Problems with Difficulty Modes

Picture yourself coming into a brand new game, only to be asked to choose a difficulty
mode that’s suitable for yourself, and presented with a number of different menu options.
And frankly, they don’t do that good of a job at giving you sufficient information to make
such an important decision. This is how many games in our history have done difficulty,
and it continues to be fairly prevalent among modern games.

Here are its common criticisms:

Asking the player to make such a decision right at the beginning is not exactly a good
idea. To select a difficulty mode before the game even starts is to make a major
commitment based on very little information available (e.g. a short description). Once the
player has selected a difficulty, they are probably going to live with it for the entire
playthrough.

Even if the game allows the player to change the difficulty mode later on, it is, in itself,
still not a very good idea. For one, explicitly selecting a difficulty mode in a menu-based
manner is certainly not an interesting choice that games strive to offer their players. They
do not have to weigh anything against anything. They do not have to analyze the risks
and rewards coming as a result of each option. And generally speaking, players are not
going to be good at weighting short-term convenience against long-term enjoyment. They
just do not know the game enough.

Such approach would defeat the entire point of progression through unlocking higher and
better tools to enhance and assist with gameplay. It would go against the intended
gameplay experience from the game designer. And most importantly, it would make the
player feel judged for not choosing a higher difficulty.
There have been several solutions to negate these issues, of which Mark Brown has gone
into depths in one of his videos. However, not one of them was able to solve them all and
still maintain immersion.

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment

The idea of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (or DDA) hinges on the theory of the
player’s Flow State, in which the player is completely immersed, and the game’s
difficulty feels just right. Any more difficulty will cause frustration and break immersion.
Any less difficulty and the player will quickly find boredom, and you guessed it, lose
immersion. Therefore, as designer Andrew Glassner put it in his book Interactive
Storytelling, games “should not ask players to select a difficulty level. Games should
adapt themselves during gameplay to offer the player a consistent degree of challenge
based on his changing abilities at different tasks.” Or in other words, games should be
implemented with a performance evaluation system as well as a dynamic difficulty
adjustment system in order to adjust itself to accommodate the infinitely different and
ever-changing characteristics of players. More on the technical details of DDA can be
found in Robin Hunicke’s 2005 paper The Case for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in
Games.

However, while the Flow State theory admittedly has its merits, the DDA approach
doesn’t go without its numerous downsides:

Some players, when they find out about DDA, hate it. Especially when DDA cannot be
turned off, the player ends up feeling patronized, and not respected by the game as an
adult, capable of taking on challenges and improving him/herself.

Players can, and will, learn to exploit DDA by pretending to be worse at playing than
they actually are. And oftentimes, a DDA system will require some sort of break time in
order to avoid revealing itself to the player, thus not able to quickly adapt itself to the
player’s ostensible skill level.

DDA inhibits the player’s ability to learn and improve. As soon as the player improves,
the difficulty ramps up to match their skill level, thus eliminating the possibility of
positive results. If the player cannot see some sort of feedback from the game regarding
their performance, they cannot know whether any changes in their approach to gameplay
were effective.

DDA may create absurdities. One of the popular example of DDA going awry is the
rubber-band effect in racing games, where opponents speed up and slow down seemingly
for no reason in order to adapt to the player’s performance.

DDA is incompatible with some forms of challenge. If the challenge in question is

numerically-based, then DDA can work easily. However, when the challenge is
symbolical, with pre-designed elements that are nakedly visible to the player, often
having only one or a few intended solutions, then DDA cannot work.

There are many interesting and nuanced approaches to DDA that I won’t mention since
that’s beyond the scope of this segment. While I imagine there are going to be a lot of
way to make DDA functional and sufficiently inscrutable through clever algorithms and
implementation, I am rather discussing the fundamentals.

Organic Difficulty in Games

There seems to be a number of different terms to address this approach, but just for this
article I’m going to use the term “Organic Difficulty.” This is something that has been
tossed around in the last decade or so.

The basic idea of Organic Difficulty is that the game does not ask the players to select or
adjust their preferred difficulty via GUI-based commands, nor does it automatically adapt
itself to match with the player’s performance and progress. But rather, the game allows
the player to interact with it in certain ways to make it easier, or harder, for themselves.
These take the form of tools, approaches, strategies, input sequences or methods, etc.
which should often come with some sort of trade-off.

This is something that has been implemented in a number of games including From
Software’s Dark Souls, which Extra Credits has dedicated an entire episode to, and which
everyone should take a look.
In Metal Gear Solid V, for every mission the player has completed, there’s a score rating
system which provides a rough overview of the player’s performance based on a number
of factors such as stealth, lethality, accuracy, completion speed, whether the player has
completed any mission tasks, and what tools they used. While the player does get minus
points for mistakes such as getting detected, raising enemy alert, taking hits, etc. some
other factors are not as clear-cut as to how they constitute minus points aside from
narrative reasons. The player can always go on a lethal rampage, tossing grenades at
everybody in sight, or calling a support helicopter to airstrike the entire enemy base. The
player is provided the tools to do exactly all of those, and they’re always just a few
buttons away, and the worst they get is a C rank, provided they completed the mission,
and a slight dip in their earnings.

Another example of this can be found XCOM: Enemy Within. There's a "cheesy" tactic
in the game that can almost ensure victory, which is to have a unit with the Mimetic Skin
ability to safely spot the enemies, thus enabling a squadsight-sniper from across the entire
map to pick them off one-by-one safely without any real repercussion. This strategy is
extremely effective in virtually every mechanical aspect of combat, with the only risk
being that the spotter must not be flanked for they would instantly lose invisibility. The
actual problem with this strategy is that it’s incredibly boring: your snipers just simply
shoot every turn, and you can only take a few shots every turn, not to mention reloading.
This strategy is best suited for beginners and people who have made mistakes and want to
get out of the downward spiral. While on the other end of the spectrum, there are players
who understand how the game and the AI of every alien unit in the game work, so they
are more confident about moving up close and personal with enemies with minimal
armor. Because for them, it's not about defending against the enemies, but about
manipulating, "nudging" the enemies into behaving the way these players want them to
(e.g. nobody needs armor when enemies are only going to attack the tank; nobody needs
to take good cover when enemies are too scared to move to flank in front of an
Opportunist-overwatch unit; etc.)

The above examples seem to imply a few important points regarding difficulty:

Difficulty should not only be designed around the mechanics of a game. It should also
take into account the aesthetics or elegance of those very mechanics.

Punishment does not always have to be tangible or significant, as long as it is enough to

indicate to players that they are straying off the intended experience. A good analogy
would be physical pain. The pain itself is not what’s causing harm to your body. The
physical wound is. Pain is merely a bodily signal to let you know that what’s happening
right now is pretty bad and you probably shouldn’t let what just happened happen again.
But remember, the choice is ultimately yours!

It may not be a good idea to put people on the linear graph of "gaming skill" where some
people are simply "softcore, not-so-good at video games" and some other are "hardcore
and always challenge-seeking." The idea alone is absurd, because players on such a graph
would move up and down constantly, even during a single playthrough. Some people
pick things up faster than a game can predict with its tutorials' pacing. Some people due
to real life reasons have to abandon the game for some time, and they lose a bit of their
touch when they come back to it.

Instead of judging the player’s skill and trying to accommodate every possibility, games
should be judging player interactions instead, using a spectrum between Effectiveness
and Aesthetics of Play (or what I shall humbly name Ludoaesthetics).

The Effectiveness-Ludoaesthetics Spectrum (ELS)

On the Effectiveness-Ludoaesthetics Spectrum (ELS), difficulty exists only at the lowest
technical level. Each end of the ELS represents what each player wants at a certain point
in the game with certain conditions. On this spectrum, games are designed with the
player’s interactions, approaches and strategies in mind, each with its own degree of
effectiveness and ludoaesthetics. These are not solely defined by mechanics or the
player’s skill level, but rather the way in which they are experienced and perceived by the
player.

Effectiveness refers to how well the player can progress and achieve their goals in a game
using the set of tools they’re given and the strategies they’re allowed to formulate. How
easy those tools are to use, and how good they are at helping the player progress towards
the game’s intended goals, primarily constitute Effectiveness. Players who aim towards
and stay on this end primarily look for the most effective ways to achieve the intended
goals of the game (which of course include playing the game the easy way).

Ludoaesthetics refers to the perceivable aesthetic appeals of the aforementioned set of

tools and strategies given to the players. Players who aim towards this end do not
necessarily look for the most effective ways to achieve the intended goals. But rather they
tend to look for the added intrinsic benefits derived from unconventional play. These
benefits include:

Superficial Attractiveness: Visual and auditory appeal of using the subject matter or the
subject matter itself. It can be represented by any entity the player can recognize in the
game such as a character with great visual design, a badass-looking weapon with
satisfying visual and sound effects, etc.

Competitiveness: a.k.a. bragging rights. This is rather self-explanatory. There is always

that portion of players who keep seeking greater and greater challenges to prove
themselves to the world. They may even go as far as handicapping themselves with
arbitrary limitations to heighten the challenge.
Greater sense of satisfaction derived from greater challenges that may go beyond the
goals intended by the game. People who have been through heights of overwhelming
odds know about, and may expect, the immense amount of satisfaction that comes with
them.

Narrative Fantasy: Players may look for things that may not be effective or productive in
terms of gameplay because they would align with the narrative better (in games that
understandably contain some degree of ludonarrative dissonance), or they would add an
extra layer of depth and intensity to the narrative and thereby enhancing it. Essentially,
they’re sacrificing gameplay optimality to elevate their narrative fantasy.

Design for Ludoaesthetics

The point of designing for ludoaesthetics is NOT to create increasingly harder challenges
in order to accommodate the player’s increasing skills (though that is not to say such
approach has no merits whatsoever). But rather, it is actually to encourage players to
strive for aesthetics in their gameplay and to lean more towards the right side of the
spectrum.

Here are a few suggestions on how to go about it.

Creating more depth

Depth refers to the amount of space the player is allowed to make interesting choices
using the set of tools they’re given by a game. For a more detailed explanation of what
Depth is in comparison to Complexity, you can take a look at Extra Credits’ episode on
Depth vs. Complexity.

Essentially, Complexity is the amount of constituent elements that make up a game, and
Depth is the degree of interactivity between those elements. The very nature of
ludoaesthetics has to do with the deviation from the default, intended approach (a.k.a.
Playing “by-the-book.”) Therefore, the more those elements “talk” to one another, the
better chance it is for ludoaesthetics to emerge, because then the player will be able to
find more different ways to control or manipulate each element.

[Also read: Design for Theorycrafting]

Depth is pretty much the prerequisite for ludoaesthetics even as a concept to exist.
Without a lot of depth, the window of opportunities for ludoaesthetics get significantly
lower or completely non-existent.

Creating patterns suggesting the possibility of gameplay aesthetics

Adding more depth is not only about simply adding more stuff in a game and making
them as obscure as they possibly can be. It is also about leaving breadcrumbs to suggest
that there is more than meets the eye, therefore encouraging players to explore further
possibilities. What kind of depth to even add? And how does one go about
communicating it?

Below is a conceptual representation of a set of challenges typically found in video

games.

Each challenge is represented by a window of failure and a window of success. These

windows can be spatial, temporal, symbolic, strategic, or a combination of all. They are
the spaces in which the player enters by behaving in a certain expected way. Secondly,
the black line represents the player’s interactive maneuvers: where to get across and
which direction to turn to next, in order to overcome the set of challenges without
stumbling into the windows of failure.

For example, say we have a situation in a 3D platformer game where the player is facing
a pit, and across the pit leaning towards the right side there is a narrow platform. In such
a scenario, we can assume that the window of failure includes any and all sets of
behaviors that lead the player plummeting down the pit, and the window of success
includes those that lead the player to landing on the platform across the pit safely.
Now consider the same representation of challenge above, but this time with a slight
deliberate arrangement.

As you can see, the sizes of the windows of failure and the windows of success stay
exactly the same, but the positions of the windows of success have been altered so that
they align somewhat (but not exactly aligned to the point of being too obvious). You can
see that nested within the windows of success is a narrower window where the amount of
the player’s maneuvers stays extremely minimal. Stepping into this window offers the
opportunity for a non-disrupted gameplay flow, where a deliberate and guided set of
behaviors will let the player “breeze” through the challenges seemingly almost with ease.
This window is where ludoaesthetics occur.

Of course, the downsides of it are aplenty: it can be extremely difficult to realize such a
window exists in a real scenario. And in order to stay inside such a narrow window, the
player has to be extremely precise and/or smart in their gameplay. You can think of this
window of non-disrupted flow as an intended “weak point” of the challenge, where a
single and concentrated attack will break the whole thing apart in one fell swoop. But the
process of identifying such a weak point, and delivering the finishing blow with great
accuracy may require a lot of trials and errors, and can be extremely tedious and/or
difficult.

An Example from Master Spy

A common manifestation of ludoaesthetics comes in the form of speedrunning. Finishing
with speed is, for the majority of games, not the primary intended goal. Games are rarely
ever designed to be speedrun, and most players do not have to finish any games at high
speed in order to not miss anything. So speedrunning has always been a sort of arbitrary
self-imposed challenge by those who seek greater sense of enjoyment from their favorite
games.

However, there are a few exceptions. And you can find the above mentioned window of
non-disrupted flow in levels like this one from Master Spy by Kris Truitt.
In this game you play the role of the Master Spy, to infiltrate ridiculously well-guarded
buildings, palaces and fortresses with a huge number of different enemies, hazards and
contraptions standing in your way. And you are given no tools whatsoever but an
invisibility cloak that can help you sneak past the eyesight of certain enemies while
halving your movement speed.

In the example above, your goal is to retrieve the keycard on the other side of the wall
slightly to the right of your starting point, and then to escape through the white door right
above your starting point safely. And while your cloak can get you past the eyesight of
the guards, it is of no use whatsoever against the dogs, who can smell you even when
you’re cloaked and will sprint forwards to attack you at horrendous speed as soon as
you’re on the same ground as them.

So what you have to do as a sequence of actions in this level is first to cloak yourself,
then drop down from the first ledge past the the first guard, then quickly decloak to
regain speed as the cloak is useless against the incoming dogs. Then before the first dog
reaches you, move forward to the right, then quickly jump up. Keep jumping to retrieve
the keycard while avoiding the second and third dog. Cloak up, then get on the ledge with
the three moving guards. Finally, jump to the left to reach your destination.

However, as you can see from the footage above (courtesy of a speedrunner nicknamed
Obidobi), as soon as the player reaches the ledge with the three moving guards on the
right, the guards turn to the other side and begin moving away from where the player is,
effectively freeing the player from having to cloak and having their movement speed
halved. And then right before the player reaches for the white door, the guard on the far
right is about to touch the wall and thereby turning back to the left. This is such a tiny
window of success that should the player not have begun moving right after they started
the level and stayed uncloaked at the end, they would have failed. The level is designed
in such a way that it can be completely solved without wasting any moment and action.
Is it significantly more difficult to play this way? Yes. Was this arrangement absolutely
necessary? Not really. But the designer made the level with the expectation that people
are going to speedrun the game and will be looking to optimize their timing with each
level. Thus, the levels in Master Spy are designed so that should the player start looking
to speedrun the game, they will easily recognize that sweet, sweet window of non-
disrupted flow. It is an immensely satisfying experience to discover it.

Ensure Usability
As usual, it is easy to get too extremely logical about design and forget all about the
equilibrium, which is almost always what design is about.

In this case, it is important that designers must ensure that whatever tools they’re making
for their players to achieve ludoaesthetics, MUST have at least some sort of usability,
even if it’s incredibly niche or extremely difficult to pull off. Things that serve nothing
and mean nothing are NOT aesthetic. Say you have an RPG, and one of your players goes
out of their way in order to build an unconventional character because they see some sort
of future potential from this build, only to find out later that when they’re finished with
the build, the meta of the game has changed and the window of opportunity for such a
build has long passed. This means that the entire amount of depth you added, and the
ludoaesthetics you might have intended by allowing that player to go in such away, is
utterly useless and entirely wasted. So always remember to ensure usability for
everything you add in your game.

Conclusion
Organic Difficulty and the ELS are not only, and not necessarily, an alternative solution
to the whole difficulty problem. But rather, they represent an entire paradigm shift away
from the idea that games should find more and more complex ways to serve players with
different skill levels, and towards a design philosophy where players are given integrated
tools within the context of games to set their own difficulty at any point without breaking
immersion and perhaps the extra baggage of shame. It is not enough to have your players
stay at the same level of difficulty throughout the game, or dynamically adjust the
difficulty on the fly to suit them. It is best, in my opinion, to let your players cook to their
palate. Just make sure that the process of cooking and the game itself are one and the
same.