I think it's important to preface a claim like this with an acknowledgement. Games, like any medium, indelibly exist within the current social and political context. The claim that I'm making here - games shouldn't have difficulty settings - is one that is a favorite of those who like to exclude people, namely anyone who isn't a 20-ish year old able-bodied cis straight white man, from experiencing games. The history of this connection between arguments about difficulty and the current culture war is complex, but ultimately born from people who mistake things like accessibility failures, bad onboarding, and overreliance on player's knowledge of previous games as "difficulty" and who deeply enjoy telling people who are different from them to get good. It feels appropriate and necessary, then, to state this clearly: Games are for everyone, and if your vision of "difficulty" is something that conveniently goes away if you are a 20-ish year old able-bodied cis straight white man who has played video games since you were 5, you don't understand difficulty or humanity, and your opinions are probably worthless as a rule.
Now then...
Games shouldn't have difficulty settings. This isn't to say that every game shouldn't have a certain level difficulty - everything that has challenge has some level of difficulty. This also isn't a euphemistic way of making a sweeping statement of "games should be harder" or "games should be easier" - games have the right to be any difficulty level they want. This also isn't to say that games shouldn't change their difficulty in other ways - think of the Risk of Rain series, where the game displays a difficulty level on screen that increases over time, or Terraria's "Hardmode", where after defeating a certain boss, a set of new, harder enemies begins to spawn in the world. Really, these examples aren't difficulty settings, but game mechanics that use the player's notion of what "difficulty" is to communicate themselves. What I specifically mean is that games should not have non-diegetic, player-controlled options that change the difficulty of the game. These settings are damaging to a game's community and a compromise of the quality of the game itself.
A frequent argument in favor of games having difficulty settings is that multiple options for difficulty allow more people to play the game. This is, at the literal level, not incorrect. Many players exist who might get frustrated by a game's difficulty, get bored with a game they find too easy, or simply see the lack of a difficulty menu and quit the game. Frankly, that's fine. There exist so many games in the world that even the most devoted player couldn't get through 1% of them, and not every game is for every audience. Every year, more and more quality games of all genres and all difficulties are created. Now, if your goal is simply to make a game that as many people can play as possible, rather than to make the best game possible, then yes, you should add difficulty settings. This is not unique to games as a medium in any way. The books, songs, movies, TV shows, and pieces of visual art with the largest audiences all compromise quality for a safe relatability and their creators are rewarded handsomely with money and prestige. Their creators also have to go home, look in the mirror, and see a person who wrote "Young Sheldon".
Nevertheless, there is still a value in having a bustling and active community for your game. Video creators, modders, and even just passionate fans build a rich world of paratext around a game that, at its best, creates a holistic experience larger and deeper than the text itself. This is not something unique to the internet era; what is chess, if not an incredible symbiosis of its rules and its history, strategy, stories, and cultural impact? It might seem a decent heuristic to then aim to build a community as large as possible in order to foster this environment, and to include features like difficulty settings to support this goal. However, difficulty settings at their best introduce fracture to a community, and at their worst empower bad actors. Consider Minecraft, a game with one of the largest gaming communities in the world, and also a game with a treasure trove of settings, many of them difficulty-related. Besides the choice labelled "Difficulty": Peaceful, Easy, Medium, or Hard, options exist to disable different types of mob spawning, change what exactly happens when you die, disable different types of damage to the player or world, and more. The result is a community that is large, yes, but fractured. Discourse about whether the keepInventory setting, which prevents the player from losing items on death, is cheating seems to pop up every eleven minutes, with hostility on all sides. Really, the Minecraft community is more like two, or five, or a hundred communities in a loosely-tied confederacy, many of which condescendingly look down on the others. This works fine for a game with such a massive fanbase, but in a smaller community, there may not be room for this type of split. A game without difficulty settings, one that simply exists as it does without the player's ability to shape their experience with such encompassing power, builds a robust community of people sharing in the same experience. There is less room to question your fellow player's validity when you know, for a fact, that they played the same game as you.
The common response to any argument that a certain setting shouldn't exist is a phrase resembling "Well what's wrong with just letting the player choose?" This game-specific extension of a sort of "death of the author" philosophy argues that ultimately, once a game is in a player's hands, it is their right to modify it without limits into whatever form they would like. Now, I don't disagree with this in the sense of ownership: once the files of a game are on a player's computer or the pieces in a box are in the player's possession, of course they can do whatever they want with them; they're just pieces of excited silicon or extruded plastic, and all of the technological attempts to restrict modding have been unambiguously terrible.
However, from an artistic perspective, the idea that a text is something that the reader has the right to make exist how they want is perplexing. One doesn't read Of Mice and Men and, upon Lennie's death, think "I didn't want that to happen - let's change that." Inasmuch as a reader thinks "I didn't want that to happen," that frustration fuels a reflection on the text's plot, themes, and the commentary on the human condition contained within the two. Yet, in a game with even one difficulty setting, every moment where the player thinks "I didn't want that to happen" is now a small prompt - an opportunity to open a menu and define the experience so it might not happen again, and an opportunity to forgo reflection, forgo a behavioral change, and forgo any consideration at all of the game as a text to be understood, rather than a machine to make the brain feel good. A game, inherently, is a text that is already packed with opportunities for player choice, far more than any other medium. Choice is the unique power of games as an artistic medium. A player does not witness a setback - a player has a setback, and then feels the consequences personally. A player does not witness a triumph - a player has a triumph, and is empowered by the setbacks they had on the way.
Unless, of course, the game provides the player choice of whether or not they want consequences, and thus whether or not they want to feel - it provides the player triumph with optional setbacks, growth with optional practice, and text with optional theme.
Naturally, this applies in the opposite way. Some games are supposed to be easy - their primary point is not their challenge. But these games have no less right to enforce their difficulty. The idea that the player has the right to make their games as hard as they want, while perhaps not as prevalent as the reverse, is stickier. Without the social stigma from the first-paragraph crew of "cheating" looming over them, and often encouraged by them as a sort of self-flagellation to prove something, players look for challenge modes, hardcore gameplay, permadeath, and the like from games that are not about that. If you have learned a game's tricks and outgrown the time when it provided an interesting challenge, perhaps it's time to embark on a new journey through a new game. There are plenty of them out there.
The elephant in the room, though, is accessibility. Not everyone is capable of experiencing games the same way, and games should endeavor to enable all players who want to play them to play them. There is a clear difference between a player with a disability who needs an additional support element to control a game, and a player who is bothered by failure and wishes to edit the game so they do not fail as much. There is not a controversial take to have here, and many smarter people than I have created resources on game accessibility.
What about just being bad at games, though? Surely even if a game is perfectly subtitled, color-blind friendly, capable of remapping any and all controls, and so on, an easy mode is still good for players who are just bad? For discussion, we can split "bad at games" into two more specific subsets, one of which has the same name as the superset.
Games, like any medium, have a rich history, and with that history comes a set of symbols, design patterns, conventions, terminology, and common skills that one learns by playing games. Consider your typical 3D game with movable camera - Portal, Call of Duty, or Super Mario 64, to name three. The game likely uses a control scheme similar to this: "left stick to move, right stick to look around", or "WASD keys to move, mouse to look around". It is easy to forget that these schemes are skills that must be learned, since many habitual gamers learned this before they even remember. A player experienced with card games has an inventory of terms - suit, rank, trump, trick, and wild, to name but five - that they can then use to learn a new game. "It's a trick-taking game but nines are wild unless they're of the trump suit" can expain a game, in a sentence, that might take minutes to teach a player new to cards. Perhaps a player receives a weapon that lists "WEIGHT: 21" in its description. The experienced gamer has seen "weight" as a stat before, and knows it likely limits how many other items they can carry, or perhaps is a factor in the weapon's damage amount or type. The inexperienced gamer has some understanding of "weight" as a concept, but doesn't have the knowledge of all the games of the past that use weight primarily as a storage limitation. I could list a hundred more examples, but it really is self-evident that people who haven't played many games have a harder time playing more games.
Regardless of whether it's nature or nurture (and we're probably a few hundred years of neuroscience research away from figuring that out), some people are just worse at games than other people. It is difficult to say more than that, especially because it is so common for the seemingly unskilled to actually just be inexperienced, but for now, I am operating under the assumption that there are factors besides experience that make people better or worse at games. Regardless of whether or not there turns out to be the "good at games" gene, I think the following arguments still hold up - all people deserve good games.
In terms of outcome, being bad at games is similar, in some ways, to being disabled - in the context of the play of a single game. Regardless of whether it is caused by a disability or a childhood involving going outside and playing sports, if someone struggles to control a 3D camera, they will struggle in a 3D game - even if the game isn't about using the camera. These struggles add up to frustrations, and the frustrations add up to an (accurate) perception of difficulty, and, importantly, this difficulty doesn't have some greater artistic payoff, because the designer wasn't making a game about camera movement. The cheap and easy solution is to add a difficulty setting. In a perfect world, that solves the problem. Those who struggle with things the game didn't mean to be hard to do can turn down the difficulty of the game, and those who can move a camera like their own head can turn the difficulty up, and now everyone has the same experience!
Obviously, they don't. Everyone who wants to play a game wants a challenge on some level, otherwise they would not play a game, and if the challenge is the same challenge of manual dexterity that the player experiences in every other game, and also possibly in life, then that, frankly, sucks. The idea of difficulty settings as a cure-all also operates under the assumption that the difficulty settings change the difficulty in an effective and interesting way. Perhaps the game reduces the health of its enemies - great, until weapons are introduced that deal damage as a percentage of the enemy's health, and now anyone using hard mode loses the challenge of choosing weapons. Perhaps a simulation game reduces the risk of negative outcomes of events - effective, until a player using easy mode for any reason realizes that making all of their villagers into skydivers and founding cities in volcanoes is the most effective strategy. If the mechanic behind the difficulty setting is even a little imperfect (and every mechanic is imperfect), the game begins to pull apart at the seams. The designer is no longer designing a game, but rather two or three separate games that resemble each other.
What to do then, if you're a game designer? If you think the answer is to abandon those players because they're not your target audience, go read the top paragraph again. People who are disabled and people who are bad at video games do tough things and enjoy them every day. Rather, the answer is the tough answer: improve accessibility, onboarding, and conveyance. These are topics that have plenty of established research, so I don't see a need to wax on about specific techniques for them. Regardless of the exact techniques, though, the core is the same. Reflect on what knowledge and abilities the game assumes and requires the player to have. Is it necessary that they be a part of the game? Are they what the game is actually about? Can we teach them to the player in better ways? Can we make sure the player has learned them before they are thrown into challenges? What is an appropriate punishment when the player fails them? This is definitely harder than just adding a difficulty setting that changes a few multipliers, but the results are more robust and rooted in a real respect for the player.
What about the games that are hard, though? The ones that have followed every piece of advice on accessibility, onboarding, conveyance, and more 10-ish letter words from GDC talks? What if they're still hard? Great! Overcoming a challenge is one of the biggest draws many people have to games, and there are still so many ways to explore that in new and innovative ways. But what if some people can't finish the game? Also great. The idea that any player, good or bad, is entitled to finish a game makes no sense. Games are not movies or books. The story of a game is not the scripted dialogues, cutscenes, and music numbers stored within, but the story of the player playing the game. If the game is built such that its player's story is only compelling after a certain amount of playtime, then the game should just be a movie.
Ultimately, I can't deny that difficulty settings are easy to implement and sometimes adequate. Game development is, perhaps more than anything, a field of the good enough. This isn't to say that any game with a difficulty setting is automatically terrible, just like a game with crappy hand-drawn art or a random music loop grabbed off the internet isn't automatically terrible. Rather, I aim to point a spotlight on the difficulty setting as an element of mediocrity. I think its ubiquity has turned it into an element of games that most people just ignore - something as essential as the pixels on the screen - and most of the modern discourse around difficulty has turned into a collection of dogwhistles about woke making Dark Souls too easy. In conclusion, some calls to action:
To the player who uses easy modes: You deserve games to be better for you. There is an underlying assumption that easy games are easy to make - you can just change some numbers to make a compelling experience that is still approachable - when there is so much space to design in. But also, try sticking it out sometimes. Play a game that feels too hard for longer than you might want to. It might surprise you.
To the player who uses hard modes: Go mix it up. Whether you're using hard mode to get more content out of a game you love, or to get the challenge you want out of a game that doesn't meet your needs at its core, there's a game that does what you actually want. Go find it.
To the game developer: Think about if you're creating mediocrity just to get more money, or to attract more players, or to make your job easier. Tradeoffs are unavoidable, but you're still making art. Act like it.