We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I'm not going to ask you to elaborate.
But I hope the answer isn't zombie porn.

Don't answer.

hurf durr lookit me not answerin

I did once see a question posed, why many old RPGs would make you stat out your character when you had no idea that, say, Charisma is completely useless in this game. The answer, of course is that the old expectation was for people to restart games a few times (or many times, depending on the game) before they could really get going. For western RPGs, this expectation lasted well into the 90s. One could screw oneself at character creation as late as Deus Ex.

This extreme trial-and-error stuff is, of course, not a particularly transparent way of presenting decisions to the player, and I don’t think we want to go completely back to it except in some fundamentally unavoidable ways (“Charisma is useless in most games, ya doof!” and other metagaming... hm, sounds like a title for a book). In its absence, though, game design has to try a lot harder. I know not the ways. But my guess is that’s why there have been a number of indie games over the past few years where difficulty is back to “absurd”; it’s clearly not all bad to be unfair.