A game is hardly a game without a proper challenge, but everyone wants to be challenged in different ways. In this post I want to examine what types of challenges exist in games, how those challenges present themselves, and differentiate between challenge and difficulty.
There are hundreds if not thousands of different types of challenges that a game player can find across the world of games. One of my favorite types of challenges is assembling a team, a challenge that can be found in a variety of genres from fantasy RPGs to sports to strategy card games. My preferred level of difficulty for this particular type of challenge is low: I prefer to be able to put together a competent team without facing much resistance. While I don’t mind unlocking characters through gameplay or picking from the same pool of characters as other players (such as a fantasy draft in a basketball video game), if a game makes it too difficult to add characters to your team (by, for instance, making you complete challenges that require a high skill level or making the best characters nearly impossible to acquire) then I am less likely to invest my time in that game.
My idea of a good time.
However, after I have a relatively easy time assembling my team, I prefer to have my skills and intellect challenged when it comes to utilizing that team. When I put together my ideal team for an NBA 2k season I don’t like to just roll over any opponent I face, I prefer to have a hard fought battle… that I eventually win. In order to accomplish that I often have to play with the AI skill sliders so that my opponent is better at defending and worse at midrange jump shots, and my players are worse at defending but better at 3 point shooting. Of course, the quality of the other team’s players has an effect on the level of challenge (it seems like Damian Lillard has never dropped fewer than 30 points on me in the past 3 years), but if I face a good team with my custom levels, I will ideally have a game that is competitive right up to the final buzzer.
Not my idea of a good time.
As you can see, even within a single game the same player can desire different levels of difficulty in different challenges the game presents. Most games have a mixture of challenges that each have different levels of difficulty. Titanfall 2 has the challenge of figuring out how to equip your soldier for the upcoming battle (what kind of guns to use, what to use for your special power-ups, which titan to use) as well as navigating around the map through parkour style movement, combat with enemies, and piloting a titan. Hearthstone has the challenge of putting together a competitive deck and making ideal plays with those cards/managing your mana while playing your cards. Chess challenges players to both know how to create a formidable attack and defense with their pieces as well as how to respond to their opponent’s moves. The best games have multiple challenges, and these challenges come in many different forms.
Within challenges there are different levels of difficulty, and different players desire different difficulty levels in different games. A great example of a game challenge where players like different levels of difficulty for is traversal. Almost every digital game requires players to move around a virtual world whether that means moving an avatar through a city, driving a car around a race track, or moving a camera over a battlefield. Players that enjoy platformers with easy traversal may enjoy a game like Super Mario Bros. 2 where they can select Luigi and have a nice easy time making it from platform to platform thanks to Luigi’s high, floaty jumping ability. Players that enjoy platformers but prefer punishing traversal may be more attracted to Super Meat Boy where the slippy-slidey controls and necessity for precise timing will undoubtedly lead to countless deaths for the uninitiated.
Or, to compare across genres, take a look at flying a plane in GTA V versus flying a plane in Microsoft Flight Simulator. In GTA V you only need to do a few basic controls to fly a plane, most of which can be done with four buttons and two joysticks. GTA V makes flying simple because flying a plane is only a small part of what the game has to offer, and its primary purpose is to help the player get somewhere quickly or to do fun challenges like flying the plane under a bridge, a task that is only doable with simplified controls that makes use of the player’s quick reaction time. In Microsoft Flight Simulator, flying a plane is not quite as simple a task. Players find themselves in a realistic airplane cockpit and need to keep track of things like fuel, wind speed and direction, the health of each engine on their plane, the pitch and speed of their plane at various altitudes, and obey the control tower when taking off and landing. On top of that, the game’s realistic approach to flying makes things like flying under bridges or doing barrel rolls with a Learjet impossible, or at least extremely improbable. GTA V can get away with making flying a plane easy because flying is just one of dozens of different challenges that GTA V includes in the game. Microsoft Flight Simulator is all about flying so it needs to make that one challenge (I suppose if you wanted to nitpick you could say that Flight Simulator has a bunch of challenges that comprise the larger challenge of air travel, but I’m taking a more broad approach) more nuanced, and therefore more difficult, so players don’t get bored.
My idea of an overwhelming time.
There are thousands of different experiences players can find across games and those experiences are made up of thousands of different types of challenges, but I think you can ultimately sort all of those challenges into three categories: strategic challenge, performative challenge, and social challenge.
Strategic challenge refers to challenges the game presents to the human mind. These challenges don’t test the player’s ability to throw a ball the proper distance or input the controls at a faster speed than anyone else, rather they test the player’s ability to make the right decisions. Some strategic challenges are made on a large scale or done before a game has even started. A basketball team may decide they want to start smaller players in hopes that they can beat their opponent with speed, an Overwatch player may decide they want to pick Symmetra to attack the first capture point in hopes that they can use her teleporter for a sneaky flank, and a tabletop RPG player may decide to create a healer as their new character because the rest of their group is made up of damage heavy characters. But strategic challenges also happen through the course of gameplay too. A basketball player needs to decide whether to pass, dribble, or shoot, that Symmetra player needs to decide whether to run onto point and attack people with her close-range attack or keep her distance and lob ranged attacks at the enemy, and the tabletop healer needs to decide whether to spend their magic points on healing a wounded ally or casting a debuff on the enemy.
Performative challenge refers to the player’s ability to complete the actions necessary to obtain their short and long term objectives. While strategic challenges focus on the mind, performative challenges focus on the body. You would be mistaken to think that digital games do not focus on performative challenges, in fact performative challenge is a huge part of video games as nothing in a video game is accomplishable without input from a controller of some sort. Fighting games are perhaps the best example of performative challenge in video games: the top players in fighting video games are capable of pulling off impressive combos that are created by chaining together controller inputs at the correct speed with proper timing. Super Mario Bros. isn’t challenging because you don’t know where Mario has to go (he has to go to the right!), the challenge is getting him there without getting hit by an enemy or falling into a bottomless pit. Of course, physical games focus heavily on the performative challenge aspect of games. Earlier we talked about the basketball player needing to decide whether to dribble, pass, or shoot. Well, they need to be able to dribble the ball without dribbling it off their foot, pass the ball without throwing it into the opposing team’s defense, and shoot the ball through the hoop and not brick it off the back of the rim.
Finally, social challenge is the challenge that comes in interacting with other players. This challenge includes teamwork, communicating information, negotiating, and navigating relationships. This challenge occurs in almost all games that have multiple players, but especially in games where different players may have access to different information. Among Us is a good example of a game that provides a social challenge: players must communicate their suspicions and observations so that they can make the strategic decision of who to vote for when deciding who the traitor is. An offensive unit in American football relies on the quarterback to communicate when to start the play, and the quarterback will often communicate information to his team before calling for the ball as well as sometimes make fake calls for the ball to try to trick the defense into attacking early. Journey provides a unique social challenge in that players cannot communicate verbally, they can only use movement to communicate to another player.
Many games utilize all three of these types of challenges, and the best players are the ones that excel at all of them. Tom Brady won 7 Super Bowls because he has excellent decision making skills (strategic challenge), he is able to throw the ball accurately and with great speed (performative challenge), and he is famously able to communicate changes to his offensive plan to his teammates (communicative challenge). An Overwatch team increases their likelihood of winning if they pick characters that synergize well with each other (strategic challenge), communicate information about enemy positions and skill usage with one another (social challenge), and hit their shots (performative challenge).
The result of elite planning, execution, and communication.
The last thing I want to discuss is the difference between challenge and difficulty, a concept that I’ve touched on already but one that’s worth taking a bit of a closer look at.
A challenge in a game is a particular task that the player must complete in order to progress. A fighting game like Mortal Kombat has the challenge of combat which can be further broken down to the challenge of landing combos, using special moves, blocking, and dodging your opponent’s hits. But that challenge can have varying levels of difficulty, even within the same game. Attacking your opponent in Mortal Kombat is simple, just get close to him and hit an attack button and you will throw a punch or a kick that will do a small amount of damage if left unblocked. Hitting an opponent with a special move is slightly more difficult, you need to input the correct combination of controls at the proper speed and, if done successfully, your character will summon a fireball or teleport behind the opponent. If done unsuccessfully, your character might end up in an undesirable position and accidentally punch or kick the air. Stinging together a combo is harder still, you need to memorize longer chains of controller inputs that are delivered with even more specific timing and you need to anticipate how your opponent may attempt to defend themselves. Even within the broader challenge of combat there are different aspects of difficulty.
And that’s not even factoring in the skill of your opposing player. Most fighting games allow the player to adjust the skill of the AI which allows them to control the difficulty of the challenge: on lower difficulties the AI will attack and block less, allowing players to unload on them and cruise to an easy victory. AIs on higher difficulties are capable of chaining together devastating combos and blocking or dodging the player’s attacks, making a victory over them much harder achieve.
Changing the strength of the AI isn’t the only way games can control their difficulty level, though. One tried and true method of increasing difficulty is by changing the numbers, whether that means the number of enemies, the amount of health an enemy has, the amount of damage an enemy deals, the number of cards the opponent draws, or the score you need to reach to finish the level. I’m sure we’ve all played a game where there’s a late game enemy that’s just a copy of an early game enemy with more health and maybe a palette swap or played a Mario Maker level that is fairly straight forward as long as you can make it past the 200 Koopa Paratroopas jumping across the screen. A favorite difficulty spike in old NES and SNES games is to have the players face a boss rush where they must fight every single boss they fought in the game in succession before they face the final boss. I personally think changing numbers is a lazy way to increase difficulty from a design perspective, but there’s no doubt that it’s effective.
Why not just send the purple guys from the beginning? Do they charge more and Shredder was saving money?
Portal is a great example of a game that increases difficulty by doing more than just changing the numbers. The challenge of every level in Portal is essentially the same–get to the exit using portals–but as you get farther into the game, the puzzles get more difficult by introducing new concepts such as using portals to increase your speed, barriers that won’t allow you to go passed unless certain conditions are met, and turrets that fire energy blasts at you. These same concepts are used in new and creative ways the deeper you get into the game: the turrets that fire energy at you can eventually be used to power up different parts of the level if you can figure out how to use your portals to get those energy balls to where you need them to go. Portal manages to increase difficulty not through programming harder enemies or increasing their stats, but with clever level design.
That’s not to besmirch the hard work of programmers: creating an AI with multiple difficulties is a task very few are equipped for and is a perfectly legitimate way of increasing a game’s difficulty level. Think about soccer video games: it’s one thing to make the AI’s team more difficult to beat by giving them better stats or requiring the player’s shots to be more precise, but it’s an entirely different thing to make the AI’s players anticipate what the player is going to do based on how they’ve played the game already (if the player has been primarily attacking from one side of the field all game, for example, the AI may position more defenders towards that side of the field as the game goes on). A more difficult enemy AI in a strategy game may move faster than a less difficult one, but it’s also better able to adapt to decisions the player has made. A game that utilizes good AI can give a player a fulfilling challenge regardless of difficulty level.
In the future I’d like to discuss difficulty more in depth, specifically how players determine what is too easy/too difficult and what they consider fair vs. unfair. But for now, I’d like to hear from you. What are some challenges you love to receive from games? How do you want to be challenged?
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