The challenging experience is a very common type of experience in games. The game provides the player with a challenge they have to overcome. The feeling of accomplishment and victory is essentially what this experience boils down to. The challenging experience might only be a small part of the overall game, or it might be the major focus of the game. The following examples of challenges are only some of the countless different types of challenges a game can provide in order to create a challenging experience.
The mechanical challenge
The mechanical challenge is one of the more common challenges a game issues to players. How quickly and accurately can the player click the correct buttons at the correct time? Aiming in a first person shooter is a great example of this, where you use a mouse (or aa controller) to line up a cursor before you tap a button to shoot, this is a mechanical challenge. Using abilities and aiming them in a MOBA is also an example of a mechanical challenge.
The awareness challenge
The challenge of awareness checks how good the player is at being aware of what is going on in the game. Can the player keep track of multiple enemies at once? Can the player keep track of a lot of projectiles at once in a bulletstorm? Does the player see small changes in the environment in order to spot traps? Can the player keep track of the level layout with everything else going on? These things challenges the player to be aware of their surroundings while they are also busy doing other tasks.
The knowledge challenge
In a lot of games you need to know how the game mechanics work. How does cards work in a card-game? How does the mechanics of bosses in an action-game work? What is the layout of levels? This is essentially the challenge of how quickly you learn new levels, new mechanics and so forth when you see them. How many times do you need to see something before you understand how something works or remember the layout of a level? This is a challenge that is typically overcome by using time. Basically every game includes this to some extent, but card games and real time strategy games typically have a lot of knowledge that is required in order to even compete, they require a lot of knowledge about the game. A lack of knowledge is therefore a way a player can lose, because they don’t know the per-requisite knowledge in order to know what to do.
This can be a subtle challenge, but understand that people learn at different rates, and be aware of how much knowledge is required to get to another type of experience. This is a type of experience that can be a deal-breaker for a lot of people, and especially if they don’t come prepared for it. This is one of the reasons progression systems are used, to reduce this type of challenge by making the game easier to learn.
The decision making challenge
How do you make use of the knowledge you have obtained in the game? How do you approach a combat encounter? How do you allocate resources? In what order do you do things? Strategy and tactical games are big on this type of challenge; you need to plan ahead and think about how you are going to play the game, but also need to constantly adapt your strategy in order to overcome the challenge. You need to make constant decisions in order to win. This also extends to shooters in terms of where you position and what type of weapon you choose to use, and when you engage the enemy. What cards do you put in your deck in a card-game, and how do you play them during the gameplay? Any sort of decision you make in a game can be thought of as a challenge you need to overcome. Good decisions wins you the game, and poor decisions lose you the game, or at the very least puts you at a disadvantage.
The teamwork challenge
How well can the players communicate and work together to overcome a challenge? The obvious examples are team-based competitive games such as CS:GO and MOBA’s such as League of Legends. In these games teams work together in order to beat the enemy team. The players need to communicate with each other, and be in agreement to how the games should be played. The players also need to deal with the social aspect of having each other fail and still maintain the will to win. This experience is not only for competitive games of course, and a lot of games might require two or more persons to do different tasks in order to progress.
Winning without effort
For some people the experience of winning is all that matters, no matter how artificial that win is, or how little work the players themselves did. No matter how they got there, winning is all that matters. I refer to this type of experience as an illusion. The game is essentially winning itself with minor input from the player, but the player might not realise it.
Think of small children that just like to win, but don’t care or realise that they are given the victory. You can use this type of experience on adult players as well, you can create an illusion where the game essentially wins itself with minor input from the player. The victory will feel hollow when the player begins to question the game though, and the experience will no longer exist.
Overcoming an unfair game
This is the experience of overcoming gameplay that is difficult and punishing for the sake of being difficult and punishing. This is the type of experience where you will likely fail hundreds of times before finally winning. This is not about any of the other challenging experiences, this is winning for the sake of winning. Which means that as a developer you can add a lot of enemies with high stats, add visual clutter, impose a bad movement system in order to create this experience. As long as the experience is difficult and punishing that is all that matters, it does not matter how fair the game is. Winning over this brutal difficulty and punishing gameplay is the experience.
Players can create artificial difficulties for themselves in order to get this experience as well. Beating Dark Souls with bananas as the input controller for example.
I don’t understand this experience, and can as such not really discuss how to create it, but it does exist in some form. I don’t find enjoyment in beating a poorly designed, but difficult game. I don’t think this is a good experience to build a game around.
The overarching challenging experience
When you create a challenging experience, you will most likely produce more than a single type of challenging experience. Some of these challenges work with each other to increase the skill-ceiling of the game by requiring all challenges to be overcome at once, while others allow you to excel at a specific type of challenge to reduce the challenge of another type. You can for example be very good at aiming in a shooter, and therefore don’t need a lot of decision-making to win. Being aware of how these experiences interact with each other is a key aspect of designing good challenging experiences.
It is very important to understand that what we are discussing here are experiences, which means they change from individual to individual. Both the preferences for what types of experiences people like, but also how the experiences are formed and created varies between individuals. There is no single way to create a challenging experience within any of these sub-categories that will work for every person. One of the most common techniques used to broaden the experience is through a difficulty scaling or setting in a game, but the fundamental experience can sometimes not be changed, and you will need to be aware of what type of player you are targeting with certain experiences.
Because some people like certain challenges but dislike others you might want to create a game that takes advantage of that preference. You might have a player-base that loves strategic challenges, but detest mechanical challenges for example. This creates a market for a certain type of experience for one set of players. Another set of players needs mechanical challenges together with their strategic ones. These two player bases are incompatible with each other at a fundamental level, and that is something you need to be aware of when designing games. You cannot please everyone, and that is okay. Understand what combination of challenges you are issuing, and understand what challenges your target audience might seek, and which they might avoid.
At this point I also feel like it is important to discuss difficulty, and how that is different from most challenging experiences. You can have a game that is very difficult, but provides few challenging experiences. Far too often developers will simply add more stats, more enemies and create a game that punishes the player because they feel like they need to provide the player with a challenge. Far too often they miss the distinction between the different types of experiences outlined here and difficulty.
I would argue that it is only the minority of players that enjoys overcoming difficult bullshit. It is certainly impressive too watch them overcome difficult games, but be very careful when using mechanics to increase difficulty in order to punishing players. It is very easy to destroy every other challenging experience, and only be left with the type of experience where players overcome the odds from a difficult and punishing game. This is likely the largest pitfall in game design when it comes to creating a challenging experience.