Git Gud: Elitism and the “Correct” way to play

Looking at video game difficulty, the desire for challenge, and the pride that comes from the accomplishment of beating a difficult game, one cannot help but wonder if this is a practical use of one’s time.

This is not to say that games must have a practical use case, but only to denote that the time investment is for a series of skills that ultimately produce nothing.

The same could be argued about many other hobbies. What is the use case for mastering a Rubik’s Cube? What is the functional purpose of being a cinephile? Even something like chess could be argued to be a bit pointless in the grand scheme of things, right?

Gaming as a hobby is neither more nor less valid than any other, though there is room to discuss its effects on players—namely, the ideology of being ‘hardcore’ and the worship of difficulty in games.

Why has difficulty come to be seen as a virtue in this space? What does the hostility toward casualization reveal about the community? What cultural history within video games does this affinity for challenge stem from, and how has it limited the understanding of what video games can actually be?

More than anything, when told to “git gud,” what does it truly mean?

Arcades and the history of difficult games

The history of difficulty in video games is as old as the medium itself. One of the more notable roots starts really with the arcades because that’s where games were first able to turn a profit.

Far before the idea of a home release arcades were places for people to congregate and see who could get the high score and who could set the record in their local arcade and be the “best gamer”.

But to be the best gamer you have to be able to play the game and all of these games were “coin eaters”

The highest-grossing video games back in the ’70s and ’80s were Pac-Man and Space Invaders games that would get progressively harder deceptively so to the point where it was impossible to beat them or at least thought impossible to beat them.

It then became a badge of honor when you were able to beat them the legacy of many retro gamers comes from their ability to get to the kill screen term for when the game literally cannot run anymore.

Nintendo Hard

As games moved away from the arcades and into home consoles, the market for difficult games was mainly in part due to the idea of making you feel like what you spent money on was worth it, the replayability.

If you’re not spending quarters playing the game, if instead, you’re spending anywhere from $30 – $60 American to play a video game, many consumers felt that it should feel like you’re going to get hours and hours of fun and difficulty served as a shortcut to make sure that whatever it was that you were playing wasn’t going to be done in an afternoon.

The term “Nintendo Hard” was popularized in the 80s and 90s due to the sheer level of difficulty some games for the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES were. Games such as Battletoads, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Castlevania all gained infamy for their various gameplay mechanics that punished the player for any mistake. To beat these games a player had to not only have skill but patience.

Even if you were to have beaten some of the games like the Legend of Zelda or Ghost and Goblins, you would be given a second quest that was even more difficult, thus incentivizing you to Play It Again to get the true ending of the game.

Difficulty options as they exist in video games range from self-imposed challenges that people put on themselves to developer-intended difficulty levels. One of the first examples of this would be Asteroids, an arcade game from the 1980s with two option modes. Option A was more difficult than Option B.

The question then arises, “What purpose does a hard mode serve in modern gaming?”

To be a sweat? To be A Casual?

The common repeated phrase of “Git Gud” is one of the clearest outgrowths of the Dark Souls fandom. The phrase itself was popularized because of a shared sense of community around the difficulties of these games, and instead of asking others for help, one should just get better at the game.

But the shibboleth of “Git Gud” did not find its roots there.

The term was first found in Metal Gear Online, as a shortened way of telling a player how to improve.

The Souls games and their various inspired works are not the first difficult games in video game history. They’re not even the first 3D difficult games in video game history. there was a long-running joke about the Ninja Gaiden franchise on Xbox being impossibly difficult.

Perhaps it is just the through-line tying the old arcade difficulties to the contemporary difficulty worshipers of today, but today’s video games are alien in comparison of difficulties, with older video games.

So games don’t have a responsibility. They can be art, they can be slop. They can be monetized skinner boxes, or they can be idle time wasters. They can be easy, and they can be hard.

When does “challenge” become masochistic?

The most common similarity of difficulty is that the enemies are more numerous and can take more shots in player vs enemy video games.

The strategies of AI outside of rushing the player with overwhelming numbers are few and far between, though not completely absent from gaming history.

Other difficulty mechanics include added maintenance elements such as hunger, healing restrictions, and permadeath, that is if you die on a run of a game, you have to start from the beginning.

However, with difficulty, this ideology of beating the difficult game in a difficult manner, there comes a conflict from where the developers intended things to be difficult and what the reputation of a game requires. In games such as Dark Souls or Bloodborne, games lauded for being difficult, there are players who eschew any notion of playing the game as intended by playing through the game on level one, or without taking damage, without using any assistance. This level of devotion often finds itself lauded in the gaming community, but that belies the fact they’re playing the game “wrong.”

This mindset has been applied to both competitive games and single-player games, and it highlights a notion within the gamer’s world view that there’s an acceptable way to play, and it restricts you from doing things the easy way.

As discussed by James Stephanie Sterling, is the idea of what is “right” when you’re playing a video game is being used a soft way of limiting others from actually engaging with the medium. That many hardcore gamers overstate their own competence while bandying about challenge runs that aren’t the intended play of the developers. Behaviors such as avoiding the use of helpful items and avoiding gameplay mechanics. They don’t make a playthrough purer, but it does make it more difficult.

An intersection of this is the realm of speedrunning, where players use a variety of exploits to push themselves in a race to beat a game as quickly as possible. There are many speedruns of “easy” games that make them substantially harder due to the precision necessary for proper execution. But that betrays the intentions of the creators. Are you better at a game because you played it “right”?

Paying to win?

In many competitive games, there are ways to get advantages by virtue of having outside resources that others do not. Whether that is the grinding mechanics of Diablo and NBA2K or the DLC paywalls in Pokemon games for competitive tournaments.

With regards to those games, the idea of playing fair or taking the harder way seems impractical. Infamously prior to a patch, Electronic Arts said in response to criticism of their monetization practices that the grind was there “to create a sense of pride and accomplishment.” Using and perverting the language of gamers to justify what many consider an exploitative business practice.

But how far off were they in this logic? Can it not be argued that grind is another form of difficulty, and thus, if one wants to avoid paying, then they should be prepared to take it on the chin?

The values of many online gamers are different subcultures typically do pick up adversarial relationships with more mainstream culture but even within gaming spaces an NBA 2K player who grinds their character to 99 overall versus an NBA 2K player who spends $50 to $100 USD to get their character to 99 overall don’t actually have a substantial difference between themselves with regards to gameplay mechanics.

Once you learn the mechanics of a game, the matters of time and money become the deciding factors in the ways you can improve.

Cheated the Game? Cheated Yourself!

Despite the wide array of ways to beat games, there is a sentiment bordering on obsession with playing games “the right way”.

When Elon Musk was revealed to be paying for players to level grind his characters in Path of Exile 2, the backlash came not just from him cheating but him bragging about being a top-tier gamer despite not knowing how to play the games.

There’s a matter of nerd cred that he wanted to attain, and his clear lack of skill and familiarity with the systems led to him exposing himself as a charlatan again.

This mentality of avoiding the “easy” way.

The term “cheesing” has allegedly existed for centuries, first denoting something as “cheap” in a derogatory manner and then being seen as “tacky”. In both cases, the term was revitalized in the Street Fighter 2 community. To “cheese” a fight was to exploit a flaw in the game’s mechanics and thus win in an unfair manner.

This has been read as in defence of the “developer’s intention”. That is to say, the developers couldn’t have caught certain bugs and to honor their work you should play the game as they intended. But this intentionality discussion from self-avowed hardcore gamers is only in the purpose of gatekeeping.

In an anecdote by YouTube documentarian Dan Olson, of Folding Idea, he spoke of how the cultural practices of the community for a game like Elden Ring, while chide and demean a player who is good at defensive, healer-focused play can beat an offensively minded player with good strategy. They don’t overperform, but they can generally win the match-up. Communally, that defensive player is seen as a worse gamer despite winning because of the nature of their winning. They were using a “cheap” strategy, one without honor, despite the fact that using play styles built into the game with the intentions of the developers isn’t exploitative.

The core of the debate

What is a game’s purpose? When people used to talk about video games as art, there was a secondary argument as well that games didn’t have to be fun. Games like Mouthwashing or My Eyes Deceive don’t seem to prioritize a dopamine release or a sense of catharsis. There’s no win state so to speak. Far from it in some cases due to the subject matter of the games in question.

When looking at games as a medium, the value of difficulty is always in a state of flux. Gamer as a term is poisoned by some of the worst-behaved internet minions imaginable, screeching into the void about how a game wasn’t pretty enough, or too gay, or too Black, or any number of pointless canards. Gamers have seemingly always wanted to return to a halcyon day when games were pure and untouched by the constraints of capitalism. But that day never existed.

Gaming as an industry always needed to follow the profit motive and the idea of escaping to a prelapsarian past of gaming, of gatekeeping tourists, of filtering and preserving Real Gamers, and that having an impact on the games industry is as naive as it is pitiful.

The argument about “git gud” is not just about a single game. It’s about easy modes or accessibility. It’s about a sandbox that has Gamers and everyone else and the reactionary mindset to try to force the box smaller.

Works Cited

Barlow, Ant “In Defence of Easy Mode: Why ‘Git Gud’ Is Gaming Gatekeeping.” Jump Dash Roll, 3 May 2022, https://www.jumpdashroll.com/article/in-defence-of-easy-mode-why-git-gud-is-gaming-gatekeeping.

Livesey-Stephens, Beatrix. “‘Git Gud’ and the Intersection of Disablism and Productivity in Gaming.” Can I Play That?, 28 Oct. 2021, https://caniplaythat.com/2021/10/28/git-gud-and-the-intersection-of-disablism-and-productivity-in-gaming/.

Nubern, John “Soulsborne Difficulty, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Git Gud.” Quit the Build, 19 Jan. 2023, https://www.quitthebuild.com/post/soulsborne-difficulty-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-git-gud.

Olson, Dan. Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft LIVE | PAX West 2024. YouTube, 31 Jan. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zS9fju20RA. Accessed 18 Feb. 2025.

Stuart, Keith “Is It Wrong to ‘Cheese’ a Video Game?” The Guardian, 31 Mar. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/mar/31/is-it-wrong-to-cheese-a-video-game.

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