re: last share, i found this interesting because the impetus for my 2014 game cute jump was to examine the weird overlap between "skill" difficulty and "time/labor" or "luck" difficulties, especially in the context of precision platformers like jumper, meat boy, celeste, etc. (celeste didn't exist yet but whatever) though the movement in cute jump is based on jumper 1, it was heavily inspired by i wanna be the guy fangames because of how these fangames tend to push the player's limits much further than popular commercial titles.
precision platformers are inarguably skill-based games and i think many players of them would argue luck and time/labor difficulties detract from them. but at a high enough level of precision, near the limit of the player's skill, i feel like they devolve into a sort of grinding or gambling with your own body. you can't execute things perfectly every time, so what's the % chance of you getting past a difficult jump? on average, how long do you have to play to make it past the jump once?
let's say it usually takes a player 3-5 minutes of attempts to get past a certain jump. if i take out the "skill" difficulty, and replace the jump with a gate that just takes 60 seconds of waiting to open, did the game become "easier" for that player?
i think some speedrunners track the number of attempts that get past a certain split, so that you can see the rough probability of a run making it to the end. speedruns often have explicit luck checks, but it's also common for them to have things like frame-perfect tricks that runners can't hit consistently, which blur the line between skill and luck.
people often refer to time/labor or luck difficulties as "artificial difficulty" which is funny because those forms of difficulty are way more common throughout life than the carefully constructed and wholly artificial difficulty of a typical action game
i don't have a conclusion to this post, i'm just a rambling gambling fool
