Difficulty is a unique narrative platform to video games: there is no difficulty in popping in a home video and pressing play, and the difficulty in reading a book comes more from the level of reading (i.e., the difference in reading Dr. Seuss versus Melville).  Video games have the ability to challenge players before allowing them to continue in the narrative, sweetening the narrative reward for players throughout their experience.  In essence, “there must be be a challenge to defeat.  It’s not enough to see a character overcome a conflict like it is in other media, a player has to be personally responsible for overcoming a challenge for the obstacle and the victory over it to have any weight.” (Filipowich, 2012)  If the conflict is too easy to overcome, players do not feel satisfied with the narrative.  If the conflict is too difficult, players will break their controllers and rage-quit before Act Three.

Games can express difficulty in two main ways: progressive difficulty and challenge difficulty.  Progressive difficulty is a steady ramping up of difficulty, starting off fairly simple but increasing in necessary skill level, challenges presented, et cetera.  Extra Credits’s episode Easy Games defines a good game in this sense as the following: “[it] starts off simple, but offers a great deal of depth later in the game because, throughout the whole experience, the player has been taught to understand and master the mechanics.” (Floyd & Portnow, 2010)  Covered in Tutorials, games like Portal (2008) succeed because they stack on the difficulty, working off of a foundation that the player has formed.  Players don’t get to achieve terminal velocity to solve a puzzle until they have mastered simple portal-to-portal jumps…more simply, you don’t get to run before you can walk.

The same principle applied in many traditional games, too: in Super Mario World, and in nearly every Super Mario game ever, players start off in the grasslands, learning the basics before sticking players with more difficult moves and maneuvers to execute, and tougher enemies to overcome.  Donkey Kong Country introduces basic mechanics before magnifying them into more challenging scenarios.  Metroid games have deliberately withheld certain challenges until the player is properly equipped for it, as dictated by the standard narrative, stacking existing powers and upgrades on new ones, to deliver balanced challenges.

There has been a shift, however, viewed by players both positively and negatively: “Super Guides,” popularized in newer Nintendo games, allow players to stop personally playing the game and allow it to play itself.  Oftentimes, this is available after players have failed continuously at a certain level, and is used as a way for them to proceed and enjoy the rest of the game without being held up on one part.  Some fear for this and the gameplay impact, that “the more the games try to play themselves and eschew player challenge, the more they threaten the uniqueness of what they are.” (Filipowich, 2012)  But on the other hand, older games of the same kind had no such options, outside of finding (possible) alternative paths around a level, like in Super Mario World, but those were very few and far between.  Now, instead of becoming frustrated with a game and giving up on both it and the franchise’s future, players can skirt past difficult portions, building their skill otherwise, and revisit it later for the full experience, while still remaining engaged overall.

Many video games, if not all, effectively work with Progressive Difficulty; like in Mass Effect, you face off against the Geth Trooper before the Geth Colossus.  Stronger enemies are generally withheld until later on; narratively, this could also play in as the antagonist finally seeing players, the protagonist, as a threat, and beginning to throw tougher enemies at them.  But games also play off of the Challenge Difficulty, by including different ‘levels’ for players to choose from, the most popular being Easy, Medium, and Hard.  Options in Challenge Difficulty allow players from many different skill-bases to pick up the same game, find their own challenge, and enjoy it without being too frustrated.  Some narrative-heavy games even include a Narrative or Casual mode, where player-characters are extremely strong and can mow past enemies with ease, all the way up to an Insane mode, where the player-character is put into a much greater challenge.  But all in-between those are modes to accommodate all type and skill of players.

Games offer these options so the experience hovers between frustrating and boring, no matter who’s playing.  “[Games] need to offer a reasonable challenge to all of their potential players for the experience to mean anything.” (Filipowich, 2012)  Failure is a sign of challenge, and challenge makes the player think, exposes them to more of the world, makes them reconsider the challenge at hand: “Failure pushes the player into reconsidering strategy, and failure thereby subjectively adds content to the game.  The game appears deeper when the player fails; failure makes the game more strategic.” (Juul, 2009)  It could be trying out new talents in Mass Effect, or a new cover in Gears of War, or just how/if you tackle a conflict in Skyrim; each of them has players rethinking their strategy instead of playing out the same scenario over and over again…assuming players take their failure to heart and there are such options open to the player.  Poorly designed games will pigeonhole players into a rail where there is only one solution; if players can’t execute that solution, no matter their difficulty level, they’re not moving on.

Of course, games have to be careful that their experience is not punishing; having to play for a long time between failures (example: die, try again at the beginning of the stage twenty minutes ago), otherwise pigeonholing players into one difficult solution, or the like.  We touched on avoiding an on-rails experience, of allowing players multiple ways to overcome one challenge.  But a game can also be more accessible and less punishing, regardless of its difficulty level, by “[lowering] its iteration time.” (Floyd & Portnow, 2013)  While some gamers would lament that frequent checkpoints are ruining the challenge of games by allowing them to start only a few minutes back from where they failed, I believe that they’re helpful.  By adhering to the ideas above, of providing multiple ways to achieve one objective, games give players the ability to try again, challenging themselves to do the mission just right through new tactics.  Some games display the failure screen right before throwing you back into the action, others give you the option to continue, but either way, the iteration time becomes minimized: players remain engaged, the challenges challenging, but still conquerable, and in portions manageable enough to not feel overwhelmed or cheated out of time.  Of course, the long gaps between safety and death can be used to a game’s advantage, but for the most part, difficulty is effectively handled this way: through adjustable challenge, a plethora of potential strategies, and a working foundation that players build on all throughout their gameplay experience.