Periodically a wave of discussion about game difficulty occurs in game developer spaces, so I wanted to share some thoughts that Zach Barth and Keith Holman of Zachtronics* once developed related to this topic that I think are helpful.
Before I start, though, by “difficulty,” I mean the friction and adverse factors that impede or prevent players from arriving at what the game defines as an end or win state. (Does this mean that the difficulty of the game is the game? I think so, but that’s for a different post.)
Importantly, there are different types of difficulty. Each of the following activities could be described as difficult:
- Defeating a chess grandmaster in chess
- Winning the lottery
- Being emotionally honest and vulnerable with someone
Because these activities are so unalike, it follows that each one is difficult in its own way, and decomposing these types will help us if we want to have a conversation about game difficulty overall.
The Difficulty Pentagram
The Zachtronics Difficulty Pentagram, as Zach dubbed it, was the result of a private discussion and not meant to be a rigorous formal theory, but demonstrates how beneficial it can be to think through difficulty in terms of its components.
The sides of the difficulty pentagram are:
- Knowledge
- Skill
- Social/Teamwork
- Time/Labor
- Luck
We will look at each in a little more detail, but first, I will caveat by saying these are not discrete categories, and it is best to think of them as interrelated factors.
Knowledge
A knowledge-based difficulty check is overcome by knowing or learning a fact. Sometimes the game itself will give you the knowledge; for example, you know that a Soulslike boss’ current windup animation means it’s going to do a specific attack that ends with a large impact and recovery period which provides a small window for a counterattack, which you learned from fighting the boss a few times previously. Other times, this difficulty is based on information you might be reasonably expected to have on your own, such as when you are able to play the word “azimuth” in Scrabble because you know that it is a valid English language word.
Knowledge can also refer to more generalized knowledge. For instance, if you know what hitboxes, iframes, and cancels are, you can be effective in a new fighting game more quickly than someone who is unfamiliar with them.
Skill
Skill-based difficulty checks are overcome by practicing the performance of a skill. The difference between skill and knowledge in this model is that knowledge doesn’t take practice— you simply know it or you don’t— whereas skill does.
Skill can mean manual dexterity, similar to what fighting game people mean when they talk about “execution,” such as being able to reliably perform a hadouken in Street Fighter. It can also mean mental dexterity, such as being so good at embedded systems design that you can create a very compact and efficient solution to a programming puzzle in a Zachtronics game.
Social/Teamwork
Social difficulty might also be called “teamwork.” Social difficulty checks are overcome by coordinating the efforts of multiple people. Winning at a team-based multiplayer game mode is one example of overcoming social difficulty, as is completing a high-level raid that requires tightly controlled roles and precisely choreographed actions.
Though less prevalent now, early mobile games heavily encouraged players to recruit their friends to progress faster toward goals, hoping that artificial social pressure introduced by the game would increase their user base. This is another form of introducing social difficulty.
Time/Labor
A time-based difficulty check is overcome by applying labor over time. Assuming this in-game labor is not otherwise difficult on its own, the difficulty is entirely about how much time you have to invest in the activity. Farming games, incrementer games, and the gatcha game grind for a super rare character or item are examples of this type of difficulty.
Luck
Examples of luck-based difficulty checks are simple: dice rolls, card deals, randomized item drops, etc. We don’t need to spend a lot of time discussing luck, as I think it’s mostly self-evident, at least from the perspective of game difficulty.
Emotion
Though it wasn’t part of Zach’s original idea, I want to propose an additional category of difficulty: emotional difficulty. To me, emotional difficulty is the friction you experience when even though there is nothing specifically mechanical in your way, you are impeded from certain actions based purely on feeling. An emotional difficulty check is overcome when you are able to push through that feeling.
Perhaps the easiest demonstration of emotional difficulty is a “shoot the cute fuzzy animal?” style joke game where the only thing preventing you from “winning” is the emotional weight of its presentation. A more realistic example of an emotional difficulty check would be overcoming your attachment to a crew member with poor stats but a likable presentation in order to dismiss them. We might also include real-life emotional difficulty checks as part of the game, such as when you are at a party where a local multiplayer game is running, and need to get over the fear of embarrassment at playing badly before you pick up a controller.
Difficulty’s Many Forms
This is of course a very granular way to think about difficulty. Most games combine multiple types of these difficulties, even in single mechanics. I’ll stress again that this is not intended to be any kind of exhaustive or final word on the matter. There are likely others who have thought about the same topic with much more thoroughness. The main point I want to reinforce here is that “difficulty” is in fact a rather loose concept that can mean several different things in practice, so we should be clear about what we mean when discussing it.
*The Zachtronics Difficulty Pentagram is shared here with Zach’s permission. Zach, in turn, credits “The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning” by Naomi Clark and Eric Zimmerman (GDC 2011) as an inspiration for the thinking described here.
