Like millions of others, I purchased the eagerly anticipated video game Hollow Knight: Silksong within a few days of its release. As I write this I’m a short ways into it, just beyond the first of many challenging boss battles, and with many directions to map out and explore. Its design digs deeper into patterns and directions established by the same small creative team’s masterpiece Hollow Knight from 2017. I can already see evidence of design decisions made with eight years of feedback from countless players, in order to emphasize joyful, flowing challenge over mere frustrating difficulty.

I have lived through many such eight-year spans, enough that I no longer take it for granted that my cognitive speed and physical reflexes will meet the challenge of a new work like Silksong. So far, my ability to play more intense video games seems undeteriorated, a fact I meet with relief. Barring an untimely personal end, though, I do expect that this ability will start sliding away from me, someday.

When I reflect on this on a cultural scale, an oddity emerges. People can generally continue to enjoy books, film, and other media for the whole length of their lives, as long as they retain enough faculties to sense and comprehend them. Video games are different. As my cohort continues to age, I anticipate a gradually growing awareness in the larger culture that the first generation surrounded by video games since childhood—the generation as old as the first successful video games—is becoming inexorably locked out of the ability to appreciate them in the same ways that they always had.

I actually don’t feel particularly morbid about this, in part because game makers have shown a more open cognizance of accessibility concerns in recent years. My favorite example is Control, which has layers of thoughtfully designed knobs and sliders that let you tune the game’s difficulty in specific ways. Still, the game all but begs you not to touch them, in order to get the designers’ “intended experience”. But as Gen X trundles through its aging milestones, a half-century after mastering the likes of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, I expect we’ll see more sometimes-reluctant accessibility layers like this in popular single-player games.

It’s OK for masterworks of media to be challenging, to require long hours of study, practice, and reflection to fully appreciate. That fact is hardly the sole domain of video games. But video games alone seem to be the one major media form which one is all but guaranteed to find more difficult to appreciate, if one lives long enough, no matter how much time and thought one has spent with them. Like my human cohort, video games as a cultural phenomenon are still young enough not to have had to reckon with this fact at scale—but that won’t last forever, and it’ll be interesting when it all starts to change.

“Old spiderweb” by Thor Edvardsen is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .