FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Managing Difficulty
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed that people performing tasks enter an enjoyable state of peak productivity, which he calls flow, when (among other things) their abilities balance the difficulty of the tasks they face. If the challenges are too difficult, people become anxious; if the challenges are too easy, people become bored (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991). Csikszentmihalyi's observations apply to games as well as to other tasks. Balancing a game, then, includes managing the difficulty of its challenges to try to keep the players within the flow state—the point at which their abilities just match the problems they face. This provides another example of the player-centric approach: Your goal is not simply to set a level of difficulty but to think about how to adjust that difficulty to maximize the player's enjoyment. See Figure 11.2 for an illustration.
Chapter 9, in the section "Skill, Stress, and Difficulty" examined two factors, the intrinsic skill required (ISR) to overcome a challenge and the stress placed on the player by time pressure, that combine to form the absolute difficulty of the challenge. The remainder of this section extends the discussion of difficulty to take into account two additional factors, ultimately arriving at the idea of perceived difficulty—the type that matters to the player. As the preceding section explained, the perceived difficulty of a well-balanced game must remain within a certain range and not have sudden spikes or dips.
FIGURE 11.2
The balance between difficulty and ability, producing Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow
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.
