Challenge vs. Frustration

August 19th, 2008 · 26 Comments

I was reading a great followup to GTA IV and how well they nailed their depiction of New York city over at Sexy Videogameland, when Leigh started wondering why it had been so long since she’d played GTA IV, much less thought about it. Namely, she questions why she used to spend so much time playing the old school pre 32 bit era titles, and how people nowadays hardly spend more than 6-10 hours with any given AAA next gen title.

Why is it that the more complex games get, the less time we spend playing them?

It’s a great question, and it’s been one that I’ve been kicking around for a few months, especially after playing Rearmed so much this past week. I’ve probably put in more hours playing Rearmed than I have GTA IV, but I’m not sure that has much to do with the values of the game production as it does a lot of other factors. I don’t think the issue is ever as simple as how real or lush the worlds are (and I’m not implying Leigh felt that way).

Personally, I don’t spend a lot of time with GTA IV because I’m admittedly very burned out on the series. I’ve beaten as many prostitutes as I’m going to beat in this lifetime, I’ve run over countless pedestrians, I’ve busted as many caps in asses as I have to bust. I’m all crooked out. I just don’t identify with a criminal’s plight, no matter how well his story is crafted this time around. I got caught up in the GTA IV hype about as much as I got caught up in the Halo 3 hype (which is to say, very), and despite buying both titles, never got past the 10 hour mark in either (I at least finished Halo 3’s story mode, though).

But again, I’m probably the exception to the rule here. I don’t think the reason most people only play the new big titles for 6-10 hours is because they’re tired of the title itself. I’m wondering if it doesn’t have more to do with the method with which the title is built.

Within the last ten years, there’s been a very deliberate progression away from “hardcore” ludic aesthetics. Before the 64 bit era games, pretty much everything on the market was “Learn by Death.” It’s a game design mentality that is built on the shoulders of coin-op: give the player more challenge than they can possibly accomplish on a single quarter, but reward them with enough cool stuff that they feel compelled to put another quarter in the machine. Almost universally, this is accomplished through “death,” be it killing off the player, or making them lose the race, not reach the end of the level/puzzle before the clock runs out, etc. It’s a financial risk reward game developers had to play for so long, in order to coax as many quarters as possible out of a consumer’s pockets. In many ways, the grind of MMO is the closest current age equivalent (but it’s stretched out over a muuuuuccchhhh longer time curve).

Awhile back at GDC I attended a panel that discussed taking frustration away from the player. Microsoft evidently has all sorts of metrics that show that players who are able to finish a game are more likely to purchase a sequel or order DLC, so it makes sense to take away the frustration that prohibits a player from finishing the title. These things range from automatically adjusting difficulty, creating more checkpoints, allowing saves anywhere (vs. gating at savepoints), but most importantly, not punishing death. Braid, for instance, is a perfect example of how not to punish death: You simply don’t die. You just rewind to a point previous to dying, and fix your error. There’s no need for multiple lives or continues or checkpoints. You just rewind.

Now, before I continue, I don’t think Braid is what’s wrong with gaming. In many ways, it’s what’s right. But the biggest problem with taking away “Learn by Death” is that in many ways, we’ve removed the challenge. There is little to no tension in GTA IV, because I know that if I get into trouble, I just need to die. Cops chasing you? Don’t get arrested; they’ll take away your guns. Just fight them, die, and wind up at the hospital with all of your guns still on your person. The only penalty is that you might have to replay the mission you were on, and you probably lost the stolen car you were driving at the time. Sure, there are hard parts in GTA IV.

But in the ten hours I played GTA IV I didn’t once have a nail-biter moment (at least I don’t recall many).

They came about every 3 minutes in Rearmed, by comparison.

In Rearmed I felt pushed and challenged at every corner, quite frequently more than I would have liked, and at times I laughed at my persistence in trying to get through what I thought was the intended level design only to find I’d just spent the past 20 minutes attempting to get to an impossible to reach secret 1up alcove. I began to remember the pride I felt at beating Bionic Commando the first five times I played it on the NES. There weren’t even save points back then; you had to leave the unit on if you couldn’t play through the entire game in one sitting. I began to realize that I actually enjoy the challenge of Learn by Death, as much as I hate the frustration of it.

We didn’t go to the moon because it was easy, in the words of John F. Kennedy. We went because it was hard. I think people, even if they don’t know they want it, crave a challenge, even if it’s a slight one. I have the sinking suspicion that the more we coddle the player, putting pillows on the sharp spikes and softening the melee blows, we create something that is too simple for them. It’s been a long-held standard of mine that using god-mode while playing a game is tantamount to admitting that the game difficulty is either broken or you are officially finished with it and are now just going to “dick around with it.” Even if dicking around with it isn’t your intent, you have now just ruined the game for yourself. There is no more unique challenge; you’ve seen them all while under the guise of god-mode. You have pretty much turned the challenge into a drooling child’s teether.

And this is what I think is wrong with the current path of removing player frustration. While I agree that we need to pull player frustration as much as possible, we do need to challenge the player, and I think that’s where we’re failing as an industry:

Assassin’s Creed fails to challenge the player through exploration. Climbing took the vast majority of their time to create in the game, and yet it’s the least challenging aspect of the game. It’s too easy to pull off, and by the end of the game I found myself almost trying to make Altair fall.
GTA fails to challenge the player through death. The police meter goes from one to six stars, and yet, the penalty for a six star response is the same as a one star response: die, and restart in the hospital.
Bioshock failed at creating any difficulty or tension at all once the player learns that the entire game can be beaten with a wrench and multiple trips through Vitachambers.

Admittedly, this is a fine line I’m arguing here. I’m not pretending I can easily do a job any better than Levine or Rockstar or Ubisoft at finding the balance of challenging the player without overly frustrating the player. At the end of the day, what drives sales is consumer satisfaction, and if you blow the challenge curve into frustrating territory, the user’s going to not be satisfied, your title won’t sell, and you’re out of a job.

But even as I type that, I’m craving the challenge/frustration of Rearmed. I’d love to say “they got it just right,” but I know that they didn’t. I’m Learning by Death here in the very worst possible spiked trap kind of way, but I’ve been chewing on these baby teethers that are being passed off as “games” for so long that it’s a breath of fresh air. I feel like a newfound S&M junkie. Whip me, beat me, make me bleed, Learn by Death is all I need.

So where is the line? Where do we put the challenge without the frustration? Obviously, it’s somewhere in the “harder than GTA” camp but “easier than Learn by Death” camp, but where exactly does that live? My money, and undoubtedly yours and everyone else’s, goes to the first team that figures it out.

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26 responses so far ↓

1 AndrewN // Aug 19, 2008 at 10:55 pm

Great post. Reminds me of Prince of Persia back in the day. Extremely minimal room for error. Yet oh what a sense of achievement when you did finish it.
2 Army // Aug 19, 2008 at 11:00 pm

Very true! I find myself persistently drawn to the hardest difficulties in all games, but recently, very few have the same level of real challenge the classics had.

Here’s to hoping Left4Dead will actually be difficult!
3 Gerard // Aug 19, 2008 at 11:07 pm

This explains perfectly why Shadow of the Colossus was so good whilst also being slightly out of sync with other games released around it. It had the right balance of challenge and reward in ways that alot of games no longer provide
4 KevinD // Aug 19, 2008 at 11:33 pm

While I can’t discuss *what* I was doing in the WAR Closed Beta tonight due to NDA, I can say that it was challenging - in large part due to my own inexperience with the class I was playing, but nonetheless hard. I’ve also recently picked up FFIV for the DS, which plays exactly like it did on the SNES, barring the inclusion of Augments. Dying horribly to Cagnazzo, Barbariccia, the Magus Sisters, and the mad doctor multiple times made figuring out how they worked all the more satisfying, and their deaths a real victory.

I couldn’t agree more with your post.
5 Nihohit // Aug 20, 2008 at 5:49 am

It is a very fine line - and I think that you’re not the average player. Remember - the “learn by death” standart is somewhat old-fashioned, especially if you look at computer games and home-consoles. New gamers are growing on the lap of the comfortable, kinder system - and if you’ll try to sell them something nearing the original PoP in difficulty, they probably won’t enjoy it.
6 Styskel // Aug 20, 2008 at 7:34 am

That’s my biggest capital-F-rustrationwith many of the current games out there, and why developers have not been getting my money lately. I’ve found that many of the free indie games are challenging and frustrating in a way that encourages further play.

Personally, if a game is not at all challenging (that is, a little frustrating to learn) I will quickly lose interest. Yet if a game has sufficient challenge, even if I’m not playing it I will be thinking about it. For example, I recently (re)started playing Dwarf Fortress. It has a very steep learning curve, and took me four attempts to actually understand enough to start playing the game a little. But now that I’m interested in the game and challenged by the design and concepts, I spend at least a few minutes every day thinking about the game. I haven’t had the time after work to play it in a few weeks, but because of that challenge and frustration I have more drive to overcome it and learn/master the game.
7 Roc // Aug 20, 2008 at 11:10 am

The other night I had a bowl of Cookie Dough ice cream.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I did and I immediately wondered why I ever -stopped- eating the stuff. It was delicious! What the hell must I have been thinking, killing myself with a steady supply of Death By Chocolate, shamefully neglecting the glory of Cookie Dough?

Still, I have this nagging feeling this doesn’t mean Cookie Dough is suddenly the one Cream to rule them all.

Perhaps I was just ready for a change. Perhaps there was no particular failure on the part of Death By Chocolate, nor any specific virtue of Cookie Dough. Just, taste.

Fleeting, malleable, cyclical - taste.
8 Toasty // Aug 20, 2008 at 7:15 pm

I came to a very similar conclusion shortly after beating “You Have to Burn the Rope”. That whole game, but especially the ending song, points out how hollow it feels to be congratulated for something you didn’t really do.

At the same time, I can’t figure out how a game can “punish” the player anymore. Typically it’s by forcing the player to play through a portion of the game again, but there’s not much I hate more than playing through the same 15 minute cakewalk over and over just to get another crack at the real challenge. In the most extreme cases, ultra hardcore games like ADOM and Steel Battalion simply *delete* your save game when you die. But on the other hand, things like Vita Chambers do tend to ruin games for me. I’m glad the PS3 version will have the option to turn them off.
9 Terry Biel // Aug 23, 2008 at 2:31 pm

Related reading to this topic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
10 Ethan Hein // Aug 24, 2008 at 9:11 am

The reason Tetris never gets old is that you always lose, always always always. The marketplace doesn’t reward that kind of game design, you make more sales when people plow through games fast and then get bored of them.
11 Jason Lee // Aug 25, 2008 at 5:31 pm

This has everything to do with what you are discussing:

I Wanna Be The Guy

http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/

Enjoy
12 Jonty // Aug 26, 2008 at 4:07 pm

You have a point, but as those above say: you aren’t entirely representative. You’ve been playing games for years and have those expectations; that games used to be so hard is why less committed players never bothered with them. Now we’re in a position where they’re likely to actually buy a game, nobody wants to scare them off by making it hard.

The bottom of that slippery slope is currently Wii Music, as far as I can work out; Bioshock and GTA are some way up but still nowhere near the heights of BC. Seems to me that there’s an increasingly niche market for the hardcore, which will increasingly be filled by more specialised developers while the big boys go chasing after the mass market.
13 GoNintendo » Blog Archive » Challenge vs. Frustration- What are you waiting for? // Aug 29, 2008 at 2:43 am

[...] Article here [...]
14 Haze // Aug 29, 2008 at 3:47 am

This post brought I Wanna Be The Guy to my mind, too. I just got a friend into it.
15 The N3 Newswire for August 29 | The Video Game Spectrum // Aug 29, 2008 at 7:21 am

[...] their next console in hopes of catching Nintendo –A rant on reviews (SB’s pick!) –Challenge vs. Frustration (SB’s pick!) –An R/B/Y Snorlax sprite made of Post-it Notes –New Tales of Hearts [...]
16 dokuro // Aug 29, 2008 at 7:44 am

nice article!, and Microsoft gave the hole point to why this happends “if the players finish the game they WILL BUY THE SEQUEL”, this is the replacement for quarters :)
17 Fun Link Friday » Games News and Reviews » Binary Joy // Aug 29, 2008 at 8:48 am

[...] Challenge vs. Frustration - one of the reasons we no longer play games as we used too? [...]
18 fuwafuwa // Aug 30, 2008 at 11:38 pm

I see the root of the problem differently…Games are losing their depth.

There are too many narrow designed linear games which punish players for not following/memorizing the only one correct path. There are too many seemingly open but flat boring repetitive games.

Well, people love both of them. Their main aim is to beat the game, watch the story, see the end. Anything that delays that process is frustration. Linear games will push you to the end, and repetitive games only offer repetitive challenges, so no worry here.

I want to see a game that makes each play unique and challenging. I want something beyond predefined memory tests. I want something other than bloated overused gameplay templates. …Finding these kinds of games is the real challenge these days.
19 Patresi // Aug 31, 2008 at 10:03 am

I totally agreee with you, when I beat Contra 4 on hard mode I felt like a gaming superhero!
20 Leonardo Bighetti // Aug 31, 2008 at 10:44 am

Two words: “Ninja Gaiden”

The real question is, are you a ninja or a dog?
21 Zelos // Aug 31, 2008 at 12:16 pm

I think a major issue with the challenge/frustration balance is how the player perceives it. If part of a game is hard, the player is going to be much more prepared to accept it if they’re prepared in advance. I remember getting frustrated with Pixeljunk Eden because it’s presented like a slow, easy game, but it’s actually pretty hard.

Personally, I prefer to play multiplayer if I want a challenge, single player games are more for relaxing after work.

(By the way, any game with saved games allows you to just give up like your GTA hospital example.)
22 Paul Robinson // Aug 31, 2008 at 4:05 pm

You, sir, are badly misinformed. Over the last few years I have seen games go more and more in the direction of stone-hard difficulty so far in excess of sanity that the games are all but unplayable. Tvtropes.org has an item on the subject where the site refers to the state as “Nintendo hard,” an indication that for people who are not bleeding edge gamers, too many of these games are so difficult that even the easy setting can be almost if not actually unplayable. But there is one potential escape route: God mode or other developer tricks to allow you to get past an area.

I have felt the “coin-op crapola” of limiting save points, making it too easy to lose, or even limiting the number of times one can play before the game is over is examples of where the game’s play level is broken.

On the use of God mode. On that point you’re half right: the use of God mode is because the game’s difficulty level is broken. Far too many of these, the difficulty levels are not easy, medium and hard, they are Impossible, Harder Than Impossible, and Even God Couldn’t Do It. And I have NOT ruined the game for myself; the game would be ruined if I couldn’t get past the point I’m at.

You seem to be of the opinion that anyone who plays a game in God mode or uses “cheats” does so for the whole game. Have you considered the idea that someone gets to a point, they get stuck, constantly, and constantly, over and over, and they decide to use God mode to get past that one point, then turn off God mode and go back to regular play? I’ve seen more than one person use that idea. This is especially important when a game is new and there is no on-line help to get you past a tough spot or you don’t want to spend 40 minutes or more to shut down the game, load up a web browser, search for a site where someone has posted a walkthrough or instructions, find the point in the game where you’re stuck, then quit the browser, reload the game and then go back to that point to try the solution someone gave you.

You should consider asking ordinary people who want to play a game and not have to scream and cry because they can’t get past an obstacle that wasn’t intuitive for someone who plays games occasionally, not the type of person that thinks any game you can win at is too easy.
23 Kyle // Aug 31, 2008 at 5:14 pm

You brought up Braid in your discussion, and I’d like to briefly introduce the “games as art” idea in this context. (I know, it’s been beaten to death, but hear me out.) I’m beginning to believe that difficulty and artistry are, at some level, at odds in the realm of games.

I was playing through Braid and got to the “Fickle Companion” level. I hadn’t quite internalized the mechanics for that particular world, so I devised a particularly complicated solution to the puzzle that relied more on reflexes than ingenuity. After 30-45 minutes of struggling through, I finally enacted my meticulously crafted solution, but I had long since started cursing Jonathan Blow. (I apologize to him retroactive, now that I’ve come across the simpler solution.)

The game positions itself as art, but when I come across something that is mechanistically difficult, although conceptually simple, the illusion is shattered. (My solution was logically consistent, and in fact worked; it just relied on the timing of rewind mechanics instead of using the powers of the world.) If I know how to solve the puzzle and am simply struggling with floaty jump physics or a consistent but difficult solution, any aspirations toward artistry are lost.

I feel like this is a problem in general with games qua art — if the difficulty curve is not tailored exactly to player skill, she becomes frustrated and loses her suspension of disbelief.
24 » Fun or Frustration? // Aug 31, 2008 at 8:46 pm

[...] Game-ism published an interesting article about balancing challenge and frustration in video games (http://www.game-ism.com/2008/08/19/challenge-vs-frustration/). While the author comes at the question with a view that is not quite diametrically opposed to [...]
25 Adaptor // Sep 1, 2008 at 3:48 am

I had a lot of suspenseful moments in GTA IV but mostly out of fear for having to replay a long mission. To me, the actual dying in GTA IV isn’t really the problem, it’s retrying missions when you die. Having to drive to a waypoint again, skipping the cutscene and going through the motions untill you reach the point again where you died on the previous attempt. The missions can be very cool but almost nothing is exciting anymore when you see it a second time. That archaic mission structure is what really killed the flow of an otherwise great game and makes me want to turn it off.
26 ¿El dolor es placer? o cómo la dificultad de un juego te hace seguir jugándolo | El Chigüire Literario // Sep 23, 2008 at 5:11 am

[...] éramos más apegados a los juegos porque “aprendíamos por la muerte”, según este artículo de Game-ism. El hecho de que el juego sea un reto, de que tenga una dificultad elevada, de que morir sea una [...]