Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 11.2
The balance
between difficulty
and ability, producing
Csikszentmihalyi's
idea of
flow
Anxiety
Boredom
Player Ability
Because game challenges fall into many extremely different domains—physical
coordination, factual knowledge, formal logic, pattern recognition, and so forth—
there's no way to compare difficulty across these domains. Even within a given
domain, such as factual knowledge challenges, it may be hard to decide when one
challenge is more difficult than another; questions of fact that some audiences find
hard are easy for other audiences. Most Americans would be unable to answer
many factual knowledge questions about the history of Angola, and 8-year-olds
would certainly struggle with complex logic puzzles. Consequently, the following
discussion makes no reference to any audience or unit of measure.
Factors Outside the Designer's Control
In managing the difficulty of a game, you command a number of factors, but a few
remain outside your knowledge or control. You cannot know how much time the
player has already spent playing other games similar to yours—or, more accurately,
facing challenges similar to those that you offer. This factor is called
previous experi-
ence
. (The experience the player gains while playing
your
game is called in-game
experience.)
You also cannot k now how much
native talent
the player brings to the game: hand-
eye coordination, reasoning faculties, and so on. As a result, we can't include either
previous experience or native talent in our calculation of perceived difficulty. We
look into these factors when we come to the question of difficulty modes in the
later section “Establishing Difficulty Modes.”
Finally, in multiplayer games, the skill of the player's opponents plays the greatest
role in determining how hard it is to beat them, and you do not control that.
