FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Absolute Difficulty

Absolute difficulty refers to intrinsic skill required and stressfulness put together. When a game offers multiple difficulty levels, the easy mode both demands less skill and exerts less stress than the hard mode. Some players like a challenge that demands a lot of skill but they can't tolerate much stress. If they know they have plenty of time to prepare for a challenge, they're perfectly happy for the challenge to require great skill. Others thrive on stress but don't have much skill. Simple, high-speed games like Tetris and Collapse! suit them best. Figure 9.3 shows a graph of the relationship of intrinsic skill and stress in various games or tasks. The higher the task ranks on both scales, the greater its difficulty.

When you're deciding how difficult you want your game to be, think about both skill levels and stress, and keep your target audience in mind. Teenagers and young adults handle stress better than either children or older adults because teenagers and young adults have the best vision and motor skills. When you allow the player to set a difficulty level for the game, try to preserve an inverse relationship between skill level and stress at that particular level of difficulty. If a challenge requires more skill, give the player longer to perform it, and vice versa.