Sports are games and have some degree of artificial difficulty. The size of the goal and ball, for example, is arbitrary (within the bounds of practicality. No moon sized basketballs, for example)

But that doesn’t really address what I was trying to get it. I feel like sometimes people online complain about “artificial difficulty” in video games, and it’s unclear what they actually want. I’ve seen it applied to everything from “The enemies hide around corners” to “you can’t quicksave”. I think it’s a kind of duckspeak thing that people say to just mean “i don’t like it” while making it sound less subjective.