Really? Thank goodness!
Also, is my face red! (yes it is!) 
Also, funny thing - nowadays it’s very easy to mistake satire/parody for the real thing on the internet. Scary!
The mention of Mario has gotten me thinking about Kaizo Mario, and how it is enjoyed by a rather small audience of skilled players.
I think games can get away with extreme difficulty and nasty traps when they are targeted to a niche of hardcore players, as long as the intended audience finds it fun and feels like the challenge is not beyond their skills.
Forgiveness means you might bore hardcore players wanting to be challenged but that you will appeal to new and more casual players.
I realise this is all hopelessly obvious so perhaps I am not really contributing much with this comment.
Stating the obvious is underrated. It’s good to go back to the basic premises once in a while or the flights of fancy get too fanciful. 
Anyway, it wasn’t so much “obvious” as “help define the term we’re kicking around”, and that’s always useful.
I’ve noticed a recent trend of IF games offering a hard mode, which I find to be a good compromise. Players who are looking for a challenge can play on hard mode, while players who are more interested in other aspects of the game can play on easy mode.
…I’m usually so good at spotting these. Now I feel silly.
I’ve heard the phrase “Mario hard” thrown around routinely as a way to describe games that don’t fit with modern audiences (in my day job - I’m a professional game dev). I went googling fast for an example and didn’t look properly at the article I was bringing up. Serves me right.
There’s the Nintendo Hard TVTropes page. See you all next week!
My amateurish sense is that part of the reason for the difficulty level of videogames (as opposed to text adventures) from around this time is the heavy influence of arcade games, which had to kill you off a lot to keep the quarters flowing.
Heh, by their relative economic models, the two types of game probably worked the same in the long term.
To play Wizard and the Princess, you put in what an American would say was somewhere between 120 and 240 quarters. Then you’d move two rooms, pick up a rock in the desert, get chomped by a rattle snake and die. But you’d have one or two hundred credits left to spend over the next year.
-Wade
This was very much my experience as well. I know the community has moved on, but this is what I still want from IF today.
A game that you cannot lose is not a game but is an exercise in futility.
(quotation from I don’t know)
I was watching speedrunner CarlSagan42 play puzzle levels in Mario Maker and he had this to say on puzzles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWm1QD2yyY&t=610
It made me think of this thread so I thought I’d share it
The tricky bit is, what if you don’t beat the puzzle? We’ve all been there - we’ve looked at the solution and went, “how the heck was I supposed to know that?”. Poor design has played a major part in killing trust, and killing trust is the main reason some of us have a lot less patience with games.
I don’t trust Curses! one bit, it’s full of walking deads. I trusted The Mulldoon Legacy a lot more, even after I had to capitulate and check the walktrhough on a couple of sticky points (which I totally would NOT have gotten on my own). Mulldoon played like a dream over the course of a few weeks; Curses! was a nightmare.
looking into another, similar, genre of games, I always chuckle when people complaining about the “shortness” of modern WRPGs and JRPGs, because my training as adventurer 
teaches me to look into every nook and cranny of the map, and having a policy “everything that can be moved from map to inventory WILL be moved” and I enjoy a console RPG for months, ticking 100s of hours without problems.
on IF, I really like having an “x out of Y rooms visited” in the score/fullscore output, whose, as written above, IS really gratifying for me
on the nintendohard/strategy guides debate, I like to put glosses in the latter (and writing those glosses is another gratifying thing), but of course I often get the guides from the discount/bargain bins 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Completionism is a virtue to some, an OCD nightmare for others!
A lot of old school games were designed when kids got maybe one or two games a year and it had to last. I like the idea of how an RPG is probably one of the easiest type of games to pad out with lots of optional content.
I love RPGs, but find myself as an adult with little time to get the most out of all of them. Fallout 3 took me about three years to get through the main quest, playing off and on. Some people appreciate a linear story of 2-6 hours, but it’s bad when a player thinks they’re getting one and it’s actually the other. If you’re in a location with no internet and tons of free time, there’s nothing better than combing the map of a Bethesda RPG.
Most computer games are too easy. Make the difficult kind. Adding the Kaizo Trap and whatever can be good idea. But, hopefully you can save as many save files as you want, possibly nearly anywhere (depending on the kind of game this may be reduced, but for most text adventure games this is reasonable), so that you can easily to recover. Although, that does not mean that you will necessarily know when you have done something wrong until it is too late (in some cases)! On the cruelty scale, Hell or easier is too easy; therefore the scale must be expanded. You can provide hints if they are needed, and/or player can try to disassemble the code and look, or examine the source code, or whatever; but depending on what it is, even such things can be misleading (even though it is true (and is not even obfuscated)!). Of course there should be description in game, with the in story reason to be truth or lies or whatever, and then the player must figure out, but certainly is possible that strange things can happen too. “The sort of puzzles where you had to reconsider the entire history of what you had already done, as well as your current resources” (as zarf mention) is good idea too please.
The cruelty scale is not a difficulty scale. We established that to begin with.
I know that, although there is a kind of relation. Also, forgiveness can make the game easy, regardless of that (although it really is independent). So, yes, not to be confuse but also not to be taken in isolation of everything else; there is many feature in game. The game can be isolated from everything external to the game too.
Also is possibility for cruelty level of game can also be altered together with a user-selectable difficulty level, or with a serpate user-selectable cruelty level (does any game have stuff like this?). Maybe even in some unusual circumstance, something that is obviously to be getting stuck is only the case when graphics are enabled, although it is not so clear from the text. Is also the possibility that whether or not multiple save files possible, and whether or not undo is possible, also is depend on the interpreter in use.
And what of the possibility that revealing the cruelty level might reveal too much about the plot or about the solution? And then, what if mentioning that it is purposely hidden is a clue?