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[hmm]

How challenging should a game be?

Common wisdom says challenge should be enough to engage the player and push them, but not so much as to overwhelm and frustrate them. This is central to the concept of 'flow'. But then I have enjoyed both punishingly difficult games (Demon's Souls) and easy games (Flower) that fall outside of this range.

It seems to me that lots of people love games of the frustratingly difficult variety. But is there also room for games that almost entirely lack challenge? Can an easy game be a great game?

What do you think?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Personally, I always go for the challenge. While I won't turn down a story, I put almost every game I get on the hardest difficulty from the start, as I feel that's the entire point of a game. Some people obviously just want to complete the game, but I find the sense of achievement is what I'm after - and, as with all things in life, the harder something was to achieve, the better you feel when you finally do...

EDIT: I guess "hard but fair" is what I like to play, and also what I'm aiming to make.

[mirosurabu]

Well, what you should be focusing on is making satisfying interaction. And challenge should be secondary property. That is, you shouldn't necessarily know if your game is challenging or not in advance. You should let the level of challenge emerge from your design. So, in conclusion, it doesn't matter how challenging it is so as long the interaction is satisfying. (I'm mentioning interaction so that you don't falsely conclude that I think games can be non-interactive)

There is a little thing one might want to take care of. One might make some mistakes that are related to challenge. Sometimes, a game might end up being a little bit too difficult than what you wanted it to be. This is the only time I think one should tackle the challenge topic rationally.

[baconman]

There are plenty of games that are fun without being hard, but again, there is a certain merit to accomplishment in harder/more challenging games. But if your game's going to be decisively "not hard," it should have a decent coat of humor and variety of enjoyable experiences throughout it.

[s0]

a game should be challenging enough to make "mindless" playing impossible imo. there's no point in designing lots of intricate and polished game mechanics when the player never has to actually use or understand them.

so yeah, how much challenge a game needs isn't absolute. challenge should be a means to an and never an end in itself. i wanna be the guy is a great parody of what happens when someone makes a game hard for the sake of making it hard.

[baconman]

Except Kayin made a lot of the surprise dying points in it pretty funny, which is why so many of it's fangames completely pale in comparison to it.

[s0]

which is basically what i said...?

[mirosurabu]

Regarding "mindless" playing, I've noticed it's something majority of casual games suffer from. Though, to be honest, I still ponder if it's just me. An analogy: I know some people enjoy playing slide puzzles and some even consider them hard, but I solve them without even using my brain.

[s0]

I already implied my definition: A game is "mindless" when the player doesn't have to properly use or understand most of the mechanics to play. How hard it is for the player to understand the mechanics isn't important.

[mirosurabu]

I wasn't talking about understanding mechanics at all though.

I was talking about games where you can progress with zero understanding. Ones which you can finish with closed eyes, by clicking your mouse randomly. I mean, take Crayon Physics Deluxe for example. When it came out it was fun. Fun to me at least. It felt like original, unique, and all that innovation stuff, and I guess that got this subjective curiosity thing working in my mind which made me play the game in a fun way. But now? I can barely stand the game. And that's how I feel about almost any physics games since then.

Slide puzzles too. (I dont think rules are hard to understand) Puzzle games in general too.

In any case, main curiosity is: are these games allowing you to make progress by doing unfun repetitive tasks, or is it just me applying internalized solutions?

[SundownKid]

Is this even a valid question? Different people play games differently. Personally, though, I think that difficulty levels, at least in RPGs, are crock. I never put the game into Hard mode, because it's usually just "hard for the sake of hard" and doesn't really make the game challenging in a different way, rather than just boosting enemy hit points and defense. I think that adaptive difficulty, iNfamous-style, or selectable difficulty, TWEWY-style, might be a step in the right direction.

[mirosurabu]

I think they put the "hard mode" just because some people don't want to imagine they are playing on "normal". 

[s0]

Difficulty levels are fucking dumb in 80% of the games that have them.

[DavidCaruso]

Difficulty levels are fucking dumb in 80% of the games that have them.

Why? Unless you mean unlockable difficulty levels, which yeah is the stupidest thing ever. Multiple selectable difficulty levels are part of the whole "accessibility" thing but it's not exactly a modern innovation (even Doom had them), and it's easily a much, much better alternative than allowing the player to grind or rubberbanding (since it still keeps the game balanced, ideally). I can see an argument that it forces the player to make decisions that the designers should have already made beforehand for him but in most cases I think the benefits outweigh the costs.

Also SundownKid, if you want a balanced and challenging game in general I don't think RPGs are the place to look at all.

[hmm]

Well, what you should be focusing on is making satisfying interaction.

This is what I was considering when I first posted on the topic. Perhaps its all about providing satisfying feedback to the player's actions? The rarity of a particular type of feedback then defines its value to the player.

If this is the case, challenge is one way of making certain feedback more rare and hence more valuable to the player, providing a more satisfying experience. But challenge may not be the only way?

On the subject of difficulty modes: it is simply the best way to cater for a range of player abilities. I don't like all this adaptive difficulty stuff.

[s0]

@DavidCaruso: Difficulty levels suck in a lot of old games too because they're often lazily designed. "Derp let's give enemies more health and more damage that'll make the game challenging." There are a lot of games where "easy mode" is mindless and unfun and "hard mode" is frustrating and imbalanced. In the worst case scenario, playing on "hard" doesn't even make make the game harder per se, just more tedious. Ex.: Bioshock.

[gimymblert]

a game should be challenging enough to make "mindless" playing impossible imo. there's no point in designing lots of intricate and polished game mechanics when the player never has to actually use or understand them.

so yeah, how much challenge a game needs isn't absolute. challenge should be a means to an and never an end in itself. i wanna be the guy is a great parody of what happens when someone makes a game hard for the sake of making it hard.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014889/Evoking-Emotions-and-Achieving-Success

[s0]

I don't have the time to watch 42 minutes of that right now. Could you sum up the main points in a couple sentences?

[s0]

I know people like different things, but if I took that into account I might as well not take part in this discussion at all. I don't pretend to speak for everyone and I don't pretend to know what's "right" I'm only speaking from my point of view and my experience.

-- Imbalanced mode. This should not be taken seriously. You're expected to fail because it's imbalanced. Winning means more when you're expected to fail and the odds are stacked against you. You need good knowledge of the game before you can circumvent imbalance, and this is what it tests.

I didn't mean imbalance in the sense of the odds being stacked against you. Difficulty has to be carefully designed and balanced to be rewarding. If it isn't, it's just frustrating.

[baconman]

Non-linear level design can create these sorts of things for you - you can have an easy road and a hard road, and just stuff the hard road with more rewards for crunching through it, and litter the easier road with obstacles that basically "train" the player to handle the harder one, once they become bored of the easy one. SMB3 implemented this in pretty much every way you can imagine, which is probably another reason it's such an all-time classic.