Challenge

What makes a video game challenging? Challenge in video games can be defined in many different ways, the amount of skill required, the amount of thinking and puzzle-solving needing to be done, the amount of information a game provides for you and the programming of the AI can all be adequate gauges of difficulty, and really what someone finds challenging is realistically dependent on the person themselves to decide. Therefore, I feel the more interesting aspect to look at with challenge in video games is the way that challenge is presented from the viewpoint of the games themselves. In that sense, challenge has been increasingly evolving ever since video games were initially created. In very many of the first major video games, challenge came from the limited knowledge provided to you and the ways you learned the game’s mechanics. Games like Tetris and Pac-man are probably not going to be very difficult for you once you understand the game’s mechanics, but it is in the learning curve itself that the challenge lies for most people. This was also sense in games like the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where the games leaves you with little to no direction and challenges you to figure out what to do next. As games became more and more technologically advanced, difficulty settings and tutorial modes became more and more popular, thus providing more information to the player. In these games, the challenge generally came from either setting the difficulty to a higher level, thus beefing up the enemies and usually handicapping yourself, or in the difficulty of the actual gameplay mechanics in themselves. Much more recently, a newer trend has evolved in video game challenge, which became most popular with the Dark Souls series of games. These games go for an alternative approach to challenge where they throw you into extreme situations, generally way before you are reasonably expected to know how to actually beat them, and force you to figure out the mechanics through trial and error. These games are touted, by most, as the epitome of difficult games, but they follow pretty much the same formula as older games in that they are simply restricting access to information and forcing you to learn through the gameplay itself. The downside to this kind of challenge in video games is that once you have the required information, the game tends to be immensely easier. This has lead gamers to create their own forms of challenge outside of the game, whether that be by setting a certain goal for a high score, trying to beat the game in the fastest time possible and playing the game in alternative ways are just a few of the avenues some gamers take when they crave a more intense challenge. The problem, in my opinion, is that most games do not seem to be trying to advance or innovate recently in terms of integrating challenging aspects to their game, which could lead to games becoming rather stale and boring, especially for people who are looking for higher rates of stimulation from gaming. My hope is that games try and move away from the restricting information form of challenge as it does not truly feel like that much of a challenge to me and is easily overcome once the required knowledge is learned. I look forward to see what future innovations games have in store for us, especially when looking at the challenges they present.