I attended a panel called “Challenging Play: Puzzles, Performance, Practice”, which was much more interesting than I expected.
The speakers, including the creators of Animal Well and UFO 50, as well as several veteran puzzle designers, talked about how difficulty in games isn’t a punishment but an invitation. One person said “Difficulty is a form of attention” in the panel, and this statement really stuck with me. When a game frustrates me, it doesn’t necessarily shut me out, it encourages me to keep playing, to pay attention, to care.
What I found fascinating was how much they talked about community. The designer of Animal Well described puzzles that literally require multiple players to work together: sharing screenshots, decoding clues, and even forming online alliances to solve problems that individual players can’t solve. That kind of design turns a game into a social experiment. The difficulty lies not just in the puzzles themselves, but also in trusting others, communicating, and piecing together fragments of knowledge.
Another designer mentioned “pleasant friction”, and I’ve been thinking about that phrase ever since. Most tech design is about removing friction, making things fast and smooth. Games, on the other hand, add friction deliberately. They slow you down, confuse you, make you fail, but in doing that, they give you a reason to keep coming back. Maybe that’s why the most memorable play experiences aren’t the easy wins but the moments when you were completely stuck and then finally saw the pattern.
They also discussed how difficulty has evolved, from the coin-eating arcade games of the 1980s to the easy-to-use motion controls of Wii Sports. It made me realize that “challenge” isn’t one size fits all. What’s “too easy” for one person might be an empowering, joyful experience for another. One speaker said her favorite playtest memory was people complaining that her game was “too hard”, and then showing up again the next night to play it again. That’s such a human response. We want to give up, but we also want to overcome.
As I left the panel, I started thinking about the games I’ve quit halfway, not because they were bad, but because I didn’t want to face that moment of being confused or stuck. Maybe I should revisit them.
