It's about ACCOMPLISHMENT, not difficulty

That's a really good point. I guess it depends on how 'grindy' a game is, if there are sections where you're really struggling frequently then you're right - it totally takes away from those moments of triumph to eek out a victory against harsh odds only to get a D-. It does tend to work well in jrpgs though, since these tend to be very grindy where your chances of even taking damage are often very low.

In hotline miami, it didnt work nearly as well because the levels were difficult and usually quite challenging on their own and often required many tries.

 

I can't talk about JRPGs, but Hotline Miami is rather hard and the gameplay consists of you trying the rather hard levels again and again until you finally beat them. You "rewrite" the history of your own gaming story until you end the level with the "perfect" run where you murdered everyone and didn't take one hit (because one hit would have killed you). I found that a very rewarding experience and the grade rating at the end often totally contradicted the feeling I had for my own performance. I had A runs where I didn't think I was doing anything special and I had C runs where I was pretty happy that I even managed the level at all so quickly.
For me the game had some potential for personal goals like try different masks or weapons or try how far you can get with only the drill. In my opinion HM2 took away some of that room for creativity and as a result I didn't enjoy it all that much.

I find the "rewriting your own history" part to be a very important aspect in general. I have had a few moments in games where I failed at a challenge and either through a glitch or by design I respawned at a checkpoint where that obstacle was already behind my. That always made me furious because I felt like that fiero moment that I would have gotten soon has been taken away from me. Checkpoints that change the scenario from where the save originally ocurred also harm my "suspension of disbelief". There is no longer that consistent timeline that you rewrite by saving and loading until it's perfect, there are tears at every checkpoint where you die and get thrust into a slightly different scenario.

 

I had to look up "fiero moment" and I came across this link - it's stupid relevant:
http://blog.perblue.com/2012/02/gamer-psychology-101-flow-vs-fiero.html

It actually reflects this thread pretty directly in the main discussion of balanced difficulty and accomplishment. There are actually a bunch of posts discussing the subject (apparently the writer Jane McGonial made a splash when she wrote a book that covered it).

Here's another article talking about how MTG deals with both sides http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/184. I'm not sure I buy the flow argument in relation to MTG - but it's still an interesting read.

 

But difficulty can also be equated to the amount of time it takes, or alternately the amount of work required. A task that requires too much work is hard, while a task that's done before you even think about it is easy.

The big problem is that time spent is a poor metric for engagement. It says nothing about the nature of tasks that go into completing the main task. Compare mining in Minecraft and Terraria. You'll probably spend more time mining in Terraria, but it's made substantially more engaging by providing new environments and challenges that Minecraft barely gets into. The amount of time maybe alludes to what the pacing is like, but otherwise doesn't address what the player is going through.

 

Whenever I start to type 'insightful', I end up typing, 'insiteful'. Which is completely different. Go-go spell check. And, thanks for being the awesome kind of insightful.

What if we apply the recipe for Flow to real life? If 'graduate college' were the ONLY task, then the primary feedback might look like: 42.68% complete. If this were all, then fewer people would graduate - it's too long, becomes extremely boring. Instead, the BIG task, 'get a degree', breaks down into thousands of sub-tasks, from big stuff like 'Junior Year', all the way down to 'Get to class by 8 AM, TODAY!' Each of those tasks has feedback. This is flow at a meta-level. And it also applies to lots of life including 'get married', 'raise a family', and 'have a career'.

Now back to games. The subtasks become the goals. So, whether the player is following explicit tasks (game driven) or is coming up with their own (player driven), it's all attempting to work within the framework of flow. The key is to design our games to best support (1) Goals, (2) Feedback, (3) Minimal Distractions, (4) Balanced Difficulty.

Flow is damn solid, well researched, and hugely applicable for games.

Gigi

 

That guys on some crack! It's a fun little article. A great find that was worth sharing. And, the author is clearly quite lose with his data. "It is said to take ten years or 50,000 hours to achieve the skills, muscle memory, and understanding needed to find flow within an activity." Is a hodgepodge of the science of deliberate practice (Ericsson), that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell - which is also called the '10,000 hour rule', that leads to mastery. It has nothing to do with achieving Flow.

Generally speaking, almost anyone can achieve flow, in almost any activity that provides the 4 ingredients. Washing dishes, programming, and having sex. Lord help us if we had to have 50,000 hours of sex, before we'd get into Flow.

Gigi

 

Some interesting discussion here, also charts..

From my perspective it's pretty simple, games are meant to be fun. But some games circumvent that in the name of "difficulty". I have some peeves I've discussed with other gamers / dev's along the following:

Damage soaking, uhhh! You're not making the game any harder, you're just chronologically endowing it. Increasing nothing but health for different modes screams to me, I couldn't think of anything better so this is what I'll do.

Development drop, so you get less XP on hard mode. That just means again you have to do more of the same to achieve the same goals as on easy mode, no thanks!.

Fetch quests, ARRRRRGHH! .. So what you're saying is I have to collect two more pairs of pants on hard mode aye? Why don't I just go shopping at the mall? It's about as relevant, but if I went shopping I'd actually have gained something.

There's more, but point being. I dislike it when they try and associate difficulty to mechanics when what they're actually doing is just wasting people's time.