Difficulty has come back into fashion for video games. Many games now specifically go out of their way to cultivate a reputation as especially difficult, whereas not too long ago it was common for designers to regard any failure of the player as a failure of the game’s design. While I’m glad that we’re no longer assuming difficulty is bad or undesirable, I’m not really in favor of considering it inherently good or desirable either – and, in fact, I’m not entirely comfortable with using the word ‘difficult’ or ‘challenging’ as a descriptor, except in the most abstract approach to a game.
There’s a lot of different things that difficult could mean when describing a game, and a great number of them have little to nothing to do with each other. Most obviously, there’s a huge difference between games that challenge your reflexes, games that challenge your strategic ability, games that challenge your ability to solve puzzles, and games that challenge your knowledge. Though most games have more than one of these elements, they frequently only offer meaningful challenge in one of them. The difference between these starts to seem extremely relevant when you remember that, depending on the challenge proffered and who’s playing, the game may not even be possible to complete!
In addition to these different skills and abilities that can be challenged, there are different ways of challenging them: The obstacles themselves can become more difficult to navigate or the resources you have for navigating them can become scarcer such that you have less room for error, the obstacles can become more complex and numerous or failures can be punished more harshly. Even if the main skill being challenged by the game remains the same, changing how this challenge manifests can make for radically different experiences.
But that’s not all! In addition to the actual challenge of the game, there’s also the way the game presents its challenges. Part of why people responded well to the at-times punishing difficulty of Dark Souls is because the world is overtly harsh and intimidating. It’s easier to swallow getting your ass kicked when, rather than being some sort of god or legendary knight, you’re just another hapless undead. Now, you may end up becoming an undead who beats the shit out of legendary knights and gods, but that’s as much of a surprise to you as it is to anyone. The XCOM games script their tutorial missions to create the expectation that shit will go wrong and your soldiers will die, so that you know going in what the stakes and challenges are. The greatest part of making a challenging design that works is in conveying what the challenges of the game consist of – and what it means to fail at them. This is what we mean by fairness: The game establishes the parameters of its challenges and conveys those to the player effectively, and those parameters do not change.
Just using the word ‘difficult’ to describe these varied concepts creates a number of issues: When used to describe the ambitions of a nascent project, it can easily lead you astray, because there’s a lot of types of ‘difficult’ that won’t work with the rest of your concept. When selling the game, it tells the potential player nothing about what sort of challenge is being offered or how that challenge is presented. And, as a catch-all term, it obscures important components such as they conveyance of the challenge’s parameters. It’s a difficult challenging tricky term to get away from, though! In order to be more precise and avoid pitfalls of design, we may need to build an entire new vocabulary of difficulty.
It may be quite a challenge.