Had a good discussion with @sylvie about the purpose and function of Difficulty in games and when I'm not so husked and barely conscious I might write some of those thoughts down here.
Alright so, when I started talking with @sylvie about how difficulty can make you engage more deeply with a game and how it encourages you to solve problems in the game's system, my thoughts on how I gauge Difficulty really started to click into place in a more conscious way for me.
In platformers like Celeste or Sylvie Lime (Although many Sylvie games have this quality and you should play them to see!) the difficulty comes in mechanically and through level design. You have to figure out really precise or creative or technically difficult ways to complete a section, you die often, get to retry rapidly, and this entire process is both fun and it pushes a player to get better at the movement techs, think in new ways about movement in this space, and it feels extremely rewarding when they clear a stage.
I mostly write visual novels and text-heavy exploration games. Most people don't think of VNs as having any Difficulty to them because the mechanics are usually really simple, but if And Then, There Were None can have a difficulty level as a novel then games can too. If you've ever felt stressed out by a dialogue choice or agonized over doing a fight because of the character implications or pored over a wiki to try and understand soulsborne lore, that's a sign of difficulty too, isn't it? The narrative's hooked you just like those platformer mechanics and because of that, you think about it more deeply and feel driven to engage with it more seriously. I'd even argue that just like games teach you how to play them mechanically, they teach you how to read them too.
It's just not a thing I ever really thought about in these terms because these aren't the terms or frames we usually use to talk about narrative design.
I've got more thoughts on this, but I also really want to know:
How do you think of Difficulty in your games? How do you decide where that difficulty comes up, why you've added it, and what effect it has on the player?
i see difficulty in games as adding friction or “conflict” in storytelling. books are pretty boring if nothing is happening. even the most slice-of-life work needs a problem to resolve, so friction needs to be there.
i’ve been interested in writing interactive fiction where the player struggles to empathize with the player character. the friction of “why am i in this character’s shoes” has always been tantalizing to me because the player is likely someone they understand but get disgusted or frustrated at their (in)action.
an example of this would be Hacknet where your actions become more and more ambivalent, even hacking to end someone’s life. your player character is silent, so all you can imagine is the oppressive atmosphere in that one scene.
there’s also putting the player in the worst abrasive resolutions ever. the games of akai mato (King Exit, Demons Roots) come to mind immediately. those endings are more like gut punches right when you want catharsis the most. the player, in facing narrative despair, wants some deus ex machina to resolve the situation, even if they know that’s impossible. think it should be obvious controversial endings like this will definitely have a lot of friction.
another lovely example of friction that people don’t think about is simulation games, especially vehicle ones. playing games like Mudrunner means you have to drive a shitty truck that doesn’t conform to usual sedan car mechanics — and the terrain is also fucking terrible. the long hours of puzzling and driving will become very memorable once you finally finish sending the logs to the correct location.
i think all works have friction: whether it be a challenging platformer, a mindboggling sudoku puzzle with dank variations, a philosophically dense treatise, or simply a challenging young adult book exploring political themes. it’s up to the creators to exploit them so intentionally that the player recognizes them as friction to contemplate over.
difficulty in games like instant death is the easiest one to understand thanks to masocore platformers and souls games, but there’s certainly more to it than just death. living is already a struggle. i think the most interesting works explore what constitutes a struggle and why we keep doing it anyway. the push-and-pull of video game design is so unbelievably fascinating.
