the buttons in time with the pre-ordained plan? Um, why not watch the developer play it on YouTube? You want to play it your way? Then perhaps let go of the vice-like belief that the creator is holy.
This captures an awful lot of the unspoken rage behind the reactions this argument receives. It’s as if people perceive gaming as some sort of international competition, one in which everyone is being ranked (perhaps by achievements or something), and on death, as you’re standing at the pearly gates, St. Peter will read out your final position in the gaming rankings. And if people can just hop over the difficult bits, they’ll be unfairly let into Gaming Heaven!
The good news is, shhhhhhh, calm down, you need a rest. When I play a game in my living room, on my console, and I don’t play it the way you think I should, there are no consequences for you whatsoever. My playing games wrong doesn’t affect how they’re developed (please, one last time, if there were any chance that the ultra-powerful Anti Boss Lobby of which I am a figurehead could control game development, do you not think that maybe there would be fewer boss fights today, rather than INFINITY MORE OF THEM?). My playing games wrong doesn’t make the game play wrong for you. I’m just here, in my own home, being wrong on my own couch in safe isolation. You’re OK. It’s all going to be OK.
The presence of an option to skip past a boss, whether it’s the idyllic situation of the game offering other approaches and solutions, or the utilitarian fix of just letting you hold B for a second while a little circle fills up, does not mean you will fall prey to it, be unable to resist the temptation to cheat your way through. Or maybe you’re afraid that you will find yourself wanting to press it, and having to ask yourself whether you were ever really loving the boss fights as much as you claimed, or if this always about bravado, about a need for everyone else to suffer as much as you did to be allowed to enjoy the game.
With game prices now looking likely to be set at $80 for the next couple of years, it’s actually pretty grotesque to argue for a scenario in which a person is not allowed to play a game they’ve purchased because they cannot complete one especially difficult sequence. This game I’m adoring, that I’m a quarter of the way through, but now cannot access the other two-thirds: tough shit? My $80 is 75 percent wasted. And yet, that’s the current position. That’s normal. That’s the situation we’re all so vociferously fighting against changing.
I think that sucks. I want to be able to continue enjoying games I was loving, even if I can’t pass the ultra-hard combat test it’s just imposed. Hell, even if I don’t want to have to spend two hours repeatedly failing in order to learn how to win. It doesn’t interest me, in the midst of a game that interests me enormously.
So no, this isn’t about not wanting to play the game, and no, watching it on YouTube doesn’t address a single aspect of anything being discussed. Being able to skip past a boss isn’t going to destroy bosses as a concept, and it isn’t going to force you to bypass it too. Narratives are not going to collapse because I didn’t fire at the glowing orange rear end of the giant insect in the tiny window between its attacks after successfully executing the three-stage move that stuns it for four seconds; they’re going to be just fine. The developer’s desire that I be forced through this endurance test doesn’t move me in the slightest. Perhaps we can focus our gud-getting on our morality and treatment of others, ahead of dedicating our lives to refining an irrelevant skill in order to be able to continue the third-person action game we just spent our monthly food budget on.
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