With Hollow Knight: Silksong’s huge launch in full swing, community debate about its qualities and flaws has gone back and forth, with some players insisting their criticisms about things like the game's difficulty are valid and shouldn’t be instantly dismissed as "hate."
Subtitles/dubs are translations. They adapt language, not pacing, cinematography, editing, or structure. That’s fundamentally different from altering a game’s difficulty, which changes the mechanics, the thing the art is built from and differentiates it from other mediums.
A better analogy:
Subtitles are like adding glasses so more people can see the same painting.
Easy mode is like repainting sections of the canvas so it’s “clearer.” You can call both “accessibility,” but one preserves the work, the other mutates it.
Furthermore, language isn’t a good metric by which to compare analogies because games are also translated.
(Ill reply to both parts in separate replies)
Subtitles/dubs are translations. They adapt language, not pacing, cinematography, editing, or structure. That’s fundamentally different from altering a game’s difficulty, which changes the mechanics, the thing the art is built from and differentiates it from other mediums.
A better analogy:
Subtitles are like adding glasses so more people can see the same painting.
Easy mode is like repainting sections of the canvas so it’s “clearer.” You can call both “accessibility,” but one preserves the work, the other mutates it.
Furthermore, language isn’t a good metric by which to compare analogies because games are also translated.