In my last post, I suggested that some games require skill in order to really access their artistic value. This, naturally, got me to thinking about skill and difficulty in games, and so I had initially intended to write a single article about both of these topics. Instead, the more I worked at them, the more I realized that, as they are really two sides to the same coin, they deserved two separate but related articles.
So, today, we are going to talk about difficulty in games: the importance that a game generally not be too easy or too hard, and how this balance is important not only to be an enjoyable game or to hold a player’s interest, but also for artistic reasons. Specifically, I am going to explain how difficulty is an integral part of atmosphere, consistency, and what I will term “sympathy;” by “sympathy” I mean the player’s ability to connect to the point-of-view character and sympathize with his or her situation and feelings.
But first,
A Couple of Notes About Difficulty
First, in other media, difficulty is not generally a good thing in and of itself. It is sometimes necessary in order to properly tell a story or explore an idea, but a work does not generally derive its artistic value from its difficulty (though there are exceptions). Inception does not gain its worth from its difficulty, its difficulty is simply necessary in order to really explore its ideas. (Indeed, one might argue that, in an effort to avoid alienating audiences by being “too difficult,” it avoided dealing with some of the interesting implications of its theories).
In fact, generally, I would suggest that in most cases, a work should strive to be as clear as it can be without doing damage to its conceit. Some works simply have to be complicated and difficult, or they feel like they are underestimating their audience and afraid of really tackling the idea head-on. I think it is generally understood that needless obfuscation is a literary sin: it usually serves to obscure a lack of content, inflate the artist’s ego, or needlessly exclude most people from engaging with the artwork.
This is not, however, necessarily the case with video games. A game’s “ideal” difficulty certainly depends on what the game is trying to be– not just its “target audience,” but what sort of artistic statement it is trying to make, if any. I Wanna Be the Guy, as a “sardonic loveletter to the halcyon days of early American videogaming,” should be mind-numbingly difficult. It would not function very well as a satire of NES-era punishing difficulty if it wasn’t, well, difficult. But most games should not be nearly that difficult. Conversely, one could argue that as Prince of Persia, is, as mentioned before, “all about flow,” and as the Prince’s sidekick Elika is strongly implied to be backed by the local deity, it makes some sense that it’s impossible for the player character to permanently fail.
But that said, a game needs to be difficult enough to be hold a player’s interest, and as such, “as simple as possible” is not a good idea with video games, for reasons which I hope will be explained in the rest of this article. I would suggest that this notion, that some measure of difficulty might almost be an end-in-itself, is one unique to video games. It is difficult to think of any other medium where the answer to “how difficult should it be to experience” is anything other than “as easy as possible without needlessly repeating explanations or avoiding difficult issues.” In video games, the answer is “easy enough for most proficient players to be able to play it without too much frustration, but hard enough to hold their interest and maintain atmosphere, consistency, and sympathy.”
Second, the following concerns are presumably why many games implement difficulty settings, so that veteran players can still experience the necessary challenge without rendering the game unplayable by newcomers. But for some kinds of games (platformers, in particular), “difficulty settings” aren’t really feasible. It’s easy enough in a shooter to change the amount of damage an enemy can take or the frequency of ammunition, but without going through and redesigning every single level, a platformer can’t really change its difficulty very much. Thus, many games require more than simple difficulty settings to try to make sure the game is accessible to the right audience.
Third, I want to draw a distinction between two kinds of difficulty in a game, what I’ll call micro-difficulty and macro-difficulty. Micro-difficulty refers to the difficulty of a particular enemy or situation in a game, whereas macro-difficulty refers to the difficulty of the game as a whole. A game might have a low macro-difficulty, with moments of high micro-difficulty: plenty of games are not exceptionally difficult in the macro sense, but have moments of sheer hair-pulling frustration, either in the form of bad game design, optional bosses, or just strange spikes in the difficulty curve
So, with those points made, let’s get to the meat of the matter by looking at a few games and genres.
BioShock: Atmosphere and Sympathy
Among the elements most critically-applauded in 2007’s excellent BioShock were the huge, lumbering enemies known as Big Daddies. These behemoths wander about the streets of Rapture protecting the “Little Sisters,” little girls infused with a powerful, strength-enhancing substances, from any and all acts of aggression. Periodically throughout Jack’s travels in Rapture, he will encounter Big Daddies wandering about, chatty Little Sisters in tow, on some unknown mission. But what makes the situation interesting is that, unless provoked, Big Daddies will in no way harm Jack. It is only if the player chooses to assault the girl or her guardian that the Big Daddy will attack. The player can thus choose whether or not to engage with the Big Daddies, and must do some basic risk-reward analysis.
These Big Daddies are generally quite hard to defeat, but not impossible, and it is this careful placing on the difficulty curve that makes them work. Were they too easy, there would be no deterrent to attacking them and rescuing or harvesting the Little Sisters, and were they too difficult, the dilemma would simply be a false choice: if it’s impossible for me to kill the Big Daddies, I have no choice but to let them on their way. But by ensuring that Big Daddies remain a substantial challenge, but not an impossible one, BioShock ensures that the player is kept in sympathy with Jack and behaves more like a reasonable human being would in the situation– only attacking the Big Daddies with preparation and trepidation.
Furthermore, BioShock’s much-lauded atmosphere is heavily reliant on the Big Daddies, and would also fall to pieces without the careful placing of their difficulty. Few things make you feel more like you’re in Rapture than wandering through a quiet tunnel, observing the beautiful scenery, and not far in the distance, hearing the whale-like moans of a Big Daddy and hearing his tromping feet somewhere nearby. You feel as though you’re in the presence of something both dangerous and harmless, and, in the best moments, it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. This is only possible because you know that, if provoked, that Big Daddy will not hesitate to murder your stupid self. You find yourself carefully measuring your steps, and being very careful with your gunfire as you fight lesser enemies. You don’t want to anger him accidentally. If you must attack him, you want to be very well prepared.
Horror Games: Atmosphere
In this case, sympathy and atmosphere are very closely related. Presumably, in a survival horror game (or any other kind of horror game for that matter), the goal of the game designers is, at least in part, to scare the player. This can only be done if the atmosphere of the situation is right.
Horror games may be the only instance where almost universally the macro-difficulty should be higher than in most games. The fun of a horror game is in having to be Very Careful, lest the monsters sneak up behind you or pop up from in front of you and devour you whole. This does not work if the monsters are pushovers. A problem with both Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 is that, even on high difficulties, towards the end of the game, one’s guns have been upgraded to the point where most villains provide little-to-no challenge. The games simply quit being scary. Conversely, the game quits being scary and starts just being frustrating if the difficulty is too high. We want to play the terrified-but-heroic character who escapes in the end, not one of the myriad goons that dies along the way.
Several of the most frightening creatures in games are announced by loud sounds that can be heard from a long way away, much like the Big Daddy above. Left 4 Dead’s Witches and Resident Evil 4’s Regenerators, to use two examples, are quite vocal about their presence in an area. Witches sob loudly, and Regenerators constantly breathe this terrible, hacking wheeze. It’s very unlikely you’re going to stumble over one with absolutely no warning. But what makes the sobbing or the wheezing terrifying is not the noise itself (though that might well be a bit unsettling), but rather what it signifies– that one of the hardest individual monsters in the game is waiting around a dark corner somewhere close, and, if you’re not careful, you’ll trip right into it and get eaten and/or clawed to death. Witches quit being scary when one figures out that, on lower difficulties, it only takes a shotgun blast or two to the head to quiet that obnoxious sobbing, and Regenerators are no longer frightening on your twelfth playthrough with a fully-upgraded Hand Cannon.
As an interesting side note, Dead Space offers an answer to the “difficulty settings” question by employing a game mechanic which, while allowing for difficulty settings to provide greater and lesser degrees of difficulty, still ensures that the game is never too easy. Unlike most shooters, Dead Space’s necromorphs are most vulnerable in their limbs, such that in order to conserve ammunition and kill them more quickly, one has to not aim for the monster’s center of mass, but rather its arms and legs. This is made more difficult by the fact that said limbs are usually flailing erratically trying to cut poor Isaac into ribbons. This helps ensure that even on the easiest difficulty, simply pointing at the Slasher and holding down they fire key is not a reasonable course of action– you will quickly run out of ammunition and end up trying to beat the monsters to death with your bare hands, a frustrating and nearly-impossible task.
Dragon Age: Awakening: Consistency
My final example for the day concerns one of the most disappointing games I’ve ever played. The expansion pack to one of my favorite games of all time, Dragon Age: Awakening has a number of flaws, but one of the most egregious is that the game is absurdly easy, even on higher difficulty levels. This is a problem for several reasons. (As a few notes: I played on Hard with an Orlesian dual-wielding Rogue who specialized in Assassin/Duelist/Legionnaire Scout. I did not particularly power game beyond that– I was still using basic runes and only moderately decent equipment).
First, and probably most detrimental to the game’s enjoyability is that the game’s lack of difficulty means that the game requires little to no thought, and its combat is not interesting. I quite literally walked through all of Kal’Hirol simply by pushing the thumbstick forward and mashing the A button, and that would be bad even in a beat-em-up. In a tactical roleplaying game, it’s just a sign of bad game design. (It could, theoretically, also be a sign that I’m just very good at Dragon Age, but see above for why I don’t think that’s so. There are, I am sure, dozens of better builds for the Warden-Commander than that one.)
But more importantly for our purposes, it makes the game’s central conflict seem silly. We are repeatedly told that the Mother’s darkspawn are a terrifying threat capable of annihilating all of Amaranthine. The game begins with said darkspawn sacking the Grey Wardens’ stronghold, killing tens of trained Wardens and Lord knows how many regular guards. But this, coupled with the fact that in-game, such villains are rarely, beyond the initial hour or so, remotely a threat to any remotely competent player, just ends up implying that every other Grey Warden in Ferelden is incompetent.
Furthermore, in the end of the game, one has to split one’s party between two locales, both of which will fall under assault by Darkspawn hordes. If one has not properly equipped Amaranthine’s army, inspired the other half of the party, and so forth, one runs a serious risk of losing that half of the party not under your control to the darkspawn invasion. On the face of it, this makes sense: a small group of warriors being overwhelmed by hordes of villains, if their supporting army is not appropriately equipped, is pretty sensible. But the fact is that, in-engine, when those four or five characters are under your control, they can annihilate a more or less unlimited number of darkspawn.
It ends up suggesting that your NPCs fight at something like one-tenth their normal effectiveness when you’re not with them, which, though perhaps intended to be a flattering indication of the Warden-Commander’s leadership, just ends up looking silly. If such threats are to be taken seriously, and not seem arbitrary, and if the world itself is to seem reasonable and consistent, the game just flat needs to be harder.
In Conclusion
On the face of it, the fact that games need to be challenging without being impossible seems simple, and I am not suggesting that these thoughts are revolutionary– rather, I simply hope that I have illustrated the point. Furthermore, I intend to use this point as foundation for next week’s article (already mostly written), about skill in games, and how, if games need to be at least a little bit challenging in order to be artistically valuable, then a certain amount of skill on the part of the player is going to be necessary in order to unlock that artistic value. Next week, I will discuss what that means for the skeptic and the newcomer, and how this fact may not be as unique to video games as you might think.