@zetasyanthis @Felthry Yeah, I don't make that distinction most of the time, but sometimes that's called for.
A difficult game would require creative strategy and adapting to circumstances. It's a logic challenge.
A hard game would be an execution challenge where you know what you need to do, but it takes a lot of focus and dexterity to pull it off.
@Felthry "hard" is more "yeah it's challenging but I just have to sit down and grind it out;" "difficult" is more "I gotta figure out how I'm going to tackle this first"
There are certainly times when I'd say one fits and the other doesn't, but I don't really understand why enough to explain. Most of the time, it has to do with explaining ND stuff to NT people though.
@Felthry You can thank the Norman invasion of England for this one.
"Hard" has Germanic language roots, "difficult" is from French. They nominally mean the same thing, but because French was the language of the aristocracy back then, "difficult" is even now regarded as a more sophisticated word, and may therefore also connote a more complex problem.
It's exactly the same thing as with "big" and "large". There are many Germanic/French word pairs like this in English.
@Felthry They can definitely be used synonymously but "difficult" tends to imply specifically difficulty of competence in a way that "hard" doesn't
"folding a thousand cranes isn't had because it's difficult, it's hard because it's a lot of work", for example, is a perfectly cromulent sentence
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@Felthry We voted on this a few days ago and forgot to explain the how!
At least in part b/c of the connection to video games, we always associate hard by itself as just, really tough, straightforward, but perhaps unfair? and Difficult as... a bit more complex. Perhaps usually a bit more fair? And something can be one without being the other.
@Felthry
I'd say 'difficult' implies a level of complexity to the problem that 'hard' does not necessarily.