5 ms·

I think Miyazaki's games are great and I enjoy them myself, but the continued (even in this article, somewhat) framing of accessibility features as ruining the

by Osmose 5y ago

I think Miyazaki's games are great and I enjoy them myself, but the continued (even in this article, somewhat) framing of accessibility features as ruining the artistic vision of hardship is a little disingenuous at this point. Many disabilities make games several times more difficult than they are for people without them, and a difficulty slider or increased stats help level the playing field so that the games can be of equal relative difficulty for all players. It's on FromSoft to own the fact that sticking to their stance on accessibility features means they are choosing to exclude players who didn't get to choose what they are and aren't capable of. I think that tarnishes the meaning of their works more than the risk of someone making the game "too easy" does.

makeitdouble 5y ago
To note, there are many other mechanisms to adjust the playing experience than a difficulty slider or an explicit "easy" mode. I think a lot of us prefer a more natural and "legit" integration of different paths into the gameplay. It requires more effort and creativity on the developer side, but it also allows players to move from laid back/easier playing to more demanding play in a seamless way. To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of, instead of dealing with settings and weird modes where you don't even know what they effectively mean and how well they would fit you.
- Osmose 5y ago
  Oh yeah, you can make lots of choices on how to integrate them or what features to offer! Celeste assist mode lets you control the game engine's speed, modify how many jumps you have, etc. Hades gives you a mode where you get a permanent 2% health buff every time you die that allows the game to meet you where your capabilities lie instead of of forcing you to guess.
  - SlowAndCalm 5y ago
    I think you touch on why a singular difficulty level can be good when you mention meeting where your capabilities lie instead of forcing you to guess. When I encounter something difficult in a game, I'm always tempted to turn the difficulty down and often do. With Souls games I explicitly know if something is too hard and take it as a sign I need to do something different; whether that's my mechanical technique or the need to explore more. An increasing buff or other difficulty helpers would mean I could eventually brute force my way through without considering other options. Maybe I would prefer that, but it would just be a guess unless I did it the other way.
- autoexec 5y ago
  > To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of What are some examples of games that do this? I haven't played many recent titles, so the only examples of this I can think of are some games like skyrim that let you max out everything so you can play as any class you like and move between them at will or Final Fantasy/Pokemon where you can grind your way to victory if you're willing to spend the hours. I'm pretty sure I've played a title or two that tried to automatically adjust the difficulty according to how well I'm playing, but I always resented it. It feels like punishing success and it's too easy to game by intentionally holding yourself back. I think options/settings still have their place. There have been several times when I (as a relatively non-disabled person) would have loved an option to disable a time limit or lower the difficultly level of a boss fight and there are games I've started but never finished because I couldn't. Cheat codes have really fallen out of favor, but they had their place too.
  - idle_zealot 5y ago
    > What are some examples of games that do this? The Souls games, and Elden Ring. There are places you can go in-game to find powerful weapons and easily level up. If a boss is too hard you can go explore surrounding areas and come back when your character is more powerful. Or you can choose to persist and master the boss’s mechanics to beat it at your current strength. Each area in these games works like a puzzle with multiple solutions.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      Dark souls has been on my list of games to try for some time. Sounds like they went the route of the grind which I'm fine with as a compromise (in some games I even prefer to be over-leveled). I'm still trying to decide between playing on PC or console though. I know the PC port had issues, but there have been plenty of times when a mod or simple console command would have saved me from bugs if I were on PC instead of a console.
      - idle_zealot 5y ago
TheFattestNinja 5y ago
Its tricky. If we look at games as art, and I think we can agree that From's one are complex enough to warrant it, on one hand I agree that cutting off someone from experiencing your art seems silly and injust, but then you think of other media: a dyslexic person will not be able to experience a complex book like a non dyslexic would. Is it right to simplify the book to only use simple english or would that compromise the book? Hard to tell. I can see the argument for which games can be made more inclusive more easily than other media and thus they should, but everything is built for a target audience and only works best when aimed at them. Im really on the fence here. I would like more people to experience From's work, but I feel the work itself wouldnt be as memorable if Blighttown was less hopeless (yes even if it was optin, as youd give into temptation)
- Osmose 5y ago
  Accessibility for dyslexia isn't about changing to "simple english" though. You can offer customizable fonts on e-readers (people with dyslexia may find some fonts have more recognizable word shapes than others, e.g. Comic Sans is a popular option that is widely available), you can offer your work as an audiobook, etc. There are many games that offer similarly difficult experiences with accessibility options that did not "ruin" the difficult experience. Celeste, for example, is a difficult platformer that offers lots of options for making the game "easier" and yet it's still known as being a very difficult, and rewarding, game, especially in the later levels.
  - stnmtn 5y ago
    I mean, the other example of not all art can be accessible to everyone is film and people who are blind.
    - mwcampbell 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description Sure, I don't get to enjoy a movie's unique visual style, but I can at least follow along with the story and enjoy it on some level together with my family.
vlunkr 5y ago
I think the problem with a difficulty slider is that it puts lots of extra burden on the developer. Balancing difficulty is already tricky, and now you have to do it n times? And a newcomer to the series might choose "easy", which is not the intended experience for the average player. My proposal is an "a la carte" difficulty instead, where you choose what mechanics you want to mess with. You could get unlimited estus or health, give yourself any item or any number of souls, freely adjust your level, etc. Basically cheat codes. That way you really choose your own difficulty. The whole game can be a cakewalk or can just skip one area that's giving you trouble. And honestly that would just be fun for everyone to mess with.
- croon 5y ago
  This is really the answer. I don't know why every (singleplayer) game doesn't do this. I know some players like to complain that it ruins the game, but I can't see how. There will always be the default/designed way to play the game, available for anyone who wants it. I grew up with games before ubiquitous internet access, where you could edit game files easily. If I wanted to play a game regularly I could, and if I wanted to edit stats, I could. It's just a form of meta agency on gaming. It's about having fun, and I think a lot of purists have lost that, at least when it comes to denying others their way of fun.
- didibus 5y ago
  Yes, some games have started doing that and giving them as accessibility features, and I love it. I think it's a great way to do it. Mario Kart 8 and Celeste are two examples that come to my mind which do that.
AllegedAlec 5y ago
Yeah, that sucks for those people. I don't think framing it as a moral failure on Fromsoft's side is right though. It's an artistic decision, not a 'haha, go fuck yourself you armless twats' one.
- Osmose 5y ago
  It's not one or the other. It's both an artistic decision to leave no remote possibility of altering the difficulty, and a moral one to exclude folks whose disabilities make the game vastly more difficult than it is for others. They're responsible for both.
  - krige 5y ago
    People with disabilities have beaten Fromsoft games. There are numerous accounts of that. From what I have seen, it's usually people without actual disabilities propping them up as a shield for their own laziness and excessive need to chase the current trend. In short, they want the reader's digest version.
  - AllegedAlec 5y ago
    > a moral one to exclude folks whose disabilities make the game vastly more difficult than it is for others. I disagree with this premise. Why hold game makers to this standard and not any other business? We don't hold car makers morally responsible for not accomodating blind drivers, or florists for excluding people with allergies.
hohoemi8 5y ago
What someone with a motor disability needs is a specialized controller, not a difficulty slider.
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  That’s not really a universally applicable assumption. I have a degenerative nerve condition and auto-immune disease, they both substantially make my response times and ability to press buttons worse. I am absolutely loving Elden Ring and I have beaten each Soulsborn Fromsoftware has put out. However, I am terrified that I will reach a point where I will simply not be able to play the games. I am working on hardware interface designs (ie controllers and keyboard/mouse) to hopefully allow me to overcome this, but I’m not sure it will ever be doable/usable enough to still enjoy my favorite games. I don’t want a difficulty slider, but some options could exist to make my future life better (more iframes, narrower hit boxes on enemy attacks, etc).
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Where do people get this entitled attitude that every game should be accessible to everyone as much as possible? Nothing in the world is like that.
didibus 5y ago
I agree, adding accessibility features seems pretty trivial for them, they can keep the game the same, but just add options to have say double the health, extra armor, auto-parry, etc. This isn't just something that could help people with disability, but also younger players, more casual players, older players. But most importantly, even me, I've beat all the games, but I'd have fun replaying them in a God mode, after going through it feeling like a chump, it be fun to replay them feeling like a god. So in my opinion it would bring more opportunity for fun from people who already played them, and also allow more people to enjoy the game.
015a 5y ago
I feel that what's presented here is an intractable problem; there's no right answer, there are only aspects to the problem. I've thought about it a lot. First, this is a legitimate example of a slippery slope. That alone is not a reason to avoid adjustable difficulty, but when done in the name of making a game more accessible it becomes difficult to pin down when a game's difficulty is the "correct" level of accessible. A wheelchair ramp is a wheelchair ramp; they work for practically anyone with a wheelchair, if built to a quantified code. But difficulty is particularly, well, difficult, to quantify. There will always be people who can't enjoy video games, because disability is a multivariate spectrum unique to every individual. On one end of that spectrum, there are many people who despite being otherwise able-bodied and minded cannot beat Margit. A friend of mine was struggling with him quite a bit. A couple hours later he finally got it. He was ecstatic, of course, then said "I don't know how you beat him so quickly". I didn't. It took me about 80 deaths and three hours of aggregated attempts. That's the point; many people view Souls games as having some Elite Echelon of players who "get it", destroying every boss handedly, and while there certainly are players like this, the fanbase is predominated by people who experience exactly the same difficulty players who "give up early" do. What we're talking about, in these instances, is not an able-minded skill differential; we're talking about Patience and Willpower. I don't believe its fair to consider these aspects of human nature a variable in the "difficulty" argument; making From's games easier purely to cater to people who don't have the patience or willpower to push through fundamentally changes the experience they have; it would no longer be a "great" game, because what makes it great is predominated by its demand on your patience. Its weird; some people like that, some people don't. But you take it away and its unclear if what is left actually has a similar value; it turns out, maybe you just wouldn't like it either way. Its similar to demanding that a scary movie have an option to remove the scary scenes, because I don't like to be scared; this demand would similarly be rooted in this idea that a tranche on the population is "missing out" on what many people love about scary movies, so they want to change the artform in order to enjoy it. Not all art is built for all people. Not everything should be a Disney movie. Your argument that a difficulty slider provides options for players to find a level of difficulty which is "right" for them is cute, but it assumes that players know what this true difficulty should be. The problem is: we don't. How can I, able-bodied and minded or not, be trusted to make a decision on the "correct difficulty for me" of a game whose entire point is to be near-impossibly difficult? I die to Margit eighty times; should I turn the difficulty down? How about a hundred times? Two hundred? What is the right number of deaths that a player should experience facing Margit? Some games firmly take the stance that the number is near-zero; that's absolutely fine, I love these games! From's games are not that. Second: I've played a ton of games. Too many; many with difficulty sliders, many without. I've literally never seen a game implement a difficulty slider which resulted in a satisfying change in difficulty at the level of FromSoftware's game's difficulties. When games implement difficulty sliders, they almost always take the form of: start with a base level of health, damage, etc, call that Medium. Increase by 25% for Hard. Increase by 50% for Insanity. Decrease by 25% for Easy. Etc. It doesn't matter if its TLOU's Grounded, or Mass Effect's Insanity, or God of War's GMGOW or Fallen Order's Jedi Grand Master. Sliders ALWAYS, in 100% of cases that I've seen, mean: there's numbers within the matrix of the game's design, lets tweak those numbers up and down. Someone gets shafted, in literally 100% of situations. Either a game was designed for medium, and the hardest difficulty is unsatisfying because enemies become damage tanks, or ammo becomes too scarce, or something. Or: a game was designed for the hardest difficulty, and the easier ones feel like an afterthought where enemies are tissue paper and you're a god amongst mortals. It turns out: game development is REALLY, REALLY hard. Its a miracle games are even released, let alone that a small number are great. Your assertion that a difficulty slider would help make a game relatively equally difficult among differently-abled people either would never work, as it hasn't in the past, or is tantamount to demanding game developers design and build multiple finely-tuned copies of their game for each difficulty. Not just health, ammo, damage values; but animation timings, ability sets, parry windows, item drop locations, its a herculean task! Not to mention: your assertion assumes that the quadratically multivariate spectrum of human disability can be satisfyingly encoded into a linear slider. TLOU2 is the only game I've seen which has multivariate difficulty sliders; from enemy health to drop rate, you can tweak five or six variables. But: that circles back to my previous point; it becomes a slippery slope where players are overloaded with fine-grained control over difficulty in order to produce the perfectly tuned game for them, without any guidance on what that "perfect tuning" actually is or should be.

by Osmose 5y ago

makeitdouble 5y ago

To note, there are many other mechanisms to adjust the playing experience than a difficulty slider or an explicit "easy" mode. I think a lot of us prefer a more natural and "legit" integration of different paths into the gameplay. It requires more effort and creativity on the developer side, but it also allows players to move from laid back/easier playing to more demanding play in a seamless way. To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of, instead of dealing with settings and weird modes where you don't even know what they effectively mean and how well they would fit you.

Osmose 5y ago
Oh yeah, you can make lots of choices on how to integrate them or what features to offer! Celeste assist mode lets you control the game engine's speed, modify how many jumps you have, etc. Hades gives you a mode where you get a permanent 2% health buff every time you die that allows the game to meet you where your capabilities lie instead of of forcing you to guess.
- SlowAndCalm 5y ago
  I think you touch on why a singular difficulty level can be good when you mention meeting where your capabilities lie instead of forcing you to guess. When I encounter something difficult in a game, I'm always tempted to turn the difficulty down and often do. With Souls games I explicitly know if something is too hard and take it as a sign I need to do something different; whether that's my mechanical technique or the need to explore more. An increasing buff or other difficulty helpers would mean I could eventually brute force my way through without considering other options. Maybe I would prefer that, but it would just be a guess unless I did it the other way.
autoexec 5y ago
> To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of What are some examples of games that do this? I haven't played many recent titles, so the only examples of this I can think of are some games like skyrim that let you max out everything so you can play as any class you like and move between them at will or Final Fantasy/Pokemon where you can grind your way to victory if you're willing to spend the hours. I'm pretty sure I've played a title or two that tried to automatically adjust the difficulty according to how well I'm playing, but I always resented it. It feels like punishing success and it's too easy to game by intentionally holding yourself back. I think options/settings still have their place. There have been several times when I (as a relatively non-disabled person) would have loved an option to disable a time limit or lower the difficultly level of a boss fight and there are games I've started but never finished because I couldn't. Cheat codes have really fallen out of favor, but they had their place too.
- idle_zealot 5y ago
  > What are some examples of games that do this? The Souls games, and Elden Ring. There are places you can go in-game to find powerful weapons and easily level up. If a boss is too hard you can go explore surrounding areas and come back when your character is more powerful. Or you can choose to persist and master the boss’s mechanics to beat it at your current strength. Each area in these games works like a puzzle with multiple solutions.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    Dark souls has been on my list of games to try for some time. Sounds like they went the route of the grind which I'm fine with as a compromise (in some games I even prefer to be over-leveled). I'm still trying to decide between playing on PC or console though. I know the PC port had issues, but there have been plenty of times when a mod or simple console command would have saved me from bugs if I were on PC instead of a console.
    - idle_zealot 5y ago

TheFattestNinja 5y ago

Its tricky. If we look at games as art, and I think we can agree that From's one are complex enough to warrant it, on one hand I agree that cutting off someone from experiencing your art seems silly and injust, but then you think of other media: a dyslexic person will not be able to experience a complex book like a non dyslexic would. Is it right to simplify the book to only use simple english or would that compromise the book? Hard to tell. I can see the argument for which games can be made more inclusive more easily than other media and thus they should, but everything is built for a target audience and only works best when aimed at them. Im really on the fence here. I would like more people to experience From's work, but I feel the work itself wouldnt be as memorable if Blighttown was less hopeless (yes even if it was optin, as youd give into temptation)

Osmose 5y ago
Accessibility for dyslexia isn't about changing to "simple english" though. You can offer customizable fonts on e-readers (people with dyslexia may find some fonts have more recognizable word shapes than others, e.g. Comic Sans is a popular option that is widely available), you can offer your work as an audiobook, etc. There are many games that offer similarly difficult experiences with accessibility options that did not "ruin" the difficult experience. Celeste, for example, is a difficult platformer that offers lots of options for making the game "easier" and yet it's still known as being a very difficult, and rewarding, game, especially in the later levels.
- stnmtn 5y ago
  I mean, the other example of not all art can be accessible to everyone is film and people who are blind.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description Sure, I don't get to enjoy a movie's unique visual style, but I can at least follow along with the story and enjoy it on some level together with my family.

vlunkr 5y ago

I think the problem with a difficulty slider is that it puts lots of extra burden on the developer. Balancing difficulty is already tricky, and now you have to do it n times? And a newcomer to the series might choose "easy", which is not the intended experience for the average player. My proposal is an "a la carte" difficulty instead, where you choose what mechanics you want to mess with. You could get unlimited estus or health, give yourself any item or any number of souls, freely adjust your level, etc. Basically cheat codes. That way you really choose your own difficulty. The whole game can be a cakewalk or can just skip one area that's giving you trouble. And honestly that would just be fun for everyone to mess with.

croon 5y ago
This is really the answer. I don't know why every (singleplayer) game doesn't do this. I know some players like to complain that it ruins the game, but I can't see how. There will always be the default/designed way to play the game, available for anyone who wants it. I grew up with games before ubiquitous internet access, where you could edit game files easily. If I wanted to play a game regularly I could, and if I wanted to edit stats, I could. It's just a form of meta agency on gaming. It's about having fun, and I think a lot of purists have lost that, at least when it comes to denying others their way of fun.
didibus 5y ago
Yes, some games have started doing that and giving them as accessibility features, and I love it. I think it's a great way to do it. Mario Kart 8 and Celeste are two examples that come to my mind which do that.

AllegedAlec 5y ago

Yeah, that sucks for those people. I don't think framing it as a moral failure on Fromsoft's side is right though. It's an artistic decision, not a 'haha, go fuck yourself you armless twats' one.

Osmose 5y ago
It's not one or the other. It's both an artistic decision to leave no remote possibility of altering the difficulty, and a moral one to exclude folks whose disabilities make the game vastly more difficult than it is for others. They're responsible for both.
- krige 5y ago
  People with disabilities have beaten Fromsoft games. There are numerous accounts of that. From what I have seen, it's usually people without actual disabilities propping them up as a shield for their own laziness and excessive need to chase the current trend. In short, they want the reader's digest version.
- AllegedAlec 5y ago
  > a moral one to exclude folks whose disabilities make the game vastly more difficult than it is for others. I disagree with this premise. Why hold game makers to this standard and not any other business? We don't hold car makers morally responsible for not accomodating blind drivers, or florists for excluding people with allergies.

hohoemi8 5y ago

What someone with a motor disability needs is a specialized controller, not a difficulty slider.

throwaway17_17 5y ago
That’s not really a universally applicable assumption. I have a degenerative nerve condition and auto-immune disease, they both substantially make my response times and ability to press buttons worse. I am absolutely loving Elden Ring and I have beaten each Soulsborn Fromsoftware has put out. However, I am terrified that I will reach a point where I will simply not be able to play the games. I am working on hardware interface designs (ie controllers and keyboard/mouse) to hopefully allow me to overcome this, but I’m not sure it will ever be doable/usable enough to still enjoy my favorite games. I don’t want a difficulty slider, but some options could exist to make my future life better (more iframes, narrower hit boxes on enemy attacks, etc).

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Where do people get this entitled attitude that every game should be accessible to everyone as much as possible? Nothing in the world is like that.

didibus 5y ago

I agree, adding accessibility features seems pretty trivial for them, they can keep the game the same, but just add options to have say double the health, extra armor, auto-parry, etc. This isn't just something that could help people with disability, but also younger players, more casual players, older players. But most importantly, even me, I've beat all the games, but I'd have fun replaying them in a God mode, after going through it feeling like a chump, it be fun to replay them feeling like a god. So in my opinion it would bring more opportunity for fun from people who already played them, and also allow more people to enjoy the game.

015a 5y ago

I feel that what's presented here is an intractable problem; there's no right answer, there are only aspects to the problem. I've thought about it a lot. First, this is a legitimate example of a slippery slope. That alone is not a reason to avoid adjustable difficulty, but when done in the name of making a game more accessible it becomes difficult to pin down when a game's difficulty is the "correct" level of accessible. A wheelchair ramp is a wheelchair ramp; they work for practically anyone with a wheelchair, if built to a quantified code. But difficulty is particularly, well, difficult, to quantify. There will always be people who can't enjoy video games, because disability is a multivariate spectrum unique to every individual. On one end of that spectrum, there are many people who despite being otherwise able-bodied and minded cannot beat Margit. A friend of mine was struggling with him quite a bit. A couple hours later he finally got it. He was ecstatic, of course, then said "I don't know how you beat him so quickly". I didn't. It took me about 80 deaths and three hours of aggregated attempts. That's the point; many people view Souls games as having some Elite Echelon of players who "get it", destroying every boss handedly, and while there certainly are players like this, the fanbase is predominated by people who experience exactly the same difficulty players who "give up early" do. What we're talking about, in these instances, is not an able-minded skill differential; we're talking about Patience and Willpower. I don't believe its fair to consider these aspects of human nature a variable in the "difficulty" argument; making From's games easier purely to cater to people who don't have the patience or willpower to push through fundamentally changes the experience they have; it would no longer be a "great" game, because what makes it great is predominated by its demand on your patience. Its weird; some people like that, some people don't. But you take it away and its unclear if what is left actually has a similar value; it turns out, maybe you just wouldn't like it either way. Its similar to demanding that a scary movie have an option to remove the scary scenes, because I don't like to be scared; this demand would similarly be rooted in this idea that a tranche on the population is "missing out" on what many people love about scary movies, so they want to change the artform in order to enjoy it. Not all art is built for all people. Not everything should be a Disney movie. Your argument that a difficulty slider provides options for players to find a level of difficulty which is "right" for them is cute, but it assumes that players know what this true difficulty should be. The problem is: we don't. How can I, able-bodied and minded or not, be trusted to make a decision on the "correct difficulty for me" of a game whose entire point is to be near-impossibly difficult? I die to Margit eighty times; should I turn the difficulty down? How about a hundred times? Two hundred? What is the right number of deaths that a player should experience facing Margit? Some games firmly take the stance that the number is near-zero; that's absolutely fine, I love these games! From's games are not that. Second: I've played a ton of games. Too many; many with difficulty sliders, many without. I've literally never seen a game implement a difficulty slider which resulted in a satisfying change in difficulty at the level of FromSoftware's game's difficulties. When games implement difficulty sliders, they almost always take the form of: start with a base level of health, damage, etc, call that Medium. Increase by 25% for Hard. Increase by 50% for Insanity. Decrease by 25% for Easy. Etc. It doesn't matter if its TLOU's Grounded, or Mass Effect's Insanity, or God of War's GMGOW or Fallen Order's Jedi Grand Master. Sliders ALWAYS, in 100% of cases that I've seen, mean: there's numbers within the matrix of the game's design, lets tweak those numbers up and down. Someone gets shafted, in literally 100% of situations. Either a game was designed for medium, and the hardest difficulty is unsatisfying because enemies become damage tanks, or ammo becomes too scarce, or something. Or: a game was designed for the hardest difficulty, and the easier ones feel like an afterthought where enemies are tissue paper and you're a god amongst mortals. It turns out: game development is REALLY, REALLY hard. Its a miracle games are even released, let alone that a small number are great. Your assertion that a difficulty slider would help make a game relatively equally difficult among differently-abled people either would never work, as it hasn't in the past, or is tantamount to demanding game developers design and build multiple finely-tuned copies of their game for each difficulty. Not just health, ammo, damage values; but animation timings, ability sets, parry windows, item drop locations, its a herculean task! Not to mention: your assertion assumes that the quadratically multivariate spectrum of human disability can be satisfyingly encoded into a linear slider. TLOU2 is the only game I've seen which has multivariate difficulty sliders; from enemy health to drop rate, you can tweak five or six variables. But: that circles back to my previous point; it becomes a slippery slope where players are overloaded with fine-grained control over difficulty in order to produce the perfectly tuned game for them, without any guidance on what that "perfect tuning" actually is or should be.