Posted By: Becky
Is Difficulty Simply in the Eye of the Beholder? - 04/23/03 10:54 PM
I just finished Ring II, and there is a sequence in it with a spiky wall. You have to walk a certain path (keyboard controls) and do a couple of jumps before the wall gets you. This took an embarassing amount of time to master. In fact, I was actually NEVER able to do it -- I finally got my husband to do it for me.
Today my seven-year-old did it on the 6th try. He did it with very little effort -- the first jump took just a bit of practice, after that it was easy for him. He seemed to scarcely even notice it.
I've seen something similar occur with more traditional puzzles, where some gamers find a puzzle insanely difficult and other gamers breeze right through it. Given this, I was wondering:
Is it possible to say anything at all about a game's difficulty? Would it be more accurate to try to define difficulty according to the type of gamer (keyboard experts or sliding tile lovers or trained musicians or those with fast reflexes or those who speak and understand several languages or those who program code or those who know how to take apart an engine).
Or should you just say that a game is easy or difficult for YOU, knowing that unless somebody knows you really well the information is virtually meaningless?
Today my seven-year-old did it on the 6th try. He did it with very little effort -- the first jump took just a bit of practice, after that it was easy for him. He seemed to scarcely even notice it.
I've seen something similar occur with more traditional puzzles, where some gamers find a puzzle insanely difficult and other gamers breeze right through it. Given this, I was wondering:
Is it possible to say anything at all about a game's difficulty? Would it be more accurate to try to define difficulty according to the type of gamer (keyboard experts or sliding tile lovers or trained musicians or those with fast reflexes or those who speak and understand several languages or those who program code or those who know how to take apart an engine).
Or should you just say that a game is easy or difficult for YOU, knowing that unless somebody knows you really well the information is virtually meaningless?