quote:
"If you want to make things difficult or easy for yourself, isn't that playing smartly?"
To my knowledge is has to do with the fact that for some people you always have to try your best.
Think of it this way... If you made your house on the side of a hill that had mudslides... would you think you were so smart? Also lets say you chose never to use stone or metal for this house... Sure when you go to the bar with your buddies they may say "Ohh, you da (Wo)man. I can't believe you did that!" but there is probably the person in the corner only saying "I can't believe you did that..." as they sigh in your immaturity.
Lets take Fable... This was a very easy game... and pathetically so having one of the easiest last bosses is gaming history... It has no difficulty settings. Yes you could make it harder by never leveling up, using the wooden sword, and/or using stat enhancement potions, making the game quite difficult. Yet the game is still considered easy despite of all this. When someone says Fable is too easy you cannot say "Well why don't you play worse?" because that is silly.
In the same way the people this topic applies to feel like they have to play "Worse" just to get some iota of challenge out of this.
This whole topic is just people brainstorming and comming up with ideas and suggestions for specifically the above.
The goal is to suggest and tweek those suggestions to create the best possible system so that a person feels like he is just increasing the difficulty rather then feeling like (s)he is intentionally making mistakes.
The best quote I can think of is: "It's not a bug, it's a feature"