Jeff On Games

Happy New Year! And to start off the new year right, I've got a nice series of posts that will be going up over the next few days. This praticular is a continuation of my previous post, where I made the assertion that difficulty is strongly tied to agency; a game that is too difficult makes us believe we have no influence on it and is therefore too frustrating to play, whereas a game that is too easy makes us believe that we can win every time, and thus our involvement is unnecessary (that we are not having any affect on the game).

If this assertion is true, we can now make another interesting proposition about dynamic difficulty, a mechanic we’ve started seeing in many games in order to make them more accessible. The problem with dynamic difficulty is that it frequently makes the game too easy, or it doesn’t actually help in the way that would make the game more enjoyable. Interestingly, thinking of difficulty in terms of agency may give you a better idea of where and how you can use dynamic difficulty to increase the enjoyment of your game, though this may be the longest stretch this theory has to make.

When using dynamic difficulty, the common implementation is that you make things slightly easier until the user can get past the situation. I now believe that this is the wrong way to implement dynamic difficulty. According to this theory on agency and difficulty, the best way to implement dynamic difficulty is to keep situations at a level such that they are just barely passable. More importantly, they should be passable completely via the user’s own actions, not by the scaling created by the game. The monsters or AI shouldn’t get easier, there shouldn’t be less of them, and there shouldn’t be extra health or items to get you past the situation faster. The game should remain at a state where you’re just barely passing any given situation. This gives the player the illusion that they are having an affect on the game; that their skill is what’s getting them past whatever situation, even if this is only partially true. Furthermore, it doesn’t insult your player. (How much do you like a game when it’s basically making you think you suck at it?)

In games that do not use dynamic difficulty and instead use chosen levels, it is still important that the difficulty ramp up, and the difficulty / agency theory can explain the reason for this as well. A game that has a constant difficulty throughout becomes uninteresting. We know we can get past scenario (a), we now want to see if we can get past scenario (b). If there scenarios are the same, there’s no new challenge, and we get back to the player’s involvement being unnecessary.

My next post will be on levels of agency, and (if I can get around to it) I’ll take this to an inevitable conclusion, and (I hope) a weird new understanding about why we enjoy games.