Videogames offer a wide, wide selection of play styles for players to enjoy. From adventure games, like Legend of Zelda to simulations games like, well the Sims, games have evolved so much from their arcade cabinet predecessors and the challenge that these modern titles offer to the average player range from impossibly hard to baby-like simplicity.
Games have changed so much over the years appealing to different gamer demographics with their own preferred genre and play style. Some prefer to win rather than to be challenged and others believe the only way to truly win at a game is to be challenged.
Many people have a different idea of what makes a good game and it seems like at the heart of it all that idea is based around how much or how little a game pushes the player. How much does the game reward the player vs punishing the player. How much does the game allow you have certain freedoms vs how much does the game limit you forcing you to use the tools available to you. But, does a game need to be challenging in order for it to be fun? That’s what this blog post is about this week, so let’s dive into this question shall we?
Videogames, even back in their infancy, were designed with a particular goal in mind. Whether it’s something as grandiose as saving a princess from danger or something as simple as guiding a yellow ball to eat pellets and dodge ghosts. There’s always been a challenge or goal that is designed by the game developers meant for the player to accomplish or overcome and depending on the world, style, and playability of the game that goal is always going to be different and have a certain set of options available to the player to see that goal through.
I believe the amount of ease the player has at accomplishing these in-game objectives, or in other words, the amount of challenge that is presented to the player to progress through the game is a big factor in determining whether a game is “fun” or not.
Games are seen as really fun and enjoyable because they activate the dopamine center of the brain a lot when the player overcomes an obstacle and progresses further in their quest. Dopamine is basically the reward system of the brain. When you beat a boss or unlock a special weapon in a game that was previously inaccessible you feel this excitement and joy and this feeling prompts you to continue because you feel good right? And you want to chase this feeling. Games give you this feeling of accomplishment when you overcome obstacles that you might never be able to accomplish in the real world, so honing in on this element through the concept of difficulty in game design is a key factor in making a well built game.
However, this can be a bit of a tricky challenge for the developers themselves. You don’t want to make the game too easy and reward the player for just sitting there, but at the same time you don’t want to make the game impossibly hard and frustrating that the player a) can never overcome the challenge to receive the reward or b) go through all the needless trouble to the point where the reward is no longer worth the hassle. Let’s look at some examples in games where difficulty in game design, or lack thereof can really hurt a game.
Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival
Let’s look at Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival to start off. This was a spin off game from the Animal Crossing series that was basically a bootleg version of Mario Party using Animal Crossing themed amiibos. While the Animal Crossing series aren’t considered “hard” games in the traditional sense, this Mario Party ripoff was very far from being challenging in any way. What you would do is set up your amiibos, get into a game, press a button to roll a dice to see how much you would move on the virtual game board and ...that’s pretty much it.
There’s no mini-games, there’s no consequences that come from your moves, there’s no other input from the player besides just rolling the dice. The game basically plays itself and, as you can imagine, wasn’t very fun to play, like at all. The player wouldn’t get a rush of dopamine while playing this game because they have essentially done nothing to earn any rewards. The game just hands them things and that’s it.
Without any real challenge or consequence to a player’s action, the game becomes both boring and frustrating because while the player is busy throwing time and money away into this one game they could be playing a game that is actually fun and rewarding. Instead, they are just throwing themselves into senseless boredom. And I don;t know about you, but I play games to escape from boredom, not run to it.
Getting Over It
Let’s look at the other side of the spectrum of this idea of difficulty with the game Getting Over It. Now this is a game that excels at frustrating players for it’s insane spike in difficulty and an unbalanced reward/consequence ratio in level design. Basically, in this game you play as a man in a pot who hoists himself up with a hammer across uneven and bizarre terrain. The goal is to reach the top of this poorly constructed mountain, but if you mess up you’ll likely find yourself falling down losing a bunch of progress and even sometimes starting right back where you started.
If you watch gameplay of this, you’ll see why many people despise this game. Getting Over it, boasts some lousy controls and even a lousier sense of accomplishment because when you finally get past that one part you’ve been trying to get through for hours and find some relief you’ll typically find yourself losing all that progress all over it again very soon afterwards. While the intent of this game is to teach about mass failure in the game design, that message is not exactly to those who are left broken after spending so much time in a game they can’t win at.
After a while your brain determines that this game is too difficult to the point where it’s no longer enjoyable or worth playing anymore and no matter how hard you may want to push through eventually you’ll throw your hands up in the air and say “I’m done.”
We’ve looked at the extremes of how improper difficulty can kill a game’s appeal, but how do you know when games have hit that sweet spot? How do we know that a game is just challenging enough to spur you on without completely frustrating the hell out of you? Well the thing is, the answer to that question is completely up to the player themselves.
There’s no formula for this kind of thing because all games are unique and have different ideas, passions, and playstyles poured into the creation of the game. If there was a defined way to achieve this difficulty bliss in games, every game would play the same and that’s certainly no fun. Difficulty in games is subjective and many players have a different idea of what they consider too hard or too easy when it comes to playing games.
Dark Souls is a great example of this. The Souls series and games like it are like two sides to a coin. On the one side, you have players who die constantly in these games by overpowered enemies or even mechanical bugs or glitches. And yet, they keep playing because they’re motivated by this spike of difficulty where they want to eventually overcome these seemingly impossible challenges ahead of them.
Every time they fight a boss they understand how the game works a little bit better and while they might have to die 100+ times to do it, they know they can eventually beat this great enemy and progress to the next stage. Many people get this huge boost of excitement (dopamine) when they eventually do beat that one boss because after all they’re failures they were able to figure this intimidating game out and beat it at it’s own game.
On the other side, however, a game like Dark Souls can be way too intimidating for many people and they see the challenge as far too great to even attempt it, so they play a game that’s more their speed, such as Animal Crossing. But, that’s ok because while Animal Crossing is definitely lighter in comparison to a goliath like Dark Souls, it presents it’s own set of challenges, such as figuring out how to catch a rare fish or determining the most efficient way to gather resources to rapidly build your animal-like society.
When players discover these things in a game like Animal Crossing they’re prompted to keep going to see how far they can go. Are these in-game goals necessarily “hard”? Not really. Anybody can pick up a game like Animal Crossing and jump it, but despite the lack of insane difficulty it’s still a very fun and enjoyable game because it offers creative freedom and challenges people in a different way. And yet, this game can be seen as far too easy for Dark Souls fans and doesn’t offer enough difficulty for them to be worth playing. Two sides of the same coin.
Both of these games empower motivation in players in drastically different ways, despite the large difficulty gap between the two. So, to answer the question, I don’t think games necessarily need to be “hard” or super challenging to be fun. Like I mentioned before, it’s all up the player to determine that.
Some players want to be challenged and push themselves to achieve that hard to break highscore. Others, just want to be pulled into another world whether that’s through empowering storytelling or freedom of creativity. Challenge is definitely a part of making great games, but there’s so many other factors that go into games that draw us in and affect how we have fun playing them. However, I’ll leave those for another time for now.
What’s a game that you enjoy and why? Leave a comment down below and whether you're into the challenging stuff or are more of a casual gamer as long as you're having fun with it that’s the most important part! Until next time.
Dean Willms
Gamer. Designer. Friend.
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