[Essay] Bad Difficulty in Videogames: the Importance of Fair Challenge

Difficulty is often one of the most discussed aspects in videogames. Many times have I heard perfectly good (or perfectly mediocre) games being bashed for being too easy, or others being praised first and foremost for being unforgivingly hard. This has always somehow baffled me: I've always considered difficulty to be a secondary aspect of a videogaming experience, that only ever truly rises to prominence when it becomes too much. Still, it is undeniable that, when done well, difficulty can convey a variety of narrative needs, can be one of the main sources of fun, and can stimulate a sense of competitive strive towards perfection that is not too different from that of sports; however, it's very easy for difficulty to be done badly in many different ways, thereby becoming the source of a frustration that should have no place in an entertainment medium. 

No game can afford being more frustration than fun: an easy game may get mocked, but it will be completed, thus allowing its qualities to connect and eventually compensate for its low difficulty; a hard game will simply get abandoned, and thus any other quality it may have had will be lost under a cloud of unpleasant memories. Besides, a 2014 study by the University of Rochester theorises that frustration over a game's difficulty may cause an increase in aggressive behaviour, especially when players feel their defeat was due to circumstances out of their control. So I decided to compile a very personal list of design decisions or challenge types that I believe fall in the category of "bad difficulty": the kind that seems to test more your patience, your memory, and the amount of free time you have, rather than your skill. 

Just to be clear, even these things aren't always bad, and can sometimes be justified or even praiseworthy in the context of a particular game in order to serve and inhance its narrative needs. Secondly, it's important to remember that bad difficulty does not necessarily equal a bad game, especially when not consistently present throughout. Also note that I'm leaving out all the cases in which bad difficulty is caused by faulty programming or flaws in the interface between game and player, like problems with the camera (the well-known "leap of faith gameplay", for example) or with the controls (for example, how in Mirror's Edge the button for running on walls is the same button used for jumping, which results in a long series of humiliating deaths). These are frustrating flaws in a game, but in this article I wanted to focus on conscious design decisions rather than problems that could come from unintentional mistakes or simple oversights.

 

• Trial and error

When the only way to know how to deal with a threat, or to even know that a threat is there in the first place, is to die to it a few times. Ideally, it should be possible to pass every challenge on the first try, with the right amount of skill and perception: there should be cues to let the player deduce the presence and the nature of a threat, enough information and tools to let them figure out a way to deal with it, and/or enough time to react to it. Most of the time they won't be able to, of course, but it will be because the game has outskilled rather than cheated them. Having the player walk on apparently safe terrain only to kill them with an unavoidable trap is one of the worst things a game can do; not only is it not a test of skill as much as patience, memory, and luck (and let's face it, a game in which all you have to do is memorise and execute is basically a glorified Simon Says, isn't it?), but it also reduces immersion and narrative impact: it means that in-story, the characters could never realistically have survived their adventure without the divine foreknowledge bestowed upon them by some external presence. 

When choices, exploration, or puzzles are involved, this also applies to having a sensible relationship between cause and effect: e.g., the players can't be expected to think that rescuing a child will cause a whole orphanage to burn down, and thus they cannot be punished for it; a player cannot be expected to check every single solitary brick in a huge castle, and thus a secret cannot be hidden without a clue behind a brick that looks like any other. Any game with any kind of narrative focus should, in my opinion, avoid trial-and-error gameplay like the plague.

Exceptions: a game like Long Live the Queen relies heavily on trial-and-error, but does a good job in making each "error" feel not like a failure, but merely like one of the many possible outcomes the story can have. Something as simple as an achievement for discovering all the 11 ways the protagonist can die helps greatly in this regard. In Hotline Miami, the lack of a narrative focus, the general atmosphere of blind desperation, and the fact that you can hit "retry" and be back in action before your body even hits the ground make the luck-based and T&E-based gameplay feel not only tolerable, but even essential to the sense of trance the game wants to convey.

• Lack (or removal) of checkpoints

Videogames that are dependant on checkpoints need to be reasonable in their placement. Far too many times I've seen games thinking that reducing checkpoints is an effective way of ramping up the difficulty from "medium" to "hard": in reality, it doesn't make the game harder, it only makes it more frustrating and boring, by testing the patience (and luck) of a player who's already proven they're able to pass a certain section. Sending the player back to the start of the whole level or even the whole game is an obsolete concept, that has no place in a world where players aren't supposed to shell out a quarter at the arcade after every game over screen. 

Needless to say, this argument has no reason to exist in games which allow the player to load and save at will: if you screw up and lose two hours of progress, it's your own damn fault.

Examples: the "Grounded" difficulty level in The Last of Us.

• Undodgeable one-hit-kill attacks

Bosses or enemies with one-hit kill attacks are interesting challenges, as long as the player is able to understand that they are coming and has enough time to react. If they can't be dodged or blocked, or can be chained to another attack that prevents the player from dodging or blocking, they become the reason why many controllers get thrown through expensive LCD screens. Not only is this the cheapest way to make a fight feel difficult without actually making it difficult, it also throws any sense of being challenged fairly out the window, as it becomes basically a game of dice: the player just throws as many tries at the boss as it takes until the game just so happens to decide not to use the lethal combo. And even when winning, the player knows it's been nothing but luck, as they know that all the boss had to do was use that one attack to vanify any prowess they may have displayed against them. In fighting games in particular, this is nothing short of unforgivable.

Examples: the final boss of Tekken 5 is well known for his undodgeable stun, which can be chained to a one-hit-kill projectile attack. Sometimes, should the player sidestep such attack, he would randomly shoot another one, which would then become undodgeable. Also, Azazel in Tekken 6 and Justice in Guilty Gear.

Exceptions: in many JRPGs games (Dragon Quest VIII comes to mind), insta-kill moves by bosses are acceptable due to the simple fact that other characters have the abilities or the items to resurrect fallen allies, thus creating counterplay to those moves. 

• Cheating AI

You don't play a game of chess in which only one player can move the king and the bishops like a queen. This is when the enemy AI does not abide in some way to the same rules to which the player is subjected. It's the most typical definition of "fake difficulty", and it's absolutely unforgivable in 1v1 fighting games. For example: the AI reacting to the player's input instead of the player character's actions, enemies being able to block attacks that would be unblockable to the player, opposing factions being able to see the whole map despite the presence of fog of war, enemies never running out of mana/pp/energy and/or having no cooldown, shooting through walls or barriers while the player cannot, skewing the random number generation (like the critical strike chance) to the player's disadvantage, etc. It makes the player feel like they have to play AGAINST the game and its rules, instead of WITH the game, it destroys narrative immersion, and it makes for, quite simply, an unfair challenge. While not nearly as borderline criminal as it was the day of "quarter muncher" arcades, it's still a terribly frustrating and incompetent way of designing a game. 

Examples: the very first Mortal Kombat had a notoriously cheating AI, which was able to throw an uppercut without first crouching (as the player had to instead), and which even anticipated Scorpion's side-swapping special move by, for example, shooting Sub-zero's projectile towards the left side of the screen before Scorpion had even left the right side. 

• Poor explanation of rules and objectives

You don't play a game of chess without telling your opponent that the knight can only move in L patterns, and you don't get halfway through a game of chess before realising that you were supposed to be trying to checkmate the king. It is important, for the game not to feel unfair and frustrating, that the player has the objectives and rules clear: having them running around trying to understand where they're supposed to be going or even what they're supposed to be doing is the quickest way to make them remember the game with irritation. Taking a look online at walkthroughs or community help should be a rare occurence for when the player gives up on the challenge, not something for the designers to expect or God forbid even encourage. Failing a boss thirty times before realising that a move that had been hidden from the player could have saved them twenty tries is basically a one-way ticket to Outthewindowville for the cartrdige/CD/DVD/handheld console/controller, actively encouraging players to find out what objective they're supposed to be pursuing by searching online for the advice of someone who might have stumbled on it by T&E (i.e. pure luck) is pretty close to the nadir of all bad ideas, and in my opinion a fighting game with no in-game movelist isn't even worth the dignity of recognition. Once again, it's merely a test of patience and luck.

• Limited lives

Related to the "lack of checkpoint" case, this is another example of difficulty that used to make sense back in the day when games were in cartridges so small that they had no other way to pad out their content, or when the only way for them to make money was to rob players of coin after coin, but it has since rightfully fallen into obsolescence. It can still be tolerable if the punishment for losing all lives is mild, or if it is mitigated in some other way (e.g. the game is very short and can reasonably be completed in, say, half an hour), but the old "Nintendo hard" system should have no place in a time in which many gamers struggle to find an hour or two a day to dedicate to their hobby. Expecting players to start over the game after every failure or to beat it all in one sitting may have been reasonable when gamers were mostly pre-pubescents or teenagers with no money and a lot of time on their hands, or when games weren't as common and numerous as they are today, but in a time in which buying and downloading a new game for under 5€ is one alt-tab away from me even as I'm typing this, there's a limit to how much you can test the player's patience. To quote Yahtzee: «no game these days has any excuse for having a lives system, because I place a clear distinction between a game that supplies an enjoyable meaty challenge, and one that merely fucks the player about».

Examples: the limited continues on the first Mortal Kombat, and the limited lives in Star Wars: Dark Forces. The latter, in particular, came out in a time in which limited lives systems were already obsolete. 

• Over-reliance on luck

There's always a risk in putting parts of a game's challenge in the hands of a random number generator. Up to a certain amount, it's reasonable, as it adds an exciting element of unpredictability not unlike that of tabletop RPGs. But, like everything else, it can be overdone. For example, when it overrides strategy, or when an unlucky roll can make a situation basically impossible to win, or when information or items that are crucial for progressing are hid behind a wall of randomness (e.g. random drops). Many games let player choice influence the RNG in some way (the basic example being an item with +20% critical strike chance, or the shooter's stance and distance from the target influencing the probability of hitting), or they give enough room for recovering after an unlucky roll, and most of the time this is enough. But even then, there's a certain line of common sense that should be respected. Have some sort of "sensible limit" that overrides the RNG: some shots cannot reasonably miss, crucial items do not drop at unreasonably low rates, don't make critical hits so powerful that they can turn the tide of a battle and one-shot opponents (I'm looking at your bloody frying pans, Team Fortress 2). Otherwise, over-reliance on luck can make every defeat AND every victory feel unjust and undeserved, and belittles the role of skills in the challenge, basically turning it into a game of dice with fancy graphics in which save scumming rightfully becomes a necessity. 

Examples: in the (otherwise excellent) X-Com: UFO Defense, it is perfectly possible for one of your soldiers to sneak right up to an alien's back, one tile away from them, empty a whole magazine's worth of rapid shots, and miss every single one of them. It is also perfectly possible, if the dice REALLY hate you, for the weakest of the alien foot soldiers to survive a direct hit from a rocket, while your brand new armoured tank gets destroyed by one shot from that same foot soldier's PISTOL. In the very first Fallout, it is perfectly possible for a lucky critical hit, from an enemy whose hits the player character barely registered up to that point, to do damage equal to twice your whole max health. In the (perfectly mediocre) Sanctum, survival mode, the enemies which make up each wave are chosen randomly, and facing the wrong kind of monster during the first two-three waves (i.e. before you've had the resources to build your defenses and power up your weapons) can easily make the game unwinnable beyond any possible strategy. In Terraria, some items have such unreasonably low drop or spawn rates that one wonders why to even put them in the game.

In conclusion, it all comes down to a few principles that wrap up all the cases I addressed:  

1) The challenge should come from applying the rules, not from trying to figure out what the rules are. 
When failing, the ideal reaction should be «Damn, I messed up» or «Hm, so what if I try this instead?», not «What the hell just happened?» or «Wait, it can't do that!» or «How the fuck was I supposed to know that?». 

2) The game should try to challenge and encourage, not punish and humiliate.   
When faced with a game over screen, I should feel like I did something wrong, and not that I was cheated by poor mechanics, unfair AI, unpredictable and unavoidable threats.

3) The player should be given all the tools and information for approaching the challenge and intuiting the consequences of their choices. 
The «How the fuck was I supposed to figure that out?» moment is to be avoided. When you're presenting me an enemy that is only vulnerable to water attacks, make them look hot and fiery so I can figure it out, don't make me blindly throw all I've got at them hoping that something will eventually work. When the boss has a stun or a one-hit-kill attack, give me enough time and cues to react to them, don't make me rely on hoping that it doesn't perform them. When you're giving me one key and many locks, give some clue to figure out which will make me proceed. Don't make the dialogue choice that will later cause my demise be «Hey, how you doing?». Don't expect me to wander around for hours trying random stuff until something works. Trial-and-error is little more than relying on luck, and at that point you might as well be playing dice.

4) Punishment for failure should be proportionate to the reason for failure
Any difficulty can be mitigated if the punishment for failure is light enough (e.g. Hotline Miami, You Have To Win The Game), just like any can become unbearable if the punishment is too heavy (e.g. lack of checkpoints, limited lives, very long waiting time before being back in action etc.). Of course there must be some drawback to losing, or there is no point in me trying to win, but don't put the ability to send me back to the start of the game in the hands of an arbitrary, unpredictable threat (like an invisible block or a dice roll). The harsher the punishment, the more manageable the threats must be; the more overwhelming the threats, the lighter the punishment must be.

Needless to say, a balance between difficulty and accessibility, challenge and intuitiveness, is very hard to reach. Creating a game that is merely punishing and hard is easy: any twelve-year-old with a pirated copy of RPG Maker can create teh hardest game evah. But making a game that is hard AND balanced, challenging without being frustrating, unforgiving yet intuitive, complex without being obtuse, difficult through the complex application of simple mechanics, that's the mark of a game designer that can create masterpieces.

In case you're interested, here is some further material on the subject:
    • Video by Extra Credits: Challenging vs Punishing Games
    • Video by Extra Credits: Easy Games
    • TV Tropes page: Fake difficulty

[Essay] Of Dao, Qi, the Force, and religious wars

One of my periodic Wiki Walks through the amazing Wookieepedia has led me to consider the many similarities between the concept of the Force in Star Wars (and Jedi and Sith views on it) and many philosophies and religions of Eastern Asia. Now, it is no secret that George Lucas drew heavily from the Chinese concepts of qi and dao[1] and from the Japanese swordfighting martial art of Kendō, and many have already pointed out the similarities between the old Jedi Order and Buddhist monks or between dao and the Force as concepts. Many interesting articles on the matter already exist on the internet; I would like however to try to further analyse the differences between the two, and to share a couple of reflections of mine on the subject.

Image taken from http://www.coffeewithkenobi.com/the-dao-of-star-wars-a-guest-blog-by-joshua-whitson/

In dao, the opposing principles of Yin and Yang aren’t given any ethical connotation of “good” and “evil”: each implies the other (in its symbol, the black portion contains a single white dot and vice versa), and both are necessary. In the Star Wars films, however, the Light Side and the Dark Side are clearly principles of Good and Evil, in a manner which may remind of Manichean or Zoroastrian ideas. Followers of the Dark Side see the Force as a means to an end, their own power and fulfilment («Through passion, I gain strength / Through strength, I gain power / Through power, I gain victory / Through victory, my chains are broken»[2]), while followers of the Light Side consider the Force its own end, and seek greater knowledge and inner emotional detachment in order to guide the Galaxy to peace. Indeed, most followers of the Light Side refer to it simply as “The Force”, and consider the Dark Side something entirely different: in this view, the Light Side is merely the Force’s natural state, a naturally flowing soothing river, and the Dark Side is its corrupted form, a burning fire of pure power, and keeping “balance” in the Force simply means eradicating the Dark Side. This is the most common view in the old Jedi Order, backed by the fact that its precursors did discover the Dark Side long after discovering the Force itself, and may be more akin to Buddhism than Daoism: avoidance of selfishness, extremisms, passion, personal possessions, and worldly cravings (taṇhā), while leading a monk-like life of compassion towards every living being in order to stop suffering (dukkha) and break out of the karmic cycle of death and rebirth (saṃsāra). The two philosophies are very far from being the same thing, of course, but some similarities do appear. 

However, this view was not universal: some, like Darth Krayt and perhaps Darth Plagueis, treat the two sides as semi-sentient entities with purposeful designs, each using their wielders as tools, despite being parts of a whole. In some Expanded Universe stories there are planets and races that are described as being naturally rich with the Dark Side (i.e. the Masassi, the Rakata, the original Sith), but even parts of the canon material seem to be close to this interpretation. Yoda and Luke fight and reject the "dark side" within themselves as if it were an enemy actively trying to subdue them, the "temptation of a devil", but they do not consider it a part that needs to exist for there to be balance. This view may be more similar to Zoroastrian or even Christian concepts.

Others, like the followers of the Unifying Force (including Darth Sidious), the followers of the unorthodox Potentium view, the Gray Jedi (like Jolee Bindo), and some members of the New Jedi Order (like Kyle Katarn and Mara Jade), view the Force as a neutral power that takes no sides: the potential for Dark Side and Light Side lay in the users, not in the Force itself. Hence why Jedi like Jolee Bindo and Kyle Katarn had no qualms about using Force powers traditionally associated with the Dark Side, and Mace Windu used an aggressive lightsaber style many deemed too close to the Dark Side, as they believed that only the intent of the user mattered. Some powers just happen to be of more use to, shall we say, "the light", while others were more frequently of use to "the dark". Despite some aspects of the Living Force view resembling Daoist thought[3], this might be the interpretation that gets closer to that of dao: an all-encompassing lifeforce that simply is, with no intent or ethic.

«The capacity for good or evil, like the Force itself, is in all living creatures. And belonging to the Jedi Order, or the Sith, or any group, won't change who you are at your core.»

In my opinion, the most comprehensive, convincing, and interesting interpretation of the Force lies just between the concepts of dao and qi: an all-encompassing energy that exists in and between every living and non-living thing in the universe, and that can be manipulated by individuals with varying degrees of prowess to cause many different effects for many different purposes (much like qi or ki or prana); that also exists as an all-encompassing non-sentient essence of the universe itself, the deepest nature of the Galaxy, that naturally moves towards its own balance and harmony; with no ethically distinct sides, or perhaps with the Dark and Light Side merely representing two different principles much like yin and yang (passion and compassion, life and intelligence, conflict and peace, creation and stability) that gain an ethical connotation only through the intent of their users.

How to explain, then, the countless conflicts between Jedi and Sith, Light and Dark, religious wars that have scarred the Galaxy for over 30.000 years? Perhaps this is, again, but the natural way in which the Force moves towards balance, as the wind naturally blows between a high air pressure area and a low air pressure area: whenever there is an umbalance in the Force, caused by the actions of Force users trying to force their will upon the universe, war is the physical effect of this natural movement towards a state of equilibrium. This is, again, pretty close to Daoist views. In my opinion, there is no reason to believe that the wars between Light Side and Dark Side followers are proof of the two sides actually being distinct entities with distinct intentions. 

The Force Wars, which took place over 25,000 years before the Battle of Yavin, were the first conflict between Light Side and Dark Side followers. Image taken from Wookieepedia.

After all, no religious war is ever truly only about religion: a religion isn’t something as simple as ticking the box of whichever god(s) one chooses to worship, and it is quite childish to believe so. Religion is the symbol and spearhead of a society’s (or an individual's) whole system of beliefs in the fields of ethics, human rights, philosophy, ecology, economy, history, science, progress, interests, culture, and so on; therefore a religious war is a clash between ways of life, ways of seeing and interpreting the universe, ways of deciding how civilisation should progress. A religious war is but one of the many, many ways humans display their arrogance and presumptuousness in identifying those who are similar to them, identifying who are “the others”, and believing that their way and only their way is right, sensible, rational, and ethical. Paradoxically, it’s the same arrogance and presumptuousness so proudly displayed by a very large part of the internet atheist community, and I find it so ironical that they don’t seem to realise how much their contempt for religion makes them similar to the religious extremists that they so despise, but that’s a rant for another time.

The difficulty one finds in pinning down any one real-world philosophy or religion as the equivalent of any single view of the Force, is testimony of both the immense potential for historical and philosophical depth in the Star Wars universe (a potential that is, in my opinion, unmatched by any fictional universe in modern history, save maybe for Tolkien’s Arda), and the sheer amount of works and authors that have tried to expand its spiritual aspect much beyond what little had transpired in the films. Even at the cost of producing pieces of fiction that contradict both each other and George Lucas’s original (and mostly unexpressed) vision.

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[1] I’m using the Pinyin transliteration system for Chinese terms, therefore “dao” is to be pronounced with a [t] (voiceless unaspirated alveolar occlusive) despite the use of the graph “d”, and "qi" is to be pronounced with a [tɕʰ] (aspirated voiceless alveo-palatal affricate).

[2] Code of the Sith, as first appeared in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic; in-universe, it was written by Sorzus Syn in 6900 BBY. Conflict, the opposite of peace, is seen as a source of progress. One might note that some of the views expressed by the Sith throughout the ages are not too dissimilar from LaVeyan Satanism, and others bear a striking resemblance to principles contained in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

[3] As far as I know, no orthodox view of the Force among the Jedi or Sith embraces the concept of wu wei (non-action or non-effort) that is so fundamental in Daoism: acting without forcing one’s will upon the universe and its natural course, but instead acting in accordance with its natural harmony. It’s the well-known concept of “being like water”: when one’s actions are in complete harmony with the way of things, they will come naturally and effortlessly). All Jedi taught instead that it was their duty to use the Force to protect others. However, the believers of the Potentium thought that the Dark Side was a “perversion” of the Force twisted by the selfish will of its users, and that the Jedi were not needed to fight evil as long as every action was conducted with moral intent; despite its ethical connotation, this view is closer to wu wei.