Accessibility and difficulty are often used as measurements of enjoyability in the rather abstract rubric of video game quality measurement, progress vs process, the results and rewards vs the journey, and all the time you spent screaming internally due to a single misinput. This post seeks to analyze some cases of video games utilizing difficulties to achieve goals, be it emergent storytelling, procedural rhetoric, reflections on social relationships, or to stimulate certain emotional states in players.
Case#1 Space Engineers
Structured much like other open-world build & survive games, Space Engineer’s first obstacle when confronted is the management of meters, power meter ticks down whenever you use tools, which are essential for furthering the goal of construction, and hydrogen and oxygen slowly depletes in hostile environments, or when you are escaping a pack of drones armed with autocannons. Space Engineer takes an effort to mask and mitigate the stress and difficulty of managing constantly depleting resources by tying them to player actions. This ties the resources management side of difficulty to player actions, granting the players agency to shape their own experiences. The other core gameplay element that encourages emergent gameplay is the fundamental method of construction in Space Engineer, a wide array of static and moving parts are available for you to construct from rovers, mining vessels all the way to cruisers, space stations and capital destroyer armed with modular cluster bombs. The players are constrained by their creativity, their ability to apply basic engineering principles introduced in the tutorial and their ambition. Demands for more complicated machinery create player-inducted, goal-based difficulty that reward player for completing self-assigned milestones and creates beautiful, procedural rhetoric created by players, tailored to their own experiences.
Case#2 Paper Beast
Abstract and surreal, the narrative-driven first-person physics-based puzzle game introduces the player to a desert planet rich in exotic fauna in the form of mind-bending complicated origami and paper sculpts. The main story utilizes the liner narrative architecture and enclosed environments to ensure players won’t soft-lock themselves or wander off to some unknown land while maintaining a level of difficulty by cleverly integrating physics-based puzzles into a simulated ecosystem. Observe and take advantage of the simulated animals to navigate through levels. Paper beast stands in the middle ground of puzzle and reflex games, you are not being timed, attacked, or judged in any metrics, and free exploration and observation are emphasized over fast fingers and quick reactions. This reduces a considerable amount of difficulty by eliminating fast-paced elements and focusing more on mental play and planning. However, the real-time nature of the game encourages players to actively interact with the world to seek out objects and creatures lest they run away or burrow under the sands. This blend of difficulty manages to both engage players and improve attention retention due to the real-time physics player and eliminates stress and failure-based frustrations by designing the whole game to be slow-paced and manageable.
Case#3 Vermintide 2
In the same vein s other horde-based actions games like L4D or Killing Floor, Vermintide 2 is a fast-paced, brutal hack-and-slash feast that requires mastery of game mechanics, quick reflexes and even by committing some controls into the player’s base instincts. New players will struggle with the normal difficulty if they do not apply all the tutorial knowledge to practice, and harder difficulties are so punishing that getting hit at all will heavily hinder your chance of completing a level. But then why do people even bother playing if it requires much time and effort to be passably good? There are fancy veteran items and character protract frames that can only be obtained by playing on the highest difficulty, there are no shortcuts to getting the fanciest and rarest items in the whole game besides practice and being good at it. This artificial scarcity managed to cultivate a certain audience that enjoys the challenge and feels like the rewards are worthy of your effort. The rarity of such items creates a self-perpetuating perspective that veteran items equate to great skills and mean a higher reputation amongst players, birthing an active player-made narrative that incentivizes playing hard and learning hard.
Example of a highly prized veteran item.
Great post! I really enjoyed learning about all these games I’ve never even heard of, and am definitely interested in trying some of them out now (especially Paper Beast – it looks super cool!). I know that some games like Halo allow you to choose your preferred level of difficulty, but would describe one of the middle-higher difficulty options as “the right way” or “intended way” to experience the game. And while it probably helped people try out more of the challenge in the game, I always thought that it could be done better. Having rare achievements is another potential way of doing it, but that lies outside the game itself and could feel more distanced. Games using in-game mechanics to incentivize players to actively seek out higher difficulty modes is something I hadn’t really thought about before, and the way Vermintide 2 does it seems super interesting. It establishes a cool middle ground between having no difficulty options and overwhelming the player with too many options, or potentially tempting them away from a more satisfying challenge, both of which might turn some players away from a game. Learning about the scarcity mechanic and how it was directly tied to the difficulty was a fun read.