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[s0]

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

[gimymblert]

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?

The point are useless, it's the demonstration that is insightful because they made a successful product with them which is amnesia the dark descent (basically the point align with notgame motto, no weapon, no competition, no death). It's about what they have replace with what.

[s0]

Amnesia DOES have challenge though. It didn't feel like a "notgame" at all to me.

[gimymblert]

They defend their notgame position pretty well (and they talk on notgame forums too), maybe it's good enough so its not downright silly so we can see "challenge". I have yet to play the game I can't say. However I have ban challenge from my design vocabulary, I replace it with "stimulating" and "tension".

[s0]

I watched a bit of the video now.

Amnesia has puzzles. It also has death (i.e. failure), contrary to what the dev says. The game alters the content of the level a bit when you die so you can never quite prepare yourself for the scares, which is pretty clever. But to say that the game has no death because it doesn't repeat exactly the same content is a bit weird. Do roguelikes have "no death" as well? I'm also not sure what's supposed to be so "notgamey" about the lack of weapons/aggressive actions for the player character.

I know the Frictional guys post on the Notgames forum (I saw a post by them the one time I went there), but Amnesia and Penumbra are miles removed from the kind of stuff Tale of Tales makes.

[gimymblert]

Thanks for the precision

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

People do like different things, but I increasingly think the term 'game' might actually be inadequate by itself to describe everything ranging from casual games where anyone nominally sentient can win, to cinematic games where the point is the story, to hard-as-nails games where the point is the challenge. I mean, we have documentaries, films, short films etc to differentiate within 'cinema', and yet we still call all of these games. Not to go off-topic, but I feel like a 'game' implies a challenge, a puzzle, and the like, and the tougher is it, the better the game...

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."

Also, this. Goldeneye-style and adding more objectives (ok, yes, as well as the other stuff) works a lot nicer, I think.

[EdgeOfProphecy]

Well, that's a complex question.

Games are, ultimately, a collaborative, interactive experience you (the designer) and the player generate through the act of play.  A game has to have a player, otherwise it's not a game, it's a simulation.

What you attempt to do is craft an experience for the player.  I tend to bend a lot of my design efforts around this experience crafting mentality.  The challenge of the game is simply a part of that experience, and before you start dialing challenge up or down (or how you dial that challenge), you need to decide what sort of experience you want the player to have, and what opportunities for play the player has.

Take for example the game Ico.  Ico is not a very challenging game.  It has some puzzles, it has some combat, but it is not very hard.  You can't die, you can only be knocked down.  You have a stick that you beat the shit out of shadowy monsters with.  It's literally one button you mash over and over.  There are no combos, no dodging, no blocking, no stamina, nothing.  A button to attack, and being knocked down.

You can lose, the chick you're protecting, Yorda, can be abducted by the shadow creatures, but combat is not particularly complex or challenging.

However, Ico rates super, super high on my "Best games of all times" list.  Why?  If it's not challenging, why play it?

Because the point of Ico is not to be challenging, it is to craft a specific experience for the player.  It is to draw the player into the story of two people trying to escape this hostile, desolate, very ethereal looking castle.  Further, it's a story that unfolds largely through action rather than words.

The combat exists to enforce the experience.  It is not challenging, but it is well designed to feel desperate and to make the main character feel pretty darn weak.  You certainly feel like a kid with a stick rather than a badass warrior or somesuch (as compared to Wander from Shadow of the Colossus, for instance).  Its there to drive home to desperation of the situation and the alien nature of the hostile castle you're stuck in.

Thus challenge is a tool for crafting your experience, and should be used as such.  If your goal is "I want to make a super duper hard platformer that requires old school pixel perfect jumps" then challenge is a core element of your gameplay experience.  If your goal is, "I want to scare the ever living shit out of the player.", then challenge might be a part of that, or it might not.

Challenge alone will not make the player enthralled or drive them away.  The experience as a whole, and its power to engage the player, is what's going to make them interested in your game.

That being said, there are ways to do challenge well and to do it poorly.  "Less challenge" is not "better" or "more approachable" or "more casual".  This is a very, very dangerous misconception that plagues the industry.  Poorly designed challenge is typically worse for all player archetypes, casual, hardcore, etc.

What makes a challenge good or bad is its capability to feed a person's desire for competency.  Competency refers to the psychological need to feel like you are good at something.  If you don't feel competent, or that you are improving, you feel bad.

A game that causes arbitrary failure is not a game that is fun.  It is a symptom of poorly designed challenge.  It's ok for a player to fail, but it needs to be clear WHY they failed and how they can improve themselves to avoid failure in the future.  This is transparency of the game mechanics and the ability for the player to learn.  Without these, the player will feel like they have no control over the game (lacking a sense of agency, another psychological need), or they will just feel like they suck and can't do the task demanded of them.

This is why people who are like, "Oh I have this totes sweet idea for an MMO class that's super luck based.  They're kind of weak most of the time but every now and then they'll just quadraslash crit windfury proc this guy in the face for 10000000000 damage and instagib him.  Pretty sweet, right!?" are barking up the wrong tree.

No, that's not sweet.  You're taking control out of the player's hand (both attacker and defender) in a major way.  Worse, there's no lesson to be learned, no gameplay mechanic to be mastered, you're just at the whim of an angry and vengeful random number generator.  Players pretty universally hate that.

[LiquidAsh]

What you attempt to do is craft an experience for the player.

EdgeOfProphecy nailed it with this line.  The first question to address is what experience are you trying to create for the player.  The type(s), variety, and amount of challenge will depend entirely on the kind of experience you are engineering for your players.

Aside: As much as I feel driven by challenges in games and in life, I think that progressing through and overcoming challenges is more enjoyable than being challenged.  From this perspective, it's more important to help the player progress through your games challenges, than simply make the entire game more or less difficult.

[DavidCaruso]

Whenever people talk about things like Ico or some other game's "emotional experience" I just mentally replace it with "I really enjoyed this game's aesthetics despite the actual game part being boring," since most of the time that's what the people who use the term essentially mean anyway. Which is a perfectly valid reason to enjoy a game! It's just that I couldn't imagine myself playing most games where most of the enjoyment lies on an aesthetic level (graphics, story, music, etc.) more than once, and likewise if you're designing a game like this you always have the risk of outstaying your welcome and running out of new cool shit to show the player. I think challenge is one of the best ways a game can engage the player, since fair and difficult obstacles to overcome forces the player to pay close attention and "get in the game" (aka: "immersion"), and many of my favorite games are designed to be both challenging and fair while also having a lot of cool shit to show the player on a graphical/aural level. (Though there are 1 or 2 exceptions, but they're not really near the top of the list anyway, and in general I can't think of many great games at all which elect to put narrative or visuals over mechanics.)

As much as I feel driven by challenges in games and in life, I think that progressing through and overcoming challenges is more enjoyable than being challenged. From this perspective, it's more important to help the player progress through your games challenges, than simply make the entire game more or less difficult.

The general rule I've found is that the greater the challenge, the more exhilarating it feels when you overcome it. Think of climbing Mt. Everest vs. climbing the hill in your backyard, etc. Of course there are some preconditions to this, e.g. the challenge has to be fair (the game has to make it feel like it's your fault that you lost). The great thing about challenging games is that there is a sense of progression (if the game is well designed at least, e.g. Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV are excluded from this category), every single try you can feel yourself getting better or getting farther than you did the last time. If you only find yourself having any fun once you finish a challenge in a game instead of the entire time you're trying to get through that challenge then that's a possible sign that it's a badly designed game (though of course it'll always be the most exhilarating the first time you get past a difficult section you couldn't before).

[mirosurabu]

Am I the only one to think that challenge in single-player games is inferior to challenge in PvP games? I mean, I really do love challenge, but I've never found a single-player game to be satisfying in this department. It always felt like a watered-down challenge for noobs, to be honest. (grand strategies aside, demon's souls is not as challenging as people say)

As such, I rarely see a lot of difference between "art games" and supposedly challenging games. The first ones let you progress at a fixed pace and the second ones have you progress at a variable pace. That's all there is to it. I still don't enjoy many of "art games" though, but for a very different reason.

Another thing that always bothered me is that a lot of people seem to be obsessed with "level of challenge" and never really seem to care about "quality of challenge" as if it doesn't matter if they are dealing with timing precision, aiming precision, memory, association, spatial coordination, lateral thinking, classical conditioning or logic.

People want "another platform but with more challenging" or "new mechanics" and all but a game with a "new type of challenge".

[DavidCaruso]

Am I the only one to think that challenge in single-player games is inferior to challenge in PvP games? I mean, I really do love challenge, but I've never found a single-player game to be satisfying in this department. It always felt like a watered-down challenge for noobs, to be honest. (grand strategies aside, demon's souls is not as challenging as people say)

Have you 1CCed Dodonpachi? Armed Police Batrider? Denjin Makai II? Metal Slug 2? Beaten Deus Ex on Realistic without quicksaving and loading every 5 seconds? Ninja Gaiden Black and Vanquish on hardest difficulties? I still have yet to accomplish a lot of stuff (especially with arcade games).

EDIT: Though I can definitely agree that the best competitive games have the potential to be much more challenging than the best single-player games, sure.

As such, I rarely see a lot of difference between "art games" and supposedly challenging games.

There's a huge difference, the supposedly challenging games are 1000x better videogames. :D

Another thing that always bothered me is that a lot of people seem to be obsessed with "level of challenge" and never really seem to care about "quality of challenge" as if it doesn't matter if they are dealing with timing precision, aiming precision, memory, association, spatial coordination, lateral thinking, classical conditioning or logic.

Yeah this is the type of thinking which brought us Super Meat Boy. It's so supra dupra hard because you have to repeat these 10 second levels like 40 times to beat them! Except the levels are 10 seconds long, and because they are 10 seconds long they're incredibly basic by necessity, and because of the basic level design combined with short length there's only one or two ways at most to tackle each scenario, and because of infinite lives the level designers were allowed to make any scenario as badly designed as they wanted to with the excuse of "so hard," and because of infinite lives combined with short level lengths the game pretty much loses all tension, and because of the lack of all tension it just becomes retarded especially with later levels boiling down to "will you get lucky on the 40th time."

[s0]

I haven't played Super Meat Boy so I'll reserve judgement on that, but what you're describing is a problem I've noticed with a lot of "retro" games. Their creators try to imitate the difficulty of classic games (LOLZ N1NT3ND0 HRAD!!!1) but don't get WHY the games they're ripping off were difficult in the first place.

Difficulty for its own sake is dum. It's boring and shallow. Good challenging games aren't good because they're hard but because they give the player interesting skills to master. Mastering the scoring system in a Cave shooter or the combat and strategy in Demon's Souls is fun because these mechanics are inherently interesting and the difficulty of these games is just a way to make the player use them and explore their nuances. Peace out yo.

(I just realized I'm basically repeating my post from earlier in this thread but w/e)

[DavidCaruso]

I haven't played Super Meat Boy so I'll reserve judgement on that, but what you're describing is a problem I've noticed with a lot of "retro" games. Their creators try to imitate the difficulty of classic games (LOLZ N1NT3ND0 HRAD!!!1) but don't get WHY the games they're ripping off were difficult in the first place.

Difficulty for its own sake is dum. It's boring and shallow. Good challenging games aren't good because they're hard but because they give the player interesting skills to master. Mastering the scoring system in a Cave shooter or the combat and strategy in Demon's Souls is fun because these mechanics are inherently interesting and the difficulty of these games is just a way to make the player use them and explore their nuances. Peace out yo.

Yeah, I feel like the main thing that modern "retro" game devs get wrong is that they confuse the focus that old games had for simplicity. I mean, if you view a video of something like Captain Commando on Youtube then it might look like a shallow and simplistic game, but once you actually sit down and try to clear it (The Proper Way) you'll need to learn how to master every single move, weapon, and option available to you, you'll need to learn how enemy behavior works and manipulate it to your advantage, you'll need to learn how each of the stages are structured and develop strategies for them, and moreover you'll need to be able to play through the levels virtually flawlessly in a tense environment where one major mistake can mean your shit gets wrecked and you'll have to start over. Despite being in 2D stuff like that is easily on par with most modern action games. Unfortunately I don't feel like many indie devs really get this at all, so they try and make "simple" "nostalgic" "throwbacks," as if the only reason those old games are so enjoyable was because people were kids when they played them or because the games were so much "simpler."

[mirosurabu]

Right, so single-player games can indeed be challenging. A concentration/memory game can be quite challenging if you put billion cards on deck, right? But then, why I do feel like art games feel the same challenge-wise to single-player games? I think it's because majority of these games play easy on normal. There are exceptions of course, which I didn't take into account. But point is, they play easy because I've been through that sort of challenge before, so it's same to me. But more important than that is the fact that single-player games are overemphasizing memory skills. There is nothing you cannot beat if you simply memorize the game. And that's common for all single-player games, including bullet hell shooters and beat em ups (some procedurally generated games try to address this, but let's leave that aside for now).

Bullet hell shooters have fun moments where you get rewarded for successfully relying on your intuition. That's the only thing that I find fun about them. Everything else is just memory and reflexes and I don't think it's particularly good sort of challenge. You can make them more difficult by requiring faster reactions or making complicated patterns, but man, that's a cheap trick.

Beat em ups. Point? Memorize. Dissect enemy patterns. Find weaknesses. Build simple strategies so you don't killed by other enemies. Win. Can be fun? Sometimes. Challenging? Not quite, unless you use cheap tricks. Is it more thoughtful than VVVVVV? Probably. More fun? Not necessarily.

[J-Snake]

Yes, overuse of memorization-requirements is my main concern with the old retro-games. But adapting to clean patterns and mastering them, which can also be thrown randomly at you, that is clean challenge, that is satisfying, it's a man's nature.

That is also why I dislike common shmups, in addition they also put a ton of effects-/ and features-overhead which adds to an unclean quantity-experience.

[King Hadas]

Yeah, I feel like the main thing that modern "retro" game devs get wrong is that they confuse the focus that old games had for simplicity. I mean, if you view a video of something like Captain Commando on Youtube then it might look like a shallow and simplistic game, but once you actually sit down and try to clear it (The Proper Way) you'll need to learn how to master every single move, weapon, and option available to you, you'll need to learn how enemy behavior works and manipulate it to your advantage, you'll need to learn how each of the stages are structured and develop strategies for them, and moreover you'll need to be able to play through the levels virtually flawlessly in a tense environment where one major mistake can mean your shit gets wrecked and you'll have to start over. Despite being in 2D stuff like that is easily on par with most modern action games. Unfortunately I don't feel like many indie devs really get this at all, so they try and make "simple" "nostalgic" "throwbacks," as if the only reason those old games are so enjoyable was because people were kids when they played them or because the games were so much "simpler."

To me all this easily applies to Super Meat Boy, except for getting your shit wrecked since the penalties in Super Meat Boy are nearly none existent but that doesn't mean the game lacks tension.

[1982]

Yes, overuse of memorization-requirements is my main concern with the old retro-games.

Yes need to memorize is what ticks me off in some old games. I'm very bad at remembering things, call it early alzheimer or whatever. However game can still be great challenge without requiring any memorizing of things or patterns. For example N+ is good of being very challenging at times, but the challenge is always easy to approach because of "rooms" that are in single screen, and hold different challenge each.

[s0]

To me all this easily applies to Super Meat Boy, except for getting your shit wrecked since the penalties in Super Meat Boy are nearly none existent but that doesn't mean the game lacks tension.

Again, I haven't played Super Meat Boy, but I think VVVVVV, which also uses tons of checkpoints and next to no penalty for dying, lacks tension. The game is still decent fun, but a lot of the challenges in it devolve into mindlessly doing the same thing 500 times in a row until you get that one button press exactly right. That's not tension, it's grinding. It's also a lot more "frustrating" to me than having to replay the entire level after I die.

Also, a lot of the fun (and challenge) in old hard games comes from having to do things in sequence. By breaking the levels up into lots of tiny sections, you're dumbing down your level design.

BTW: I don't understand the hate for memorization here. Challenging games test skills, why is memorization inherently a "bad" skill for games to test?

[1982]

BTW: I don't understand the hate for memorization here. Challenging games test skills, why is memorization inherently a "bad" skill for games to test?

Because it tests too much brain capabilities. I can't survive.