Monthly Archives: May 2015

Adapt or Adjust

difficulty meterIn a previous post, I complained that a game I was playing should have adapted the difficulty level of a mission after I’d failed it many times. I know, of course, that building in such smarts would require significant effort. I was wondering about how to make the process easier, and then I realized we already have the answer: the difficulty setting. That’s the slider or check boxes we often see at the start of a game that ask us if we want it set to “easy,” “medium,” or “hard.”

I have publicly opposed the idea of a difficulty setting several times. But now I realize that my objections weren’t to the concept itself, but to how and when it was presented. I believe now that a freely-adjustable difficulty setting is an elegant and simple mechanism for preventing the kind of frustration I was experiencing. I now think that a difficulty setting, handled properly, is a very good idea.

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I Paid My Money, Why Won’t You Let Me Have Fun?

sad_face“Hello, player! You’ve failed at finishing this task within our time limit ten times in a row now. Are you still having fun? If yes, press A and keep trying. Otherwise, press B and we’ll remove the time limit. Or press X just to mark this as done and move on in the game.”

Adaptation and respect for a player’s individual abilities should be part of every single game. That includes games with time-limited goals. Those time limits are selected and tuned to provide a challenge to some class of players. If you’re outside that class, that arbitrary limit should not present an insurmountable obstacle that ends all pleasure and progress in the game. Sadly, I’m playing an otherwise wonderful game that requires me to do something I can’t seem to accomplish in the given time. The result is that the game is over for me, since this mission is mandatory to continuing the story. The game has ruined itself.

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