{"id":6226,"date":"2007-10-13T22:00:52","date_gmt":"2007-10-14T04:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dreamdawn.com\/sh\/post_view.php?index=6226"},"modified":"2007-10-13T22:00:52","modified_gmt":"2007-10-14T04:00:52","slug":"frustration-and-difficulty-progression-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=6226","title":{"rendered":"Frustration and Difficulty Progression Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nGraph 1: Difficulty over Time<\/p><\/div>A couple of weeks ago I posted a message about how Cold Fear<\/a> was driving me up the wall with a sudden spike in difficulty. This post proved to be somewhat inflammatory, and a lot of you came out to tell me to stick with it a little longer. I did, and you guys were right–the game fixed itself. But the episode got me thinking about how difficulty and frustration interact as a player plays a game through for the first time. Specifically, a couple of comments about simply stepping up to the challenge and becoming a better player rather than whining about the difficulty got me thinking: I don’t mind hard games at all, and usually I’m more than happy to spend some time iterating over the same challenge until I’ve improved my skills. But occasionally, the difficulty level is high enough that I stop having fun. This is certainly what happened in to me a few hours into Cold Fear, even though that game is still easier than other games that I’ve completed without becoming frustrated.<\/p>\n

So I thought about it for a bit and decided to visualize my complaint with Cold Fear in the form of the all-powerful line graph. I have two graphs to show, one tracking the difficulty of several games over time and the other showing the relative frustration I felt with those same games over the same amount of time. The levels here are completely subjective: I don’t expect other people to have felt exactly the same way as I did about these games, so before you get bent out of shape about how Siren<\/a> is totally easy or Halo is amazingly hard and frustrating, realize that these are my impressions alone. Chill, ok?<\/p>\n

You are probably like, “wait, did he say Halo?” Yeah, it seems a little out of place in this graph, I have to admit. But I am including it here for a good reason: it’s an extremely popular, extremely highly-rated game (also I just finished it the other day, so it’s fresh in my mind). If you get 97% on Metacritic.com<\/a> and sell over 6 million copies<\/a>, you have to be doing something very, very right. So I’m using Halo as a baseline in this graph to show how other games relate in terms of difficulty progression and frustration over time.<\/p>\n

This first graph shows the level of difficulty I perceived for several games. You can see that Cold Fear started out fairly easy but then spiked really high early on. It was during this spike that I vented my frustration about the game on this blog. After that, the difficulty drops off very quickly and stays pretty shallow after that point (note that I’m not quite done with the game). Siren also started easy and then spiked dramatically. When this happened I ranted about it<\/a> here. Unlike Cold Fear, Siren doesn’t get a whole lot easier over the course of the game–it stays pretty damn difficult until the very end. Silent Hill 4<\/a>, on the other hand, was a walk in the park for the first half of the game and then suddenly became quite difficult in the second half. Finally, you can see that Halo’s difficulty curve is pretty uniform: it gets harder at a predictable rate but never spikes. It also never becomes super-difficult; even at its hardest, it is easier than Siren and Silent Hill 4. Halo has a very well-defined difficulty curve, while these other examples are less regular.<\/p>\n

The second graph shows how frustrated I was by these games at different points in my play-through. You can see that Cold Fear got super frustrating at the same point that it was super difficult, prompting my rant. Siren was also super frustrating when the difficulty spiked, which is probably why I ranted about it as well. Silent Hill 4 was not very frustrating early on, but after a while the game became difficult and frustrating and stayed that way through the end. Halo has no spikes, and though the frustration level does rise with its difficulty, it manages to stay pretty frustration-free throughout the entire experience. It seems clear that spikes in difficulty are sources of frustration for me, but what I think is interesting about this graph is what happens to Siren after the spike: even though the game remained difficult, I was less frustrated by it the more I played it.<\/p>\n

So what’s going on here? Cold Fear gets super hard and super frustrating and then becomes super easy and less frustrating. Siren gets super hard and super frustrating but then becomes more fun without losing any of its difficulty. If my theory is that hard games are frustrating, or even that dramatic spikes in difficulty are cause for frustration, it should follow that Siren would remain frustrating


\nGraph 2: Frustration over Time<\/p><\/div>throughout its duration.<\/p>\n

Here is my theory: frustration isn’t as much a function of difficulty as it is a function of communication with the player. In fact, unplanned spikes in difficulty are probably caused by poor player communication, which is also the source for frustration; the first graph is not the cause of the second, they are both side-effects of the same problem. As Halo demonstrates, when difficulty increases gradually, the player himself improves and no frustration is evident. Most designers probably intend for their games to become incrementally harder over time, so spikes in difficulty and frustration represent unplanned-for failures to communicate the rules of the game<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Let me elaborate by looking at why<\/i> Cold Fear suddenly became so hard and frustrating for me:<\/p>\n