
Make Your Game Easy, Then Make It Easier - angelbob
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/11/make-your-game-easy-then-make-it-easier.html
======
flatline
As a counterexample, take Nethack. Probably largely reserved for more of the
hard-core gamer type, but I don't consider myself to be a hard-core gamer any
more. In fact, difficult games that force me to repeat a failure over and over
I will push to the side due to lack of time. Nethack, however, has continued
to fascinate me over the years. Its randomly generated content and creative
ways of killing you (usually) keep you from dying repeatedly in the same exact
circumstances, and you come out of it feeling that you learned something and
are developing a worthwhile skill in terms of the game. Dying in Nethack is
practically positive reinforcement rather than pointless repetition.

~~~
blasdel
And despite the pervasive RNG skewing every outcome, death is always the
player's fault, _and the player knows it_.

~~~
swolchok
Sometimes it's bad luck. "You fall into a pit! The spikes were poisoned! The
poison was deadly! You die..." before you could get poison resistance, for
example. The classic example is the early-game gnome that gets generated with
wand of death, which you have no defense against at that stage.

~~~
blasdel
Over the course of many hundreds of deaths, I've had that happen to me maybe a
couple times, like a falling rock trap on turn 5. Occasionally epic shit like
this happens: <http://alt.org/nethack/player-all.php?player=Ascension> \-- but
more common is early unavoidable pet deaths.

But as you pass the first few hundred turns, the probability that your death
is going to be entirely the fault of something you decided to do in the last
few turns rapidly approaches one. You can acquire resistances and detection
mechanisms quite early, plus your pet is so very useful in that period too.

Once you know what you're doing, every decision is an explicit trade,
especially in hindsight.

------
derefr
I think Vogel's advice loses something in the phrasing. Having multiple
difficulties is important, but making the "default" mode the easy one
_encourages the developers to design with the easy version of the game in
mind_. this is important in strategy/RPG/puzzle games, where the difficulty
corresponds directly to how much thinking is involved. If you start with the
easy mode and then tack on the hard mode after the actual game mechanics and
content are set, the hard mode will usually just end up as a set of
statistical skews and extra "hard quests" that are _quantitatively_ more
demanding, but don't leave you with any _qualitative_ feeling of added
difficulty, only of frustration. For examples, think of the speed increases in
Tetris, or the Weapons in FF7.

By comparison, if you design in difficulty from the start, the difficulty will
be interwoven with the game design. You can always make the game easier later,
but you'll still have the areas that require Advanced Thinking to
surmount—you'll just have a shortcut available as well, if you wish. For one
example, the Mario series is designed such that every stage can be beaten as
"small" Mario. Every power-up is, in ways, a shortcut—if you want to
experience the game at its cleverest, play without them.

------
nuclear_eclipse
One of the best things I've read in past relating to this topic dealt with the
playtesting that Valve held for (I think) Half Life 2. If anyone could supply
me with my lost source, it would be greatly appreciated.

They would sit a wide range of users down in front of a new level or scene,
and silently watch them play, with no help, and with analytics running in the
background. If they noticed players taking too long on certain puzzles, dying
too often from certain monsters, or just not grasping the expected flow of
events, there was further work to be done; likewise, if players blew through a
level or puzzle too quickly, didn't have any troubles with a "boss", there was
also work to be done.

~~~
lmkg
The Director's Commentary in Portal and Episode 2 is particularly revealing.
One major lesson: it's impossible to teach players to look up.

Bungie had a laboratory for testing players playing Halo 3. I remember seeing
heat maps of where players died the most frequently.

~~~
bradbeattie
Heatmaps in HL2:

[http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep2/death_maps/ep2_outlan...](http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep2/death_maps/ep2_outland_08_deaths.jpg)

<http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php>

Interestingly, they provide them for TF2 maps as well:

<http://www.steampowered.com/status/tf2/tf2_stats.php>

------
sjsivak
People often confuse "making a game easy" with "making a game rewarding". The
worst thing you can do is make your game too easy, the best thing you can do
is reinforce every single correct user action with positive feedback and a
reward.

The almighty example: Peggle.

~~~
vlad
_People often confuse "making a game easy" with "making a game rewarding". The
worst thing you can do is make your game too easy_

Maybe I misread, but what you wrote is exactly the opposite of the point Jeff
makes. Jeff is respected in the indie games community, and has created
shareware games since 1994, while you just graduated college this year. I
bring that up because he wrote a whole article explaining his point, while you
simply wrote a statement saying it is the worst thing. Why?

 _the best thing you can do is reinforce every single correct user action with
positive feedback and a reward._

Rewarding as many user actions as possible is known to be an important tactic
and is not something the author disagreed with (and is likely something he
believes as well.) Why was it used as a counter point?

Also, why do you believe that reinforcing every "correct" user action is on
the opposite end of the spectrum of making games easy?

Rewarding user actions with points and spiffy effects is actually a part of
making the game very easy. People want to feel successful for doing anything
at all in casual games, and giving rewards and accolades for easy-to-
accomplish tasks (as seen in games like Peggle) is part of making the game
easy.

And what you call "correct" user actions in casual games such as Peggle would
be better called "rewarded" actions. As players click around the screen, they
are rewarded for coming closer to a goal, often having no idea why they got
those points. Additionally, many successful casual games are designed so that
even user actions that are completely ineffective are rewarded with points to
the point that this is an inside joke between casual game developers. That is
what I mean when I say that making games easy is correlated, not the opposite
of, rewarding players often, and also why games are not necessarily about
rewarding user behaviors as much as keeping them feeling confident and
playing. Finally, this is also what I believe Jeff is talking about.

~~~
sjsivak
Sure, you can try to discredit me because I just graduated from grad school
this spring, but I have been making games for a while. To be honest I have
never heard of Jeff Vogel before nor have I heard of Spiderweb Software,
therefore I have not played any of his games. This is not an attack on him, he
seems to be a successful indie game developer.

I realize he wrote a whole article, I did not read it all, just the bold
stuff. This sort of idea about difficulty has been sprouting up since casual
games hit the main stream a few years ago. Most people seem to think casual
games got so popular because they are so easy, I totally disagree. That is
what my comment was based on.

As for making the game "too easy" (notice I said "too easy") being the worst
thing, how much fun is it to play an 8 year old in basketball? How fun is it
to play chess against someone that has never played before? How many games
have you been bored with because they are too easy. Making a game too easy is
bad, it will just make players stop playing. The key is finding the balance
between difficulty and skill (go ahead and graph it based on your playtesting
surveys) and riding that curve up and to the right the entire way.

The reward can be independent of difficulty. The reward is juicy feedback. It
is empowering. The problem is most people assume the reward must be something
relevant to the game mechanics, like a bigger sword, but that is not true. The
reason I used Peggle as an example is because user feedback basically has
nothing to do with the actual game. The fireworks, soundtrack, bling-y
graphics, all of that is what puts the game over the top. You think that the
extravaganza that happens at the end of each level has any impact on the
difficulty of the game? No, it just makes the player feel awesome. Sure, it is
not as tough as Ikaruga, but have you tried the Master Levels? They are not
easy. The feedback is not part of the difficulty.

As for the actual bold parts of that article:

"People will forgive a game for being too easy. They will never forgive it for
being too hard." (I switched it since he disagrees with the opposite)

Eh, I guess. But there have been times when I have died while playing the game
and I did not blame the game, I blamed my skill. It was not the game's fault.
It is bad to make a game too difficult, just as bad as it is to make a game
too easy.

"People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them
feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a
grudge, and never buy your games again."

My whole argument is that you do not need to make the game easy to make the
player feel badass. Even then, if the game is too easy players will think it
is pedestrian and not play it.

"When a player is on the default difficult level, has built his or her
characters poorly, and is playing straight through the main storyline with
mediocre tactics, that player should almost never be killed."

I would think this is a problem with the tutorial or how complicated the game
is. It should be straight forward to see progression of most players and know
roughly at what point they would be at throughout the game. If they do not
know how to play (have mediocre tactics) that is probably not a difficulty
problem. I would look at what made the player think those choices were good,
and then try to figure out how you can reinforce the right ones with juicy
feedback.

TOO LONG DID NOT READ VERSION: Your game might not be too difficult, it might
just need more/better feedback for the user to make them feel awesome. If your
game is too easy it will fail, probably the same way if it is too hard.

------
DannoHung
Wrong on both counts: A game should have a difficulty curve that guides the
player through the course of the game, but presents them with enjoyable
challenges that they must escalate their skill to as they progress.

It's no good having a game that's _too_ easy, because then it is boring.
Conversely, if the game is too hard with no way to provide the player feedback
necessary for them to improve their capacity, then there is no purpose in
playing.

When Jeff is talking about games that are easy or games that are hard that are
still satisfying, he's referring to the fact that both types of games provide
adequate feedback to the player. The easy games that are good will still
quickly defeat the player if he does not interact in an appropriate and
effective manner even though the player still knows exactly how to engage in
those interactions. A hard game that is good is _fair_ about its difficulty
and the skill challenges provide the player a way to attune their play to the
required interaction with coherent and consistent feedback.

------
Groxx
I doubt I'm the only one, but I completely disagree. I hold grudges against
games being _too_ easy, because they're _not_ enjoyable. If I want a leisurely
stroll through a dungeon, I pick up a game more designed for such a thing - a
casual game. If I want a _challenge_ , something to get my adrenaline going,
to make me WANT to win, difficulty is where it's at. Difficulty is addictive,
ease isn't.

In its defense, it's saying that you shouldn't kill your player too much on
the default difficulty. That's good advice, but it's missing what I believe to
be the real kernel of truth: death shouldn't be excessively _costly_. Having
to play through a long-ass level to fight the 99%-indestructible boss just
because he got a lucky shot in will definitely turn people off.

~~~
angelbob
What Jeff Vogel says (in the comments, I think) to this point is that there
are harder difficulty levels if you want to do this. His games do tend to have
them.

Another commenter replies that the difficulty levels should probably be better
documented in this case, so you can tell who they're intended for. Fair
enough.

~~~
ryanelkins
A good example of this was Torchlight which I picked up this weekend. I was
all set to play it on Normal but the tooltip said that this was a good setting
for people new to Action Adventures (or soemthing like that - not 100% sure
how the makers categorized it). I proceeded to Hard mode which was described
as being good for people with some experience with these kinds of games. My
next run through I'll probably give Very Hard mode a try.

The idea though is that you want to make things accessible. If you start out
with ANY product targeting the top 1% you're going to either have to charge
ALOT or just not expect to make much money. Having the default mode be not
very challenging for newcomers lets them get their feet wet while providing a
way to challenge themselves down the road, should they be looking for a
challenge.

------
lmkg
I think the article is oversimplifying the issue, but it's still an important
and relevant view that a lot of gamers don't want to believe. Most people
don't play games for the challenge, we play it for the fun. Overcoming
obstacles is one way, of several, to achieve this.

Ninja Gaiden is fine. It's a good game. It's hard, but it's not hard just for
hardness' sake, it's not a jackass about it (usually). Ninja Gaiden was the
best example I've seen of a game that makes the player rise to the challenge
and become better at the game. There are a lot of games I've seen that are
simply cheap and frustrating, losing sight of the 'fun & games' aspect of
gaming just to raise the difficulty bar. These games shoot themselves in the
foot by severely restricting their appeal. For example, the Medal of Honor
series never interested me because too often, it uses the 'challenge' of
making the player memorize with millimeter-precision a route through the
level, with no way to find the path without getting shot in the face a
statistically significant number of times.

However, the issue isn't really about how hard or easy the game is. The issue
is appealing to different audiences. How do you appeal to the hardcore and
casual audiences at the same time? One way is by offering difficulty levels
(another is auto-adjusting the difficulty, like Max Payne), although some
absurd fraction of people just choose "medium" and be done with it. Another
way is having a more continuous range of success available, with different
difficulties. This is why achievement systems are such a good idea. They let
the user cherry-pick how much challenge they want to deal with, as well as
when and which types.

This is not to say that hardcore tough-as-nail games shouldn't exist. They
have a right to exist. However, they should be made with the awareness that
they're niche products, and that the majority of the game-buying public (now
that the majority of the public buys games) is looking for some entertainment
and not a lifestyle.

There's also a lot that can be done to make difficult games more palatable,
and even appealing. As as said above, Ninja Gaiden does a good job of making
the player better at the game. Giving the appearance of progress is important,
even if the player is nominally failing, they'll feel better if they're
getting closer to succeeding. The most important quality is simply the
appearance of fairness, which varies wildly and is totally subjective. Quite
simply, if the player blames the game for being hard he'll quit, but if he
thinks do better and beat it he'll most likely continue.

------
mquander
Another reasonable option is to avoid making the player pick an inappropriate
level by picking for them. Off the top of my head, one example is Quake Live,
which puts every new player in a little test area; first, it challenges them
to see if they can jump accurately; then, it challenges them to rocket jump;
then, it challenges them to strafe jump. Finally, it puts them in an first-
to-15 deathmatch against a bot opponent with adaptive difficulty (so if you
start out pwning the bot, it will rapidly get better until it starts evening
the score.) By doing so, it forms a good picture of the player's skills so
that it can match them evenly against other players immediately. The process
takes about 15 minutes, but it certainly saves people a lot of poorly-balanced
games.

It would be hard to do the same thing in an RPG without a longer test period,
but it would be really easy to do so in a more action-oriented game, or a
platformer. Of course, one would want to be able to override the
"autodetected" difficulty level, but it would simultaneously address the
problem of casual gamers getting frustrated because the default is too hard,
and the problem of tough-as-nails gamers getting frustrated because they
picked one that turned out to be too easy.

~~~
iamwil
with that, sometimes you get better players pretending that they're not as
good, so they can prey on weaker players when they're categorized as a bad
player when they're really not.

------
bitwize
A game should be difficult. It should even be hella difficult. But the game
should be so crafted such that the player should feel in complete control at
all times, and if he loses it's always his fault and not the game's. _Mega
Man_ series games did this brilliantly.

~~~
blasdel
See also: _nethack_

It's an object lesson in humility! In every death after the first few hundred
turns, you instantly realize the entire chain of totally avoidable bad
decisions based on bravado.

------
chipsy
I think "deceitful design" is the best way to phrase this. When the player
starts the game they have zero knowledge of what kind of fun, immersive
experiences the game holds, and they have no reason to expend effort into
seeking out those experiences for themselves; "beat the game" is usually all
they're out to do when they start playing. Therefore, they have zero tolerance
for a learning curve that forces them to "sink or swim," because it will feel
arbitrary and pointless - an elitist barrier to "beating the game" that is
likely to make them unhappy and stop playing immediately. Games which are
built to a preexisting genre and mechanics can cheat and be hard from the very
first instant on the expectation of an existing player base knowing - more or
less - how things are going to work. But games with substantial original ideas
can't rely on this, and it isn't a good idea in any case.

So the problem for the game designer is not to make the game easy so much as
it is to make the player feel confident - even overconfident - so that they
are willing to see all of the game's features, and then to gradually slip in
the challenging elements to disrupt those confident feelings without
completely shattering them.

Reward-focused design happens to be the best way to go about this - "you can't
fail but you can always do better," where the game puts a lot of emphasis on
achievements of skill without making them a barrier to game progression, or at
least makes it so that even if skill limits progression(as in most arcade
games, or games like Nethack), opportunities are presented to polish up play
at earlier points and reap rewards for it later. Resource bonuses like
powerups or extra lives are particularly good for this, but even measurements
like combo counts or accuracy can serve this purpose if the feedback is
immediate and given regularly.

Designing all the game content around the introduction and tutorialization of
mechanics, which Portal did, is another strategy, and it can work in tandem
with reward-focused design.

------
Jach
I really think it's best to have a good variety of easy and difficult
challenges in a game (and you need challenges). People will never forgive a
game for being too easy, or for being too hard. A nice middle ground needs to
be found.

This reminds me of the "Iwata Asks" article recently on HN, and I think they
have a better take on the issue. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970566>
A couple quotes:

Iwata: So you wanted to know what it was that made players insert another 100
yen coin once the game was over and have another go?

Miyamoto: Right. And basically, I concluded that this was born of the players
being mad at themselves.

...

Miyamoto: Well, since you've purchased it, it's surely better to be able to
see the ending.

------
chrischen
Call of duty. This was one of the easiest games I've played. You could
literally just let your computer ai beat the game for you on normal
difficulty. Grand theft auto is similar. It was easy as long as you didn't do
the missions. These two games also happen to be the most popular games ever.
I've been dying for gamemakers to recognize the fact that easy is good. If I
wanted to get frustrated by difficulty I'd go do some work, but a game should
be an enjoyable pasttime, not a placeholder for work. If it's hard, then it
should at least reward adequately. Knowing you wasted 5 hours dominating real
people online is rewarding. But knowing you wasted 5 hours beating a computer
is a waste of time.

~~~
ebrenes
I'd like to point out that the Call of Duty series is not famous for its
single-player campaign (especially the critically-acclaimed versions).

Its call to fame is the multi-player aspect where the level of difficulty can
be as hard if not harder than what's available at the hardest difficulty
setting for the single-player campaign (veteran difficulty).

~~~
chrischen
Call of Duty's campaign's are extremely short. They don't do much repetition.

For me personally Call of Duty is one of the few games I actually went through
the campaign. It felt satisfying.

But like I said, if there must be a challenge, it should be against other
players, and Call of Duty got that right too.

------
rms
I'm actually trying this now with a Facebook game... a game for people who
find Mafia Wars and Farmville too challenging. The gameplay for those games is
already almost-non existent, so why not abstract away the meaningless
clicking?

~~~
Deestan
You should take inspiration from Progress Quest:
<http://www.progressquest.com/> They've masterfully abstracted away every part
of your standard MMORPG that doesn't require thinking.

~~~
rms
:) Definitely, cloning Progress Quest was my original idea. Since then the
design has gotten a bit more ambitious, but I still think a mostly straight
clone of Idle RPG or Progress Quest could work as a Facebook App. I wouldn't
be offended if someone else takes that idea.

------
johnfn
Counterexample: <http://www.notdoppler.com/theunfairplatformer.php>

This is a game which is totally built around the concept of being impossibly
hard, but still succeeds.

~~~
benmathes
How does that succeed? It's not on their top 10 list, and I found it to be
personally a giant pain in the ass. I quit after a few minutes.

~~~
johnfn
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+unfair+platform...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the+unfair+platformer&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g-c7)
2 million hits on google, hundreds of thousands of hits on websites like
armorgames and kongregate. Pretty good for a flash game.

------
tumult
This is why games suck now.

'Make a game easy' is what you do when you can't design good gameplay
mechanics that work at multiple skill levels. If your game can only work at
one skill level, you have to make that skill level really easy if you want to
keep as many people as you can playing it after their first try.

The downside is that there is no reward for improving at the game. You play it
a few times, and you do not improve. There's no newer corners of the game to
explore, no new approaches to playing it.

Some games are so good that you can re-release them over and over for years
with just a few changes and maybe some new content, and people will keep
buying and playing it. Tetris. Puyo-puyo. Super Mario. _Those_ are the games
you should try to idolize, not games like Gears of War or Halo or random-
indie-game-that-wishes-it-were-Braid #455321.

You can brute-force a game that sells a lot by playtesting it with countless
focus groups, paying Hollywood-level for game assets, and marketing it to
death on Gamespot and whatever, but that's the equivalent of hiring a giant
workforce and grinding out your web app in some old Java enterprise
WebPortletComponentModelerFactory thing.

Be agile, try small fun stuff and wander around until you get something that's
fun to play, and then think up a way to make a full game out of it. Don't
start the other way around, with the desire for 'some game' but no way to fill
it out with the fun part.

Addendum: Don't be afraid to let the player _die_. That's why there are
multiple lives (if your game works like that, I mean.) Most games I see today
go as far as possible to prevent a player from dying during normal gameplay,
to the point where you can clear many games on your first try without any sort
of negative feedback -- Assassin's Creed 2, for example.

To learn to play Super Mario Bros., you had to die or watch someone else die.
If you're setting out from the beginning in your design with "I never want the
player to die", then just don't have lives and death at all, like Braid. It's
ridiculous when you have a lives system in a game but contort your game
mechanics to never use it. You end up creating an environment where a player
never really gets negative feedback on when to not do something, and you have
to constantly push them in the right direction with obvious and uncouth hints
in order to prevent them from making an 'accident'. You're preventing your
player from learning. Stop it!

------
vegai
A good game should be comparable to a good book or movie. Nearly all modern
games are like Dan Brown pieces.

I'm 29 and get off my lawn!

