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[gimymblert]

I consider that challenge (Ludus agon) based game design a solved problem, we pretty much know everything about it, from risk reward to feedback loop.

But there is more than challenge in game, and the flow theory is not all about challenge, a lot of pleasuring activities have very low challenge and skill input and yet produce flow.

My opinion is that challenge is reductive we should talk about stimulation instead of difficulties. Challenge is a kind of stimulation, a way to bring tension. Movie, sex or music does not provide much challenge as they immerse us totally into a zen state.

Most of the time a lot of art games are just devoid of challenge and fail to grab our attention with the hypnotic quality that challenge or music put us into. There is clearly something missing, most are just "poor" version of challenge based structure.

How to move beyond challenge bring pure stimulation to the mass? How to achieve pure mimicry without resorting on basic risk reward schedule? Maybe we could learn something and bring it back to classic game to make them even better and stronger?

Maybe we could look at how current game do that well, indie or mainstream, "art" or "classic", and trying to extract the their subtle essence, the current state of the art in order to find that ultimate video games graal.

Game like Knytt, for exemple seems to capture this elusive design, but it is not something we can actually pinpoint beyond "atmosphere". Maybe if crack the code we could create more diverse experience instead of cloning what currently work?

Is that make sense? What do you think, feel about this subject?

[Ego_Shiner]

well, for one thing, despite knytt lacking challenge it still did new and interesting things. it made you explore and gave you new abilities which aren't in every other game ever to do it, like the umbrella, the wallclimbing, and the hologram thingy. most art games are either barebones platforming or the cool and exciting metroidvania abilities you get are "jump higher", "shoot better" and "double jump"

[gimymblert]

You are saying Knytt work because it rely on discovery to replace challenge as a stimulation?

Interesting!

What are the other stimulation you can think of used in game?

[gimymblert]

OH that was fast, case solved...

Challenge is a type of stimulation and stimulation work by tension and release. If you apply the tension and release format to challenge you have difficulty (tension)- success (release).

Let's look at different type of stimulation and tension/release:

Choice (risk/reward)
Information (mystery/discovery)
exploration (obstruction/opening)
people (hostility/sympaythy)
social (rejection/acceptance)
knowledge (obscurity/understanding)
manipulation (complication/facility)
composition (negative space/positive space)
Progression (push/pull)

Some of them can be seen as a subset of other or part of a same class, etc...

It seems that game always had used many many kind of stimulation beyond challenge to keep player playing. The novelty here is the associate tension and release to formulate their appeal a step further.

Now instead of focusing on where is the challenge we may just ask ourselves what kind of stimulation, tension and release I want the experience to convey. Instead of analyzing and seek only challenge in game we seek for all kind of stimulation. I think game would be richer and better design that way.

For exemple the path can be seen as using mystery/discovery to move his experience, from that point of view we can analyze how it succeed or failed and how to improve toward a better experience.

We can take Challenge game and add new layer of stimulation to provide a better gameplay texture.

Can you think of new stimulation with tension and release?

[s0]

Can you think of new stimulation with tension and release?

How about fear? "Survival horror" games have been using that since the 90s.

[Zecks]

Yes, I think games can go "beyond" challenge, but I think you're going on about it the wrong way.

Like you said yourself, we can't really pinpoint it, and I don't think we can just "crack the code" either. To me it's something on a far higher level that one can't just suddenly "discover" and then create.
i.e. art

[gimymblert]

@Sinclair
Yeah I forgot that one, but I propose this format instead: Horror(fear/relief)

@Zecks
It's an okay opinion, but I should have say a better way to think game instead of reducing everything to challenge (without ruling it out). The idea is to one level higher in design thinking, one more tool, I think the concept of stimulation is a better tool and cover pretty much everything we already know while expending their application.

For exemple: usually "art game" are usually hard to critic from a pure challenge perspective and we often feel that the also fail at their own standard. With stimulation paradigm we can better analyse their mechanics and find why their are shallow while proposing direction and solution to enhance them. We can look at the premise and think about where is the main aesthetic stimulation and how it work, and the game succeed or fail at building upon that.

[s0]

Actually, I think there are very few notable games that rely exclusively on challenge (or depth/complexity of mechanics) for stimulation.

Because this thread is kind of an offspring of the Icycalm thread let's take a look at bullet hell shooters: Sure, the main draw of the best-known exponents of the genre (Cave games, Touhou) is the hardcore challenge and the depth of the scoring system, but there's another important reason why people like them: They're pretty to look at. The intricate bullet patterns in a game like Perfect Cherry Blossom do not only require high levels of skill to navigate through, they're also aesthetically pleasing. In fact they're a direct computational visualization of the challenge: The harder the game gets, the more beautiful it looks. Note that danmakus were initially invented to make 2D games look "flashier" so they could compete with modern 3D hardware in arcades, so it's even part of the "authorial intent".

Even Atari VCS games relied on something other than pure mechanics to pull players in: The novelty of the technology. Simply the idea that you had little figures you could move around on your TV screen seemed futuristic back then.

[iffi]

Because this thread is kind of an offspring of the Icycalm thread let's take a look at bullet hell shooters: Sure, the main draw of the best-known exponents of the genre (Cave games, Touhou) is the hardcore challenge and the depth of the scoring system, but there's another important reason why people like them: They're pretty to look at. The intricate bullet patterns in a game like Perfect Cherry Blossom do not only require high levels of skill to navigate through, they're also aesthetically pleasing. In fact they're a direct computational visualization of the challenge: The harder the game gets, the more beautiful it looks. Note that danmakus were initially invented to make 2D games look "flashier" so they could compete with modern 3D hardware in arcades, so it's even part of the "authorial intent".

Pretty much what I had in mind as I was clicking on this topic, except written a lot better.

My impression is that recent mainstream games tend to focus less on bringing pure challenge (think of all the hand-holding that goes on in games such as Modern Warfare 2), and instead stimulate the player with flashy graphics, cinematic action, and the like.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

just read reviews of modern games and read reviews of old games. i mean, read how games were reviewed in the old days and how they're reviewed now.

in the old days, how challenging a game was and how long it'll take you to master it were considered virtues. the reviews usually focused on how hard or easy the game was. even gamepro (which was the worst of the oldschool game magazines) had 'challenge' as one of its 'factors' when rating a game. so did nintendo power, they rated games on graphics, sound, "fun factor", controls, and challenge. those were what reviews were concerned with back then: controls, challenge, and fun made up most of what games were rated by. the more challenging a game was, the *higher* it was rated in that category. the score system game magazines used were literally designed to reward hard games with higher scores.

today, difficulty is rarely mentioned at all in reviews, and when it is, it's usually in the form of 'the game can be difficult at times, which is frustrating, but...' as if it's a negative thing for a game to be too hard. most sites don't rate games by categories anymore, and those that do almost never have a 'challenge' or 'controls' category, instead only having the "fun factor" category, which today is called "gameplay".

so it's clear that games journalism, at least, has moved beyond challenge (for the good or for the bad).

[s0]

Mainstream games have shifted their focus from interaction with content  to content as an end in itself.

[Ego_Shiner]

the old sonic games also managed something like this, with challenging platforming rewarding you with "speed" rather than just the satisfaction of pulling shit off. i dont really know what this would qualify as, other than some really interesting payoff method.

[gimymblert]

There is a lot of great observation here! An that approach is hardly new and reflect well the current state of mainstream game (at least).

I was hoping a more design methodology angle (how instead of why or what), but I guess that's all I get for not expressing myself correctly.

I mean Whenever we think about a great experience in game we try to come out with challenge and we can currently express how it work in great detail. Contrasting on different approach where we are much looser on structure and end up more difficult to balance (hence the tension/release format I propose to discuss).

[it_is_coming]

So if I understand what you're saying, words like "atmospheric" aren't really valid gameplay  characteristics, and all gameplay traits are derived from basic tension/release elements. That's a pretty interesting idea. Take Resident Evil 4, a game praised for it's atmosphere. Its gameplay consists largely of tension/release moments. You walk around, find some infected villagers, kill them, walk around some more. Presidents' daughter gets captured, you save her, etc. You could say that the entire game is made of tension/release "units" that interlock in a mesh, and all these "units" are what create what we call "atmosphere". Am I understanding you correctly?

[gimymblert]

Basically, but I'm seeking something more practical for design planning instead of nailing "atmosphere" and generalize "tension/release" over "challenge" as a design guide.

[gimymblert]

The problem with challenge oriented design is that it's hard to think of interaction like "role play" without losing the improvisational part which is essential. You do not role play under challenge, you are doing calculation.

You can think of interaction as two principal thing IMO
Participation (extreme case rythm game)
Choice (extreme case: CYOA or toys)

But the only solid design framework we have is challenge. Therefore challenge game have the best design. But people still feel something is missing, something that is HIT or MISS in game.

I don't think challenge is that necessary, a lot of everyday and pleasurable interactions are not challenging at all. Sharing for example does not involve challenge. We need to capture that. We need a framework.

I think challenge is only the tip, an instance, of something bigger we need to master (here i think it is stimulation with the tension/release format). Doesn't challenge used to provide tension?

What do you think about that perspective?

[gimymblert]

Your point are interesting

But at the same time you stretch the word challenge so much to cover so much experience that it became as cloudy as the term we want to avoid.

The greatness of challenge as we used it in game is how strongly it allow logical deduction of structure. Challenge imply obstacle, obstacle imply goal, obstacle imply tools, tools imply action, action imply choice, choice imply risk, goal imply reward. It's easy to make a game under this assumption because you can see the interactivity unfolding from one element to each other, it's as easy as filling the blank of some template.

But challenge is concern with DOING, I think what you called freeform gameplay need BEING (role play, which frame "doing" neatly). Without a framework which tie structure from BEING solidly, we are left with a weaker framework and fall back onto challenge as a mean for structure.

[mirosurabu]

A couple of micro-level ones:

Pedantry (messy/tidy) <- Lego games, Achievement Unlocked
Facebook (shame/pride) <- Facebook games
Hatred (arrogant/defeated) <- Phoenix Wright, novels and films too of course
Negative curiosity (calm/chaotic or friendly/violent) <- GTA
Positive curiosity (you can do cool things/you do a cool thing) <- Parser games, such as very first Leisure Suit Larry of beloved Don't Shit Your Pants game and simulation games like The Sims

This one too
Hentai (aroused/ejaculation) <- Visual novels

[JoGribbs]

Calm/chaotic is interesting because once things become chaotic, don't you then want them to become calm again? You walk around, it's boring, you blow up a police car, you then run from the cops, they stop chasing you, it's boring...

[gimymblert]

Lol, miro

I have try to make some game using that as a guideline and it does not work. It's a great tool to plan moment to moment texture but not structure a game from scratch, it does not replace Challenge/obstacle/goal, it only complete it.

I'm following Orel insight instead. Stake/being(role)/purpose seems to work better for now. It seem that the real deal is push/pull. Goal is a pull. Stake is a push. As long as you can resolve the stake things are set in movement.

But the main point is still not solve, stake still provide challenge, it's less about goal and more about open ended resolution.

Damn, having a true framework not based on challenge is my last horizon in game design  I want to know!