1. Difficulty Modes and DDA Flow in Games Difficulty and Reward
Readings 7A
Difficulty Modes and DDA
Flow in Games
Difficulty and Reward

2. Difficulty Modes and DDA
settable difficulty levels issues:
The player has to decide too early. Games usually ask the player to choose a difficulty level right at the beginning, and at that point the player doesn't actually know how hard the game is going to be because he hasn't played it yet
Response?

3. Difficulty Modes and DDA
The options are too coarse. What if medium mode is too easy, but hard mode is too hard? The categories are too widely spaced.
Response?

4. Difficulty Modes and DDA
They're too broad, by which Glassner means that the difficulty settings apply generally across all the different types of challenges in a game, and a player might be good at one kind, such as shooting, but not at another such as driving. Which setting should he choose?
Response?

5. Difficulty Modes and DDA
They're too persistent, i.e. a difficulty setting doesn't adjust to the player's rate of improving skill, especially if he's not allowed to change the setting later. The difficulty growth curve, at whatever setting, may prove to be too steep or too shallow for the player.
Response?

6. Glassner concludes his discussion by saying, "Games should not ask players to select a difficulty level. Games should adapt themselves during gameplay to offer the player a consistent degree of challenge based on his changing abilities at different tasks.“
In other words, they should do dynamic difficulty adjustment(DDA)

7. DDA also called adaptive difficulty
It would be very cool to code a game that was smart enough to adjust its challenges to the player's abilities, so as to guarantee him a good time. But despite Glassner's confidence in DDA, I also recognize that it's not necessarily easy to do

8. problems with DDA
Some players hate it. Many players feel patronized when they discover that a game is going easy on them when get into trouble
Players can learn to exploit DDA by pretending to be worse than they are.
DDA doesn't work for all kinds of challenges
DDA can create absurdities. DDA mechanism must operate in a way that is logically and emotionally consistent with the game world.
DDA ruins pacing and obviates good level design

9. DDA
Any DDA system needs a performance-evaluation mechanism and an adjustment mechanism for each type of challenge that it will work on.
The performance-evaluation mechanism determines how successful the player is at overcoming a particular type of challenge
the adjustment mechanism makes the challenge easier or harder,

10. DDA considerations
Make the game harder by beefing up the opposition, not by weakening the player
Make it optional
Make it subtle adjust the difficulty of the game through frequent small changes
Keep the details secret

11. Flow in Games
Flow, the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment
the activity needs to reach a balance between the challenges of the activity and the abilities of the participant

12. Flow in Games
three core elements a video game must have in order to evoke Flow experience.
the game is intrinsically rewarding, and the player is up to play the game.
The game offers right amount of challenges to match with the player’s ability, which allows him/her to delve deeply into the game.
The player needs to feel a sense of personal control over the game activity.

13. Flow in Games
designing and implementing a DDA system is not trivial. Every so often, DDA systems take control away from the game designers
different people have different skills and Flow Zones. A well-designed game might keep normal players in Flow, but will not be as effective for hardcore or novice players

14. Flow in Games
Tuning represents the process of a game designer using playtesting to iterate the design and manually polish the game experience until it gets close to evoking Flow
Playtesting usually involves multiple testers to reveal the potential Flow entropies in the game

15. Flow in Games
Passive Flow Adjustment

16. Difficulty and Reward
Difficulty in a platformer is usually established by a very simple formula: (Percent chance the player will die) X (Penalty for dying) = Difficulty
Penalty for dying in video games started in the arcades where the major penalty was adding a quarter.
Once home consoles became the norm the player no longer had the ability to add credits with coins.
The formula had to change. The goal of achieving a high score was replaced with progression to completion, and the major penalty became going back to the start.

17. Difficulty and Reward
Risk/reward was a way for the designer to give the player a way to gain more credits by taking bigger risks
Removing lives lets the designer base difficulty more on the actual level design and challenge and less around the penalty of losing lives and restarting

18. Difficulty and Reward Keep the levels small
2. Keep the action constant
3. Reward
Video games are exercises in learning and growing.
The designer acts as the teacher, giving the player problems that escalate in difficulty, hoping their course will help them learn as they go, get better, and feel good about what they achieve