If you consider interaction a core component of a game, affecting all other aspects of the "experience", then reducing that interaction, and level of awareness,

If you consider interaction a core component of a game, affecting all other aspects of the "experience", then reducing that interaction, and level of awareness, time, practice, etc that builds into the experience clearly alters the experience. Consider the extreme -- play through any given game with a mario super star.. it's difficult to imagine the game experience isn't radically changed. These kinds of defenses for "easy" modes (that is, easier than the game was designed for) seem to be fundamentally based on the idea that an optimal game is simply a movie with some (perhaps optional) QTE's to keep you from getting bored. But they're not. Clearly not all games get any benefit out of increasing difficulty (most game's difficulty increase amounts to turning everything into bullet sponges -- this rarely alters the experience in any notable fashion), but that hardly means difficulty has no purpose or place. An easy mode might not ruin the game.. but it may be a worthless mode to have, and one that ruins the player's experience. The souls series would be generally uninteresting if you weren't pushed towards playing careful and meticulously. The DMC series would be generally uninteresting if you weren't pushed towards better and faster (and more stylish) combo'ing. Shadow of the Colossus, BioShock would have absolutely no impact/weight (incidentally, an easy mode has been added I guess to latest remasters). Super Meat Boy wouldn't even be a game anymore. Imagine never experiencing 100 to 0 pikmin loss! Without that threat, is it even the same class of game? If you couldn't play them properly, it would probably be a waste of time. Their stories aren't that interesting. They ain't books. Of course, for many games it doesn't matter. Uncharted series really is just a movie with some QTE events (and QTE events in the fashion of a cover shooter), and difficulty isn't a factor. CRPGs/JRPGs generally have such uninteresting encounters that you could rip out most of the non-roleplaying combat mechanics and still have much the same thing (but you lose that sweet, sweet timesink). Mass Effect 1 and Star Control 2 barely justify the existence of combat in the first place (reduce the fuel needs in SC2 and you'll radically change its early game however, probably much worse). They can be made easy... but it hardly applies generally. And these are all examples where they can be made easier, because they failed to make any use of their difficulty in the first place.