Hey, remember when I said I was doing a thing?
Thing dropped.
I was just wondering what the status of that thing was! I'm so psyched to finally get to read this. Congratulations on your Polygon debut, may it be the first of many articles there with your name on them. Also, that clip of Amethyst getting trolled in Riff 2 is priceless.
These hacks are all at least somewhat difficult and I think there's something to be said for just playing more of them, rather than always ratcheting up the difficulty. Someone like LaserBelch or Grim didn't get to be as good as they are by playing ten hacks in a carefully-calibrated difficulty curve*, they just took whatever came out and wound up playing literally hundreds of hacks in the process. You're still gaining experience and building muscle memory when you play hacks that are only moderately difficult, even if they don't push you to the limit at every step.
You make extremely valid points, and all of this is 100% true and worth remembering. I also did a pretty poor job of communicating my inner thoughts here -- I'm not interested in difficulty just for the sake of difficulty (I'm not interested in something like Horses or Precision86, for instance). But there is a whole world of hacks that are universally agreed on as being Good that are also extremely hard, like Mostly Harmless and Moon, and I want to be good enough to play them. Really, what I want is to have enough skill where I can play a hack that looks interesting without worrying that it'll be too hard for me. I'm really trying to take a GlitchCat-style approach to thinking about kaizo, where every hack is just another chance to learn new things and get better as a player. The journey is the destination, or something. The friction occurs when I run into a hack like Comfort Zone that knocks me down a peg.
There's definitely value in playing easier hacks, and for the most part I have more fun playing them too. I'm not trying to advocate for only playing progressively harder games, because this should be fun! I'll never turn my nose up at a cool hack because it's easier than the last one I played.
For as useful as Tofu's terribly-named Kaizo University program can be, I think it also gives people the impression that they should be climbing the difficulty ladder with each new hack they play. That might be the shortest way to get good, but it's not necessarily the most fun!
This is another excellent point and one that I think a lot of people miss. Look at someone like SpaceVixen, who's been playing Invictus for over a month and is taking 3-4 sittings just to get through single sections. As far as I'm aware she's just been going straight through the University list, but it seems like she isn't really getting a lot out of it. I have to wonder if she wouldn't be better off taking a break and playing some easier hacks like Hark 2, Take It Easy, Little Mario World, maybe even Hyperion. Play the easier stuff to gain the consistency you need for the harder stuff, play more stuff to gain context for more setups. (Of course, if she's happy to keep grinding Invictus, she should do that! I'm not gonna tell anyone how to run their streams.)
On that note, I saw a few people playing Super World yesterday and it looked like a fun one. I think I might give that a go next.