Game Difficulty Choices: Who Sets the Challenge?
Game difficulty choices can sit in a menu, inside play or with an automatic system. Read what two 2016 experiments found about control and effort.
Start with the rule that changes
Game difficulty choices involve a rule and a decision about who can change it. In a fictional signal-repair game, players tap when a pulse reaches a receiver. Giving them an extra half second to respond changes the challenge. Who grants that half second, and when it becomes available, are separate design questions.
One player may want extra time to learn the rhythm. Another may want to keep practicing the original timing despite several misses. Both could produce the same sequence of missed pulses. Those misses reveal something about performance and leave the player's goal open.
Three ways to make an adjustment
Smeddinck and colleagues' 2016 paper compared menu selection, in-game choices and automatic adjustment. Forty participants tried all three in a bird-flight prototype with motion controls or a gamepad. Eighteen compared the modes in an adapted fl0w. Both studies varied condition order.
The repair game could offer a pause menu to extend the response window, a station to visit between waves, or a rule that extends the window after three consecutive misses. Record the timing each player receives. Otherwise, the comparison can mix the convenience of choosing with the benefit of more time.
Autonomy and enjoyment can diverge
Reported autonomy was significantly higher with in-game choices than automatic adjustment in the bird game. In fl0w, the significant contrast favored menu over automatic adjustment. Neither experiment detected significant differences in enjoyment or presence.
A tester could enjoy the easier timing while wishing they had chosen it themselves. Ask who they believed set the window and whether they felt able to change it. Follow with a separate question about the timing challenge. A single satisfaction score would give those answers nowhere to disagree.
An in-world option has a cost
In fl0w, the in-game choice required chasing special food. Participants reported significantly more effort than with the menu and more frustration than with automatic adjustment.
Imagine placing the repair station behind a room full of fast pulses. The player who wants extra time must first handle the constraint they want to change. Moving the station to a safe walkway preserves the in-world decision and changes what it takes to reach it. A test could record whether players saw, reached and used the station. Each step can help explain an unused option.
Say when the new setting starts
These were short casual play sessions with different implementations. The null results leave room for differences in longer sessions.
In the repair game, a change might start on the next pulse or at the next wave. Immediate application could help someone stuck on a wave. Waiting could let them finish the attempt under the original timing. Showing when the change applies gives a tester something precise to explain if the pace feels unexpected.
Test the decision path
A prototype comparison could hold the timing choices steady and vary how players access them. Log when the timing changed and who initiated it. Then ask players to describe the change. Those records can separate changes the system made, changes players recognized and changes they meant to make.
Ask who can change which rule, at what point and at what cost. For a repair encounter, that gives designers a question they can test before bundling timing, obstacles and resources into a difficulty preset. The paper and proceedings entry below document the same research.
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