Challenge vs Immersion in video games

[Cowboy Moment]

tl;dr at the end.

I've always embraced the position that games are about gameplay, artfags and Ken Levine can go fuck themselves, and praise mondblut, our savior. Not that I didn't enjoy a good narrative, but always thought of it as an extra of sorts. However, some recent "indie" releases and a bunch of game-design related blogs have gotten me thinking about what the capabilities of the medium really are.

Let us start with Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I've been a fan of Frictional Games ever since Penumbra: Overture; the sequel to that - Black Plague - I still consider their best creation, and one of the few games ever to actually scare me. Amnesia didn't really do that. However, I did appreciate the design of the game in general, and still thought Frictional understood horror quite well - I myself was too jaded and saw through the mechanics of the scares easily, but it did legitimately scare a whole lot of people, and sold extremely well for a product of less than 10 dudes working from their homes with no publisher backing.

In any case, I did not find Amnesia that scary, but I did find the reaction videos and LPs of it really amusing for a period of time. They were also educational, in the sense that they explicitly showed how various people experienced all these attempts to frighten them, and the effectiveness of different tricks from the horror-game toolbox. Now, the project manager from Frictional has a blog where he mostly discusses game design, which I've read a bit of, and I didn't like it much. Even though he's articulate and analyses various game design tropes well, he would keep talking about having no competitive mechanics and no death in games, which seemed like a roundabout way of saying he wants to make movies instead.

However, after watching a bunch of those videos, I couldn't help but notice he's right about a lot of things in the context of Amnesia at least. For example: I noticed that the people who had gotten most immersed (and scared, consequently) were the ones who were most successful at dealing with the game mechanics. As in, the ones who never failed any chase sequences; who always hid from monsters effectively and never got found; who never died in the water level, and so forth. On the other hand, this guy was almost completely desensitized to the game's tricks later in his playthrough.

So, it appears to me, that Mr. Decline from Frictional is indeed correct in his assessment that challenge and death take away from the atmosphere of his game (you can also watch his lecture from the GDC; he's kind of awkward and clearly not used to speaking publically in English, but it's pretty decent nonetheless). More interestingly, he argues that a similar thing is true for Limbo - that failing a puzzle or a sequence multiple times (moreso if the failure is a result of missing some key element rather than bad execution) takes the player out of "the experience", ruins the atmosphere.

So, I ask you, hivemind: Is this kind of thinking legitimate, can it lead to anything good? If we forget the notion of a game as a system that the player needs to learn and master in order to succeed, and instead begin with "the experience" that we want to create for the player, and design our gameplay to support that as best as we can - what would that achieve? Note that this doesn't necessarily mean lack of challenge or death though - Pathologic is probably the best example of this kind of design, and it has tons and tons of potential failure in store for the player. I have seen Ico and Shadow of the Colossus mentioned along similar lines, but I haven't played them, so maybe some consolefag can elaborate.

Now, to clear up some inevitable misconceptions:

1. "That's just wanting to make movies instead of games, go play Mass Effect 2 faggot" - it's actually the other way around. Amnesia and Limbo have practically no cutscenes, they achieve everything through some kind of interaction.

2. "This is more of that games as art bullshit, isn't it?" - somewhat, but not entirely. It might sort of seem like that because so few of these kinds of games are made, so they stand out. However, Amnesia isn't a particularly artfag game. Limbo is, but it's not awfully pretentious. And Pathologic, I don't really know.

Anyway, TL;DR: It seems like it's worthwhile to sacrifice the challenge posed by gameplay mechanics in order to preserve the game's atmosphere and the player's immersion. Could this lead to something good if done right, and not by Bioware? Examples included in wall-of-text.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's not the challenge that is destroying the immersion, or even the death. It's the repetition of something out of order that makes things so weird and breaks the flow of the game. If The game normal goes lull-chase-lull-shock-chase-lull, and instead because of failure and reloading you change it to lull-chase-chase-chase-chase-lull-shock-chase, the way it affects you emotionally is going to break down. This applies to any other kind of game as well. But you can look to roguelikes for an example where despite major challenges, the atmosphere remains tense throughout, unless the player gets stuck on a samey loop (usually a new player might feel like this for the first few levels until he can reliably get past him, otherwise it's only an issue if the game isn't varied enough by early midgame.) But even repeated deaths later on don't screw with the immersion much, because you're sent so far back the pace of the game overall isn't broken.

Checkpoint saving helps with this (although it'll have the same issue if the checkpoint is too close to the failure, and has other problems). But obviously the best solution is to make failure incremental. If failure means you lose a portion of your health that can't easily be recovered, you can maintain overall challenge in the long run, without making reloads so frequent. This works especially well with checkpoints, since then on the next attempt you'll be far enough from the failure to reset the pace properly, and have enough room to avoid multiple failures on the way there, significantly changing your outcome, as opposed to reloading a save just before you failed, where even success only means you changed one small event.

As far as whether to design games around engaging the player as opposed to making them good mechanically/balance wise- this is a good thing, as long as the game in question isn't being designed for a competition. Difficulty is a tool (an important one, but hardly the most important) to heightening the player's engagement. It is not an end in and of itself. Building a house of cards is quite difficult, but as games go it's pretty shit. Challenges only have meaning if the player cares about the outcome, and mechanics alone cannot facilitate that for most people, and even if they can, other elements added in will do a much better job.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are even more immersive due to the difficulty level. If they were easier then the doom and gloom atmosphere would make no sense to me because it wouldn't resonate with the gameplay.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'm surprised those games didn't come to mind for me. Note they both fit what I said perfectly- the challenge is there, but you never reload spam an encounter (generally) and the checkpoints make sure the pace of the gameplay is maintained, since you encounter enemies and suffer challenges in the proper order.

Dying still throws it off a little as you won't be finding items rerunning an area you've been through, but it's much much better than it would be if it had quicksaving.

 

[DraQ]

Well, obviously having to go through multiple die-reload cycles lessens the impact somewhat and takes you out of the game, but OTOH game being too easy and predictable removes the tension which also causes an immersion failure because instead of being scared, you're just going through motions, confident that nothing bad will happen to you.

This was IMO the main difference between Amnesia and earlier Penumbras (apart from polish and technical excellence), and it didn't help it.
I still enjoyed the game, but there were very few moments when I felt genuinely vulnerable (a notable exception would be splishy-splashy sequence that genuinely freaked me out), because most of the time even if I was actively sought by the enemy I could easily avoid getting found and killed. Part of the problem was that enemies only appeared when scripted to and disappeared after failing to find the player, meaning that you didn't have to stay on your toes in Amnesia, while in Penumbra you had to.

I still liked Amnesia a lot, but most of the time it just wasn't as scary, whereas Penumbra, even the first one with stiff, badly animated dogs was almost psychosis inducing.
I didn't die a lot in Penumbras and was generally very apt at negotiating gameplay mechanics, but I knew I could die rather easily if I lowered my attention.

For a scare to be really effective, it has to either confer a real threat, or effectively target something subconscious which is much, much harder to do.

Sanity mechanics in Amnesia would be stellar, was it not for the fact it completely lacked incentive to not lose sanity. Sanity in Amnesia was a non-resource because it didn't need to be conserved. The worst thing that ever happened was some hallucinations, distortions and "..." status description.
Enemies, for most part were also non-threats because you most of the time they could only kill you if you were staggeringly inept or stupid.

So, tl;dr:
While I find immersion more important than challenge in typical SP games, sometimes those two work synergistically and lessening challenge can kill the immersion.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are even more immersive due to the difficulty level. If they were easier then the doom and gloom atmosphere would make no sense to me because it wouldn't resonate with the gameplay.

Yeah, it obviously does work for some games. I've finally gotten around to playing Stalker, which is very immersive, with a great atmosphere - and death doesn't break the immersion at all, because it actually feels like a logical part of the whole experience.

I actually think Stalker is a decent example of this kind of design process in a general sense. I'm almost certain the dudes at GSC didn't go "Let's make a shooter!", and then "Where should we set it? Does lifting the Zone from Stalker and Roadside Picnic sound like a good idea?; but "We love Tarkowski, let's make a game where you play a Stalker in the Zone!", and then wondered what kind of gameplay would suit the idea best. Well, they made it a shooter cause nobody would buy an open-world action-adventure game with minimal combat, but it was still a good effort.

Well, obviously having to go through multiple die-reload cycles lessens the impact somewhat and takes you out of the game, but OTOH game being too easy and predictable removes the tension which also causes an immersion failure because instead of being scared, you're just going through motions, confident that nothing bad will happen to you.

This was IMO the main difference between Amnesia and earlier Penumbras (apart from polish and technical excellence), and it didn't help it.
I still enjoyed the game, but there were very few moments when I felt genuinely vulnerable (a notable exception would be splishy-splashy sequence that genuinely freaked me out), because most of the time even if I was actively sought by the enemy I could easily avoid getting found and killed. Part of the problem was that enemies only appeared when scripted to and disappeared after failing to find the player, meaning that you didn't have to stay on your toes in Amnesia, while in Penumbra you had to.

I still liked Amnesia a lot, but most of the time it just wasn't as scary, whereas Penumbra, even the first one with stiff, badly animated dogs was almost psychosis inducing.
I didn't die a lot in Penumbras and was generally very apt at negotiating gameplay mechanics, but I knew I could die rather easily if I lowered my attention.

For a scare to be really effective, it has to either confer a real threat, or effectively target something subconscious which is much, much harder to do.

Sanity mechanics in Amnesia would be stellar, was it not for the fact it completely lacked incentive to not lose sanity. Sanity in Amnesia was a non-resource because it didn't need to be conserved. The worst thing that ever happened was some hallucinations, distortions and "..." status description.
Enemies, for most part were also non-threats because you most of the time they could only kill you if you were staggeringly inept or stupid.

So, tl;dr:
While I find immersion more important than challenge in typical SP games, sometimes those two work synergistically and lessening challenge can kill the immersion.

One thing to note about Amnesia is that the basic mechanics were very poorly implemented, because they did it all like 6 months before release; you can listen to that GDC presentation for all the hilarious details. Although, I think you're idolizing Penumbra a bit - it had stuff like disappearing enemies and shit too. Black Plague, I think, was simply more polished and therefore cleverer and more subversive in its scares. Like that event in the computer room, fucking piece of shit.

Anyway, I think Amnesia is very good in concept, just needs work on specifics - like enemy variety, less transparent mechanics (the monster music ffs), and more subversion in general. The use of the water monster throughout the game was absolutely brilliant, they should look into that. It's fucking hilarious to watch people play the game and freak out over random splashes in the sewers, just because there could be a water monster there.

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, it obviously does work for some games. I've finally gotten around to playing Stalker, which is very immersive, with a great atmosphere - and death doesn't break the immersion at all, because it actually feels like a logical part of the whole experience.

Fucking this.

The risk of death is an important part of the gameworld logic in games like shooters and horrors, and it's the key mechanics for eliciting desired player behaviour (like not walking up to monsters and asking "'sup?"). By marginalizing it for most of the game Amnesia lost something important.

Coincidentally, my #1 scary experience in a computer game was definitely x18 from STALKER. It was fucking brilliant in every aspect and wasn't hurt in the least by the fact you were likely carrying a good gun, armour and lot of ammo at this point - if anything it made the experience even stronger, because what good is a gun if you can't even find anything to shoot at?

Although, I think you're idolizing Penumbra a bit - it had stuff like disappearing enemies and shit too.

A bit, but it didn't overuse cheap, scripted scares. An enemy in a location was persistent and was subjected to mechanics, including detecting, finding pursuing and killing you. In Amnesia an enemy was mostly a scripted event, it came and gone away provided you did the hide in the dark corner/room/closet routine and counted the seconds.

The use of the water monster throughout the game was absolutely brilliant, they should look into that. It's fucking hilarious to watch people play the game and freak out over random splashes in the sewers, just because there could be a water monster there.

Well, the water monster was actually brilliant.

Anyway, such mechanics is best when through great effort you can consistently stay just barely alive.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

That's kind of the difficulty with horror in games, you ideally want the player in a "just barely alive" state, but if you kill them too much, it destroys the tension. And if you implement a mechanic that prevents them from dying too much, you need to be very clever about concealing it, because if the player figures it out, they will never be afraid again.

Overall, I think the Frictional "monster chases you, run away and hide" is a good way of doing it. It's just that Amnesia had a relatively poor implementation of it. Part of it, I think, is due to level design (which comes from them only figuring out what kind of game they wanted to make 6 months before release rofl) - Penumbra's areas were decently big with non-trivial layouts, so you could actually have the player dodge persistent enemies there. In Amnesia's levels, it wouldn't be possible.

 

[MaroonSkein]

While repeated exposure to the game over screen will remind you that yes, you're in fact playing a video game, is it really a bad thing? If you die, it mean you've done something wrong. It's the game's way of telling you that you need to improve, and it's the kind of hint that anyone with a right mindset for gaming will appreciate. Dying is fun because it means that it's time to try something different and change the way you play.

Horror is the only genre I can think of that really relies on putting the player's mind in the right state, and it still needs challenge to work properly. Here's my experience with enemies in Thief. When I first encountered zombies, I was pretty scared of them. Not because of the way they looked or sounded, but because killing them permanently required me to spend special limited resources (holy water or fire). The moment I realized just how slow zombies were and that I could just walk past them most of the time is the moment they ceased to scary. Haunts scare me to this day because I know that I can't outrun them and that I will be slaughtered if I fail to sneak up on them and kill them with a backstab. The Ocean House Hotel in Bloodlines is another good example. As soon as the player realizes that the only thing in that place that can cause any real damage to his character's health bar is the falling elevator, retrieving the locket turns into the most tedious fetch quest in the game.

 

[Gregz]

Most gamers enjoy: fragging noobs, playing out a story, developing their character/party, beating the odds, etc.

All of these are virtual accomplishments.

The player doesn't need to accomplish anything, they just need to be convinced that they accomplished something. (See WoW)

It's like a magic show, it's all fake, but if you think it's real then it works as entertainment. It's also why immersion is key, but perceived challenge vs. actual challenge is the same experience. Difficulty levels, challenge, etc. exist to help the player adjust a game in such a way that it doesn't break immersion for them. Ideally the game's AI would adjust for the player automatically, but the industry isn't there yet.

 

[shihonage]

Not only does failure slow the game down through obvious means (restarting at earlier point), but the very threat of failure makes the player move through the game slower and with entirely different mindset, such as actually wanting to explore every nook and corner in search of armor, health, etc.

As result, there's far less content required by the traditional fail-and-retry model. The "do whatever, game will adapt anyway" model would require incomparably more content for player to blow through and potentially ignore.

 

[sea]

Most gamers enjoy: fragging noobs, playing out a story, developing their character/party, beating the odds, etc.

All of these are virtual accomplishments.

The player doesn't need to accomplish anything, they just need to be convinced that they accomplished something. (See WoW)

It's like a magic show, it's all fake, but if you think it's real then it works as entertainment. It's also why immersion is key, but perceived challenge vs. actual challenge is the same experience. Difficulty levels, challenge, etc. exist to help the player adjust a game in such a way that it doesn't break immersion for them. Ideally the game's AI would adjust for the player automatically, but the industry isn't there yet.

This. Decline all you like, but generally games are about providing an experience to the player. Frequent deaths and absolute failure states take the player out of that experience. We're most immersed when we constantly feel we're escaping by the skin of our teeth, not when we're dying ten times in a row due to enemies with psychic AI. Eliminating challenge entirely isn't the answer, but we're not in a world where we're charging players per-attempt anymore; death and other failure states are only as necessary as far as they drive the player to proceed. As soon as your players start giving up, getting bored, etc. then your challenge has become useless.

There's a couple issues with this. First of all, if we're talking about perceived challenge rather than real challenge, it becomes important to make sure the challenge isn't so transparent as to be easily anticipated, exploited, etc. by the player. This means that you can't abandon challenge entirely, as it kills immersion just as quickly to realize you're immortal, as it does to realize you're never going to win a fight without metagaming. Striking a balance is hard, and is most effectively accomplished by tricking the player strategically - that is, offer a baseline level of difficulty, but lay off in special sequences (or based on player performance) in order to make sure the player keeps going when you want him or her to. Second, "fake" difficulty, adaptive difficulty, etc. are all well and good, but sometimes immense challenge can be just as much a motivation for the player depending on the genre. This sort of thing is not appropriate to every game, as the experience communicated by one game is going to be very different from another. This is especially true in games with universal rule sets, like strategy games, and of course online multiplayer games with a competitive bent.

As for adaptive AI, it actually exists in just about every major game out there, albeit to varying degrees (most notably, it's in action games). Whether it's Call of Duty, Half-Life 2, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Madden, Forza, etc., you can usually be sure that the game is dynamically adjusting its level of challenge based on how the player is going about things. Sometimes it can just be playing with item drop rates to make the player feel more comfortable after several deaths (Half-Life 2 does this), sometimes it can be reducing enemy accuracy or grenade-throwing frequency, sometimes it can be letting the player win by the skin of his or her teeth (that split-second photo finish in racing games), etc. While not all these moments are engineered and "staged", they are more often than you'd expect, and a lot of work goes into this clever balancing act that helps to keep players engaged and motivated.

For what it's worth, I love universal rule sets and getting my ass kicked by games. But we're also talking about creating products for a mass market, and the goal there is to entertain, not frustrate. If you ever need a game to kick players' asses, it's always best to make that optional... and for what it's worth, many newer releases handle this very well, with a nice level of challenge for casual players but an absurd one for the masochists. While it might bother a few people that their accomplishment of winning has been diminished by "those damned casuals," I think that's pretty much a non-issue when you're still able to win on XTREEM INSANITY CHASTITY BELT MODE all you like.

 

[MetalCraze]

Most gamers enjoy: fragging noobs, playing out a story, developing their character/party, beating the odds, etc.

That's why the most popular games are shooters with a health regen, zero character/party development, cover systems and quest compasses and often an NPC that controls you instead of you controlling him (like CoD and Biocock Infinite)

But fragging noobs while watching a movie instead of playing the game is quite popular I agree

 

[DraQ]

There's a couple issues with this. First of all, if we're talking about perceived challenge rather than real challenge, it becomes important to make sure the challenge isn't so transparent as to be easily anticipated, exploited, etc. by the player.

I think it's extremely hard to make perceived challenge different from actual challenge, because the player will discover that and shit will hit the fan.

Adaptive difficulty is better, because it's only fake on metagaming grounds - as long as you keep playing the best you can, rubberbanding will ensure the challenge remains real. I don't really like such approach but it has its uses (like optional adaptive bot AI in UT'99).

It can also make for some horribly broken shit, like oblivious' level scaling or HW2's atrocious difficulty scaling.

I propose one more alternative, though not applicable to some genres (like horrors):

Soft difficulty. Soft difficulty is such a difficulty where there is multiple qualitatively different winning states (from bare survival, to epic win), and while achieving marginal victory (survival) is relatively easy, achieving anything more gets progressively harder.
Technically, marginal victory might as well be non-fatal failure.

 

[Average Manatee]

Soft difficulty. Soft difficulty is such a difficulty where there is multiple qualitatively different winning states (from bare survival, to epic win), and while achieving marginal victory (survival) is relatively easy, achieving anything more gets progressively harder.
Technically, marginal victory might as well be non-fatal failure.

Yes, these were my thoughts. As long as the players both (rarely/never) die, yet still have something to work towards, neither the best nor the worst players ever escape the tension of trying as hard as they can to beat encounters.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Or, you could have

no difficulty at all.

 

[mondblut]

I think the planet Earth is big enough to provide for both games and "experience" rollercoasters. I just happen to only be interested in the former.

 

[Monk]

In the past, I was interested more in challenge. Now, it's immersion. It's probably because I've been more interested in seeing various games as stories.

 

[DraQ]

I think the planet Earth is big enough to provide for both games and "experience" rollercoasters. I just happen to only be interested in the former.

You could say the latter don't give you the right kind of...

...experience.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I don't play games to be scared, but for gameplay. Immershun was ok in all Frictional titles because of the style.
My problem with Amnesia is that I find the first person horror genre too one dimensional and depressing. When I look at Amnesia and it's commendable approach to art style and user interface I can't stop wondering why no one makes another game like UW / Thief / SS2 / VtmB. With an interesting story, diversified gameplay and much less scare/horror effects.

I had exactly the same sentiments with Cthulhu Dark Corners of The Earth.

 

[Trash]

Does this not heavily depend on what kind of game it is? For a game like Tetris I just don't see this distinction work.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, immersion in Tetris isn't about jumping at spooky sounds, it's about being so focused on your actions your house could burn down around you without you noticing and/or giving a fuck.

I think that that is ultimately the metric to measure a game by; how difficult is it to get you to stop playing. Challenge doesn't have much to do with that directly. Challenge is just a tool to make the skinnerbox effect work when the reward is the feeling of success. That's probably ultimately why we play any kind of game that is actually a game (i.e. you can lose). If the 'game' doesn't have any challenge to speak of, it has to engage the player in some other way. There's nothing challenging about Simcity, but I still dumped hours into it because it's fun to play god/emperor/whatever. Of course you can combine the elements that make a game without any challenges worth playing, with the skinnerbox challenge aspect for a greater whole, if done properly. But you can also try to implement conflict parts of both and fuck things up royally.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Does this not heavily depend on what kind of game it is? For a game like Tetris I just don't see this distinction work.

The whole point is that you shouldn't do this exact thing - design your gameplay and then try to make your game immersive through presentation. Tetris is fine as is, as are tactical wargames, roguelikes, bullet hell schmups, and other games which focus on challenging gameplay only. However, if you're trying to immerse the player in the world you're designing, then challenge will sometimes work against that goal (and sometimes it won't, examples of which where brought up in this thread). Challenge is not always a good thing, even if it's well-designed and mechanically sound.

 

[Cassidy]

Personally, I can't find a game devoid of challenge "immersive" in the first place. Immersion is far more greatly broken when you feel like there is a gigantic invisible hand holding you, and even more when the hand is explicit and the game is ridden with gigantic arrows pointing locations only actual mentally retarded people would miss than it could be by having to save/load. Only the kind of stupid people who couldn't find that NPC in Morrowind prompting the idea of the quest compass feel challenge and immersion as mutually exclusive.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Personally, I can't find a game devoid of challenge "immersive" in the first place. Immersion is far more greatly broken when you feel like there is a gigantic invisible hand holding you, and even more when the hand is explicit and the game is ridden with gigantic arrows pointing locations only actual mentally retarded people would miss than it could be by having to save/load. Only the kind of stupid people who couldn't find that NPC in Morrowind prompting the idea of the quest compass feel challenge and immersion as mutually exclusive.

So then, I suppose you're planning to drop Civ IV like a sack of shit as soon as you're ahead of the competition? The challenge is entirely gone once you've caught up to first place after all. After that you're just playing with an elaborate electronic lego set.