The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for…
To play a game is to perform a series of tasks it asks of you. Most of the time, these tasks are some sort of challenge of dexterity, cognition, perception, or some combination thereof. There are also, though, a number…
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…
Difficulty can serve several important roles in a game’s design: It can create an aesthetic sense of danger and foreboding, it can make the actions of the player feel more consequential, and it can push the player to vary their…
A thing about video games that I wonder sometimes if people really understand is that they’re made to be completed by the player. Dark Souls is made to be completed. Cuphead is made to be completed. The most challenging (or…
Difficulty is a difficult subject. What makes a game harder or easier is intricately tangled in what makes it work as an experience: Just as you can’t take a difficult game and make it easy without losing something, you can’t…
I think it’s interesting that, even as I consider myself someone who enjoys thinking about art, I find myself growing increasingly distrustful and annoyed by art debates. Even civil debates are often incredibly tedious, since the nature of a debate…
Adaptive difficulty is a game design concept that held a great deal of traction for a little while but has seemingly fallen out of favor recently. “The player should be challenged at all times,” is the ideal, “but never actually…
I just played FTL for the first time. As the game recommends, since it was my first time playing I went ahead and played on easy mode, and everything was going pretty well up until the last couple of star…
