by I recently noticed that I’ve never explained my views on challenge vs. difficulty in a game. Perhaps I’ve talked about it with Chezni so much, I assumed I had written it up here somewhere. Apparently I haven’t, so here it goes.
Aren’t those the same thing?
Defining your terms is one of the most important parts of debate, and some of the largest debates come about because of different definitions (I’d point out a few, but this isn’t a political blog and I like my blood pressure where it is). So let’s start there – I’m going to take Google’s default definitions and tweak them a bit.
Challenge is when your objective is achievable, but will require skill and perhaps a bit of luck to accomplish.
Difficulty is when your objective is impractical to accomplish, hard to understand, or out of your control (requiring luck to succeed).
Even those definitions are a little vague, so I’ll try to nail down what I mean with some examples. A good challenge in a puzzle game gives you all the pieces you need and lets you experiment with them while you are trying to find the solution. A good challenge in an action game is any combat in Dark Souls when you understand how to accomplish the goal, the capabilities of the opponents facing you, how your own abilities compare, and when you are limited by the same factors as your opponent. Conversely, a difficult puzzle is one where you lack all the pieces, the instructions are unclear, or if checking your solution is slow. A difficult action game would be one where your options are unclear, your opponent doesn’t have to follow the same rules as you, or if your opponent has unequal access to information. The rest of this article will be expounding on these points, so don’t feel compelled to read it all.
What makes a game difficult?
Quite often, mechanics are thrown in to a game to pad out its length and give it greater difficulty – the impression of challenge. Perhaps the most frequent of these is an expectation of grinding or similar forms of level gating. This was done early in game development because it was hard to fit 60+ hours of worthwhile content in the same space as what would amount to less than one second of HD video today (but boy, did Chrono Trigger try). That same practice is now inexcusable. With the inexhaustible supply of content now available, forced grinding is the game actively wasting your time or just trying to get your money.
If you’ll allow me a brief aside: these old practices have found a notable new home in today’s market. They now take the form of games which try to get you to pay not to play them. This is most common in mobile game trash, but has occasionally found its way into desktop games. An easy identifier for this sort of artificial difficulty are real world timers: that is, one whose counter runs constantly whether or not the game is running. There is precious little reason to ever have a real world timer in a video game other than to get more of your money. Either the game is wasting your most precious resource (time), or your most versatile resource (money).
The final time-based factor which can make a game difficult is waiting. Waiting isn’t hard, it just seems hard. That’s already been covered, so I have no more to say about that.
Difficulty can also be increased if your opponent has unequal access to information. If I’m hiding in the grass, but the grass doesn’t render for an opponent, my opponent has an unfair advantage. The same is true in single player games – if an AI doesn’t calculate your cover behind foliage, that foliage just doesn’t exist for them. This is a fairly difficult problem in many stealth games – the AI is just too “good” because it has greater access to information. I can’t find it right now, but a developer once said in an interview that making video game AI smart is easy – making it dumb is hard. In the same way, making a game difficult is easy but making it challenging is hard.
There’s one other way a game can be difficult before you have a chance to run in to any of these problems. The key to any good game is understanding the system and your options as a player. Each time you start a new game you are also learning what rules govern the system. Though there are certain conventions which are practically universal in video and board games, there is no law binding a game to those conventions. Even established conventions are not universal. WASD control schemes can be replaced by arrow keys. Running could be bound to ctrl, shift, or even your mouse wheel. Those buttons don’t exist on a controller. All of these rules go out the window on a touchscreen.
Past that, even knowing the controls doesn’t give you the full picture: you also need to know the consequences of those inputs or sequences of inputs. Can you wall jump? Can you double jump? Does killing this NPC make a faction angry at you? All of these questions have to be answered in a way that still maintains player interest. A difficult game will often leave you in the dark about the answers to these questions or present you with only some of the answers, and a fantastic game might be largely ignored because it’s too hard to use. Worse, inputs might lead to seemingly inconsistent results if consequences are not clearly tied to inputs – or truly random results if the system is not well thought out.
The most common way to answer these questions for the player is with a tutorial and intro cinematic or some combination of the two. Most of them are terrible and boring. The consequence of this is that “standard” tutorials are typically ignored and all of your worldbuilding in the intro cinematic is forgotten. This is actually okay. A good tutorial should be practically invisible to a player and enjoyable on subsequent playthroughs. Some games forgo recognizable tutorials entirely in favor of making a puzzle out of learning the mechanics: an equally acceptable practice as long as the controls are conveyed. Conversely, if a game does nothing more than throw a cinematic and an aggressively linear tutorial level at you, that’s a good indication that not enough thought was put into making the rest of the game fun – I’m looking at you, AAA studios.
Why does any of this matter? As I’ve mentioned, a difficult game is usually one that is wasting your time or resources; because there are games which are not difficult (in this sense), it doesn’t make sense to spend time and money on a game which doesn’t respect yours.
What makes a game challenging?
A challenging game usually contains a few common elements, as well as generally avoiding the things which make a game difficult. First, information will be presented in a clear and understandable way. This doesn’t always mean that every statistic in the game is laid out for you – though that can be a good sign if a wall of statistics doesn’t appear immediately and without context. Though that can work, it also runs a high risk of overloading the player and making them immediately zone out. Ideally, the statistics can be there when you want or if you look, but disappear if you don’t. In other games, it’s as simple as playing a recognizable cue whenever something is about to happen. For the most part, the game doesn’t even need to teach you this since it’s something we pick up automatically. The tricky part is making it consistent and useful.
Second, a challenging game usually reduces elements of luck and uses what chance there is to give the player a variety in experience. Rather than relying on luck to give you the best loot or to get you past that tough boss, the players’ skill should be the deciding factor in success. The perfect examples of this are well-designed roguelikes – giving you a new experience every time, but still theoretically beatable the first time you start up a game. Sidenote: Nethack lives in a middle ground here – on the one hand you could beat it on your first attempt, but at the same time there are plenty of opportunities for Yet Another Stupid Death. Or maybe I’m just nostalgic and it’s actually not a good game.
In many games, having some amount of luck (or, at least, unpredictability) is desirable to give the game replay value and excitement. A short puzzle game has almost no replayability since you’ll already know all the secrets after the first playthrough. Further, incorporating luck can infuse excitement into a game – as long as you don’t go too far and make the game outcome random.
Larger games can also provide challenge and replayability in the form of meaningful choice instead of introducing luck – choosing the right dialogue options to stay on the good side of a faction or not letting a specific NPC die are staples of the RPG genre. Though the combat gameplay usually has luck or randomization in it somewhere, this is separate from the game of dialogue. First person shooters have a harder time, and many forgo challenging gameplay for a focus on multiplayer (a few exceptions being Half Life 2, Halo, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein).
So far, these have been pretty straightforward concepts. And they are. Making them into game mechanics is another story. One failure I see very often in card games and video games alike is a snowball effect toward victory. There are a variety of ways to avoid this, but my personal favorite is to have winning cost your resources. Rather than giving the losing player a bonus, the game should incorporate a significant cost to advance. You might get a reward for accomplishing a goal that puts you closer to overall victory, but it will still slow you down. For me, at least, giving losing players a bonus or making progress to victory incur a penalty can feel unfair – why should you be punished for winning? The most enjoyable games, like Netrunner, still reward you for your progress while not creating a positive feedback loop.
This is one of the biggest factors for me when deciding if a game is worth my time. A good story is enjoyable, but if the mechanics behind that story aren’t challenging I would rather just watch a movie or Let’s Play. Quite frequently, AAA games will be difficult rather than challenging. If a game is difficult, it takes up time and makes it seem as if you’ve accomplished something – but you haven’t really developed much skill. It’s tempting to go this way because publishers want to sell games and developers want people to play (and beat) their games.
Introducing challenge means that some set of people won’t beat your game or won’t be able to experience all that the developers had planned. I think that’s important, though. I think it’s important for a game to be okay with the average player not seeing all that the game has to offer – it makes the things you experience all the more valuable, and it gives meaning to the player who decides that they want to challenge themselves with a game to see all they can.
(And because I have no original ideas, I found this article talking about this exact issue – they even use Dark Souls as an example!)