Classical Conditioning and Game Design, or “How not to make a challenging game”

I like a challenge in my video games. I was one of the people who was bashing their heads over and over against Vaelastraz, Nefarion, C’thun and the like until durability was a whisper on the wind, then dropped a repair bot and did it all again. I play pokemon Nuzlocke, I use unorthodox builds in RPG’s and I’ll play with just plasma pistols on Legendary Halo. Whether a game is challenging by itself or can be made challenging, it doesn’t matter so long as the challenge is there. Sadly, developers these days seem to have misinterpreted the concept of “challenging” as “brutally hard”.

It may seem that the two are similar, or that this is just complaining. After all, what is more challenging than giving an enemy five times the health and triple damage? Unfortunately that is not creating a challenge. That is simply increasing the difficulty level. You see, most games created in these times come with variable difficulty levels, which is understandable considering the need to target an ever growing population of casual gamers. However, the challenges present in older games aren’t finding their way into the newer titles and what we are seeing is an endless slew of titles whereby the only challenge is to put several more bullets into something before it dies.

A game does not have to be brutally difficult to be challenging. Consider Ultima Online, for example. Whilst the game was not easy it was not brutally difficult either, but death had serious consequences. This meant that whilst you could navigate the game fairly simply, it was required that you knew what you were doing and that you were careful. Combined with encounters that forced a player to deal with a substantial risk to their lives for the best rewards, you were given a challenge without the need to mindlessly raise health and damage levels of enemies. Trine is another good example of a game that provides a challenge, in that it required equal elements of puzzle platforming and simple combat, which meshed together to provide the challenge. On the higher difficulty levels it wasn’t necessarily more enemies, but enemies in new, more difficult places or the removal of certain terrain or an increase in the cost of abilities that generated a more challenging gaming environment.

Now, I haven’t played much in the way of Demon’s Souls, but from what I have played and having done some reading it appears clear to me that this is an example of what NOT to do when you want to challenge your player base. Challenges are something that, with appropriate skill, awareness and knowledge can be beaten the first time around. It may take a few more tries, but the point is that it CAN be done. For example, consider solo dungeons in DDO: Stormreach. As a rogue, with careful movement, positioning and timing you would attempt to navigate an intricate environment of traps and enemies and by keeping a watchful eye out as well as being able to read the movements of your enemies, you could disable the traps, slay only the enemies you needed to and complete your goal. With Demon’s Souls, you run out and you die; not because you didn’t possess the necessary skill or awareness but because the game is designed like that. It is an exercise in repetition, forcing a player to redo a particular section many times. That isn’t challenging, that’s rote learning. If you were to give players information about the task ahead instead, such as telling them vaguely the sorts of dangers they will face, the player is then armed with some level of ability to defend themselves on their first try. Another possibility is to make certain events more obvious or slower, so that it isn’t a case of “step here, instantly die, respawn and retry”. A game following that design philosophy would make even Pavlov wince.

Halo is guilty of this sort of thing too. I would ask how many Spartans had fallen to sniper fire when rounding a corner but I’d only receive the collective moaning of thousands of gusts of wind through the holes of so many Mjolnir helmets. This is not good challenge design. You want to know what would be good challenge design there? A simple, one line piece of dialogue that warns the player of snipers. Heck it needn’t even be done visually, you could have the player be guided toward a marine hiding behind some form of cover and as the marine goes to warn the player, his head explodes in a puff of red mist because of a high energy plasma discharge. The player is now aware that snipers are a challenge in the next section and additionally has some information as to where the first sniper fired from. They can now take steps to deal with them, instead of the typical situation that is “walk around corner, oh I’m dead, frigging snipers, let’s try that again”.

The essence of a good challenge is to provide the player with an obstacle that is surmountable the first time with proper care, skill, awareness and knowledge. To blindly kill the player repeatedly in order to make a game seem more difficult is not challenging, it is artificial challenge increase through the use of Pavlovian methods; “Die, learn, repeat until you don’t die anymore”. In regards to good challenges, I have to say that Blizzard holds the title with one key problem; those players who first encounter a new fight must follow the Pavlovian Method, to die and to learn through death. This is why websites with tactical information to defeat the challenges in World of Warcraft are so popular. Players can gather the knowledge required to defeat the challenges ahead of time and can put that knowledge into practice on their first attempt, providing the key to any good challenge; surmountability. It is just unfortunate that to get there, we must step over the bones of those slain by the Pavlovian Method.