CHALLENGE
Examples of Video Game Challenge
Consider the following two contemporary examples of gameplay in video games.
Niko Bellic is standing on a highway off-ramp overlooking a low-rise building. He has spent hours in Liberty City—a fictional urban environment modelled on New York—participating in the many discretionary activities it has to offer, including this one: finding and killing the two hundred pigeons that are hidden throughout the city. Scanning the roof, Niko sees the pigeon, head bobbing in the shadows of a billboard supported by the low-rise’s roof. Niko aims his gun, destroys the pigeon in a flurry of feathers. A moment passes, then a message flashes on the screen: “All diseased pigeons killed. LC is a cleaner place.”
The elevator door opens and Chell steps into Test Chamber 08. The layout is familiar—an austere, white chamber—and Chell’s objective, too, is obvious: to reach the sign-posted exit on the other side. Impeding her progress is a pool of noxious liquid that extends the width of the room. Chell knows she will not be able to jump over it. There are other objects in this chamber: a clear platform; a machine that intermittently spits out lethal energy pellets; and a pressure pad that presumably, once activated, will trigger a mechanism somewhere in the room to aid her progress. As with the exit itself, all these items cannot be accessed directly. However, to help her reach the other side, Chell is armed with a portal gun; a device that, when fired at a surface, creates a shimmering blue ovoid doorway. This “portal” allows physical objects—and Chell herself—to access unreachable places in the environment via a corresponding orange portal that is positioned elsewhere in the chamber. Chell sees this orange portal now, just above the clear platform and—with the aim of stepping onto the platform—uses the portal gun to open a blue portal in the wall beside her. This is a mistake, as one of the lethal energy pellets, that is directed at the orange portal, passes through it and continues its trajectory through the blue portal beside Chell. The pellet hits Chell, thereby ending her attempt at completing this chamber’s objective. As the game reloads and Test Chamber 08 is reset, Chell will have to use her reasoning, and experiment in the physics-bending capabilities of the portal gun, in order to reach the exit.
Each of these examples—from, respectively, the open world gangster game Grand Theft Auto IV (also known as GTA4; Rockstar Games, 2008) and the puzzle game Portal (Valve, 2007)—demonstrate the diverse methods by which a player might engage with a video game’s world. Niko Bellic’s hunt for the pigeon and Chell’s efforts to navigate a trapped room to the exit vary in certain crucial ways, but both indicate the importance that challenge contributes to the dynamic structure of video games. Challenge is found in the eventual discovery of a pigeon and the reward it garners; and in the misplacement of a portal that leads to the protagonist’s death: probabilities of success and of failure epitomize the essence of challenge in the video game.
Challenge, however, is present outside—and exists prior to—the player’s pursuit of success and failure within a virtual world. Challenge is part of life, work, and relationships. Indeed, outside the structures of gameplay itself, there are challenges related to the wider video game culture that are comparable to those in other cultural arenas. So, when Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf (2008) note the challenges facing the game critic and theorist who struggles to find “copies of old games and the systems needed to play them” (p. 6), it becomes a problem broadly familiar to academics, archivists, and collectors of film, music or literature.
The Appeal of Video Game Challenge
There is nonetheless a clear distinction to be made between such real-world challenges and those offered up by the virtual worlds of GTA4 and Portal. Success and failure are part of life, but when playing a video game, a person becomes a willing participant; both prepared to be tested by the game and adhere to its rules. This is the conclusion reached by philosopher Bernard Suits in his analysis of why people play games. He writes: “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (2005, p. 157).
Originally writing in 1978, Suits’s definition of games as voluntary challenges was conceived as a means of understanding such “playful” activities from games of cops and robbers to golf. Suits conceives of a “lusory attitude”—the player’s acceptance of the boundaries within which gameplay is possible—to explain the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of restrictions put upon the player to achieve a goal (p. 16). In golf, the player understands that for the objective to be met—dropping a ball into a hole—there must be impediments: the large size of the terrain, hazards such as water and sand, the use of specific equipment (clubs) and so on. Without such voluntary obstacles, the player could simply pick up the ball and drop it into the hole. Applied to video games, the voluntary challenge is built around the player’s willingness to navigate an environment specifically constructed as an obstacle to success (an urban sprawl that hides pigeons for the player to discover; a room in which the player must figure out how to reach the exit) and designed to impede the player’s progress. But challenge is also evident in the player’s recognition that video games involve learning and mastering certain methods of input—such as controllers or keyboards—whose designs and systems of button or key presses are, at first glance, as arbitrarily constructed as the putters, irons and woods used in a game of golf. As Suits has it, “the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means … such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity” (2005, p. 75).
Suits’s generalizing claim that games are essentially challenge-focused was highlighted in the 2003 publication of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play (2003). This book was written—as was Suits’s—with a mind to define games in general; but with its capacity to broaden its analyses to include video games and discuss thinkers who were hitherto unexplored into their pages, Salen and Zimmerman’s primer introduced alternative methods of understanding what video games are. Challenge is not the only way in which Rules of Play distinguishes games, of course, but Suits’s definition is integral to understanding the appeal and structures of video games; it leads the authors to conclude that challenge—after Suits’s description of overcoming “unnecessary obstacles”—is a combination of conflict and rules. On conflict they write: “All games embody a contest of powers. The contest can take many forms, from cooperation to competition, from solo conflict with a game system to multiplayer social conflict. Conflict is central to games.” And on rules: “Rules provide the structure out of which play emerges, by delimiting what the player can and cannot do” (2003, p. 80).
The need to more seriously consider the role of challenge in video games was timely, as many more theories until the publication of Rules of Play identified games as competitive activities. Looking to establish a theoretical language of its own, video game studies of this time found it in another classic text, Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (originally published as Les Jeux et les Hommes in 1958). Caillois’s comprehensive taxonomy of games was highly influential, and so was one of his categories—agôn, meaning competition. However, in appropriating Caillois’s agôn to video games, the term stood to represent not only competition but also challenge, since challenge did not have its own category. Hence, in an essay by Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad agôn is described as the process of “winning through struggling” (2003, p. 214); and for Peter Vorderer, Tilo Hartmann and Christoph Klimmt—discussing id Software’s game, Quake (1996)—the introduction of “a horde of evil monsters” that try to kill the player adds a “competitive element” to the gameplay (2003, p. 2). Sometimes this conflation of competition and challenge is part of the language through which game manufacturers describe the games themselves. The manual for Kee Games’ Tank! (1974) distinguishes its two-player military simulator from other games on the market by evoking competition in such a way: “Historically, video games have employed non-violent competition between players (e.g. all paddle and driving games) or violent competition between a player and the machine (e.g. Computer Space [Nutting Associates, 1971]).”
In each of these cases, competition defines terms that Salen and Zimmerman, after Suits, identify as closer to what would be more clearly understood as challenge: struggle and the overcoming of obstacles (for example Quake’s evil monsters). Video game terminology needed to evolve so that challenge became distinct from competition, and did not become subsumed by it. The description from the Tank! manual offers a useful delineation here: between competition as a social activity and the essentially solo endeavor of a player attempting to overcome obstacles within the framework of the game’s rules—in other words, challenge. While there are comparisons to be made between competition and challenge, the growing popularity of online multiplayer games—such as the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) and the Call of Duty franchise (Activision, 2003 onwards)—reveals there are differences, just as they suggest the importance of investigating how far those differences extend. For Salen and Zimmerman, competition contains an element of challenge, just as for followers of Caillois, challenge could be read as synonymous with competition. To be clear, however, it is not simply the case that challenge was not discussed at all by video game theorists prior to Rules of Play—there are examples here of writers who were doing precisely that—but that after 2003 the distinctions between challenge and competition became far clearer.
Challenge, then, involves the player’s willing engagement with a system of obstacles and rules; but what compels some players to pursue every last pigeon in Liberty City or reason out the way to an exit in one of Portal’s test chambers, doggedly pursuing success incrementally, or failure consistently? The repetition of actions in games shows that the designs and systems formulated specifically to challenge the player are also, when successfully implemented, able to entice the player to return more readily to those challenges. So, it is true that, in general terms, success and failure are seen to characterize challenge but in encountering obstacles unique to gameplay, the player’s motivation to complete a game’s challenges is, as Suits states, voluntary; but, more than that, it is persistent. Psychologist Michael J. Apter (2001) discusses the various levels of motivation that drive people to voluntarily accept challenge in his thoughts on “reversal theory,” a categorization since applied by Jesper Juul to distinguish between the emotional states of people who play a game as opposed to those engaged in everyday tasks. Juul notes how “people seek low arousal in normal goal-directed activities such as work, but high arousal, and hence challenge and danger, in activities performed for their intrinsic enjoyment, such as games” (Juul, 2008, p. 249).
Experiencing the Right Level of Difficulty
In its ideal state, then, challenge—characterized by the obstacles that attempt to impede player progress—is directly proportional to the pleasure gained through playing. The navigation of Test Chamber 08 or the hunt for pigeons each offer voluntary engagement with individual challenges if the perceived effort of completing that challenge is met by the player’s sense of satisfaction and reward. Desirable challenge in video games therefore matches the sense of achievement the player feels in surmounting it.
This is similar to an observation made by T. W. Malone and M. R. Lepper (1987), who suggest that part of the reason why children have fun playing games explicitly designed for educational purposes is because their challenges appeal to the player’s desire to complete set tasks. As in Apter’s reversal theory—which observes that a person’s willingness to accept a challenge is linked to the amount of pleasure that person will derive from tackling it—Malone and Lepper recognize that the lure of games is in their capacity to offer levels of arousal hard to obtain in daily life, but they add that a game’s challenges are particularly enticing because they are clearly set out for the player, so that the conditions for success are fixed and easily understood. They also state that games should offer continuous feedback on player performance so that there is a definite sense of progression toward the completion of a goal. So during Niko’s hunt for pigeons, a written message appears on-screen after every kill, both confirming the player’s progress and clarifying how many pigeons remain. That the pigeons are also hard to find fits in with another of Malone and Lepper’s conditions of challenge: playing a game, they note, should be a process of discovery, so that games that offer suitable challenge should withhold information that must be found by the player.
Malone and Lepper enlarge upon the generalizing claim that challenge in the video game is defined by rules and obstacles, and the voluntary employment of one to overcome the other. Indeed, the description of video game challenge as characterized by clear goals, hidden elements, and constant feedback corresponds with another theoretical strand advanced by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in particular his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990).
Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “flow”—again conceived in a non-gaming context to examine the habits of artists who are seen to become “lost” in the act of creativity—is highly influential as it illustrates the conditions by which a person becomes engrossed by an activity. Like Apter’s recognition of the difference between work and play by the levels of arousal each activity stirs in a person, flow distinguishes a state of awareness that goes beyond mere engagement to describe a condition of immersion in which a person is compelled to actively, and continually, pursue a task.
Challenge is an integral, motivating factor for the person immersed in an activity, and flow becomes an “optimal experience” when a challenge is neither too difficult to provoke anxiety for a person, nor so easy that it becomes boring. For Csikszentmihalyi, then, flow is imagined as a narrow channel between the conflicting emotional states of anxiety and boredom wherein a person experiences the best possible sense of immersion. But rather than being conceived of as static, flow operates on a trajectory that acknowledges a person’s capacity to become better at a task over time; thus, as a person’s competence in a task increases, so does the demand for greater challenge. As Noah Falstein (2005, 2009) writes, in specific reference to the video game: “Boredom occurs when the challenge of a game does not increase in difficulty and variety fast enough to keep the player engaged, and frustration occurs when it gets too difficult too fast” (2009, p. 17). Flow, as it pertains to video games, then, intensifies the anxiety in challenging situations, but only enough to maintain the player’s state of blissful attentiveness and intense pleasure. To achieve flow in playing a video game, however, it is not necessary to steadily increase the difficulty of individual challenges on a predictable continuum: Test Chamber 08—which as its number implies is encountered some way in to Portal—does not necessarily have to be the easiest nor the hardest section in the game. In applying Csikszentmihalyi’s theory specifically to video games, then, Falstein suggests that the channel the player navigates between anxiety and boredom should not progress at a predictable rate, but fluctuate over the course of the game. As Juul states, “difficulty should vary in waves” (2008, p. 247); reinforcing a point also made by Malone and Lepper that games should offer flexibility in their levels of difficulty (1987, pp. 223–253).
The concept of video game challenge—that “sometimes the game should be a little easy, sometimes a little hard” (Juul, 2008, p. 247)—operates contrary to the player’s desire. The player’s ultimate desire is to be successful in facing a game’s challenges, because failure leads to feelings of sadness and inadequacy, but failure also “makes the player reconsider his/her strategy (which makes the game more interesting).” Juul continues: “Winning provides gratification [but] [w] inning without failing leads to dissatisfaction.” Following Csikszentmihalyi and Falstein’s thoughts on flow, Juul adds that optimal player engagement is achieved both through the activity of overcoming obstacles and the interpretation of gameplay as balanced experience. Juul differentiates between the “desire to win” as active experience and an “outside view” of that experience that appears as “an aesthetic evaluation” of the game’s inherent fairness (pp. 248–249). Both are necessary states of awareness that the player must experience to ensure the right level of challenge has been met.
Emergent Challenges and Progressive Structures
As concepts of challenge are more readily applied to the relationship between video game and player, so the types of challenge games offer become demarcated. The examples of gameplay described at the beginning of this essay certainly fulfill the criteria for challenge already discussed—willing struggle against obstacles; a combination of simplicity and difficulty in surmounting those obstacles; a sense of fairness—but they are not challenging in precisely the same way. Niko Bellic’s hunt for pigeons takes place in an open world and has no bearing on the character’s advancement through the game’s story: it is an ancillary activity. However, Chell’s solving Test Chamber 08 is integral to completing the game as there is no other way to progress to the next section. Juul identifies these two types of challenge as, respectively, examples of “emergence” and “progression” (2005, p. 67). Emergence challenges offer a greater deal of flexibility to players in solving them, whereas progression challenges are far more rigid in their structure, so there will only be very few—or, indeed, only one—correct way(s) to proceed.
The differences between these two game types exist in the relative freedom each gives to the player. The miscellaneous objectives in GTA4—of which pigeon-hunting is only one—are entirely discretionary and can be picked up and dropped at any time. Emergent game systems offer variety—the term “sandbox” used to describe open world games such as GTA4 presents an ethos based on player empowerment—so that players might design their own tactics to deal with challenges, or even develop challenges of their own. Game designer Randy Smith (2011, p. 120) describes how a player of the stealth/action game Thief: The Dark Project (Eidos Interactive, 1998) approached a simple mission to steal a jeweled scepter from a mansion by bludgeoning the guards unconscious, and then arranging them and several bottles of wine around the banqueting hall to give the impression a drunken party had taken place. This player’s outlandish approach to completing a mission objective indicates not only a willingness to engage with the game’s challenge, but also the creation of an additional level of challenge presumably not considered by Thief’s developers.
Juul identifies the challenges evident in GTA4 and Thief as emergent because they are constructed by the player from the games’ existing rules and mechanisms. Emergence games offer variety as players develop tactics for dealing with challenges and are, in fact, the “primordial game structure” (2002, p. 324). Following John Holland’s description of an older, non-digital game such as chess as an emergent system in which “the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts” (1998, p. 14), Juul concludes that emergence exists in the video game too, so that “simple rules present challenges that extend beyond the rules” (2002, p. 324), with players interpreting a game’s toolset in varying ways when confronted with that game’s obstacles. “Complex gameplay” therefore radiates from simple rules (Juul, 2002, p. 328); relatively straightforward instructions—such as find the scepter without being seen in Thief—can consequently engender a variety of creative solutions.
Against the variations possible in emergence games, games of progression are highly linear: “the player has to perform a predefined set of actions in order to complete the game” (Juul, 2002, p. 324). “Progression structures” are a much more recent phenomenon than emergence ones, since the concept of emergence has been a facet of games long before the invention of the video game. Chess, for example, allows the development of complex emergence structures, offering seemingly limitless ways for a player develop strategies and win. By contrast, video games are able to contain narrower progression structures because the designer can set the challenges, limit the tools available to the player to overcome them, and ensure there is only one available solution (2002, p. 324). Juul notes this linearity is prevalent in puzzle and adventure games such as Myst (Cyan, 1993)—and, of course, Portal—in which a set amount of actions must be completed in a specific order so that the player might complete a level and therefore progress through the game, but states that even in emergence games there exist progression structures. In an open world game such as GTA4 it is possible to state that “some events can still be determined or are at least very likely to happen” (2002, p. 327)—so that if Niko fires a gun in a crowded street it will alert local policemen to his presence who will consequently try to capture or kill him—an observation that echoes Suits’s earlier point that the overcoming of obstacles is reliant upon the player’s awareness of and willingness to abide by the game’s rules. Emergence games may loosen the designer’s control over the precise ways in which the player might tackle a challenge, but the outcomes—to a greater or lesser degree—remain possible to predict.
Juul differentiates between games of emergence and games of progression by the ways in which the guides designed to assist the player are written: “Progression games have walkthroughs: lists of actions to perform to complete the game. Emergence games have strategy guides: rules of thumb, general tricks” (2002, p. 328). However, beyond the useful delineation of challenge structures, the existence of walkthroughs and strategy guides offers further nuance to the concept of challenge in video games. Clearly, when describing the player’s engagement with a game, the appropriateness of challenge is dependent upon a person’s competence as a player, and—to take Csikszentmihalyi’s flow as an example—on individual thresholds of anxiety and boredom. Whether a game is too easy or too hard is entirely subjective, although early games such as Defender (Williams Electronics, 1980)—many of which began in the arcades—are regarded as extremely punishing because they are potentially endless and player failure results in restarting the entire game. Such games offer challenge akin to a gauntlet tossed in front of the player regarded as proficient enough to accept it. Such images of challenge as a call to arms are suitably epitomized by the promotional material for the action role-playing game Dark Souls (FromSoftware, 2011), whose tagline reads: “Prepare to Die.”
Choosing Difficulty Levels, Cheating and the Removal of Challenge
Despite the existence of titles that cater toward a perceived gaming elite, many video games accept that challenge is entirely personal. Adaptable levels of challenge have consequently been part of the structure of games since the popularization of consoles, evolving from the inclusion of “difficulty switches” built into the hardware of the Atari VCS 2600 console in the late 1970s, and—in a trend that continues to the present day—the introduction of “Novice” and “Expert” levels in many games of that era, such as Pac-Man (Namco, 1980). More recent games, such as the Halo series (Bungie Studios, 2001 onwards), offer multi-tiered options to the player—ranging from “Very Easy” to “Legendary”—while others allow the player to set difficulty levels for the different types of challenge the game presents. For instance, certain entries in the Konami Silent Hill games, such as Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Silent Hill: Downpour (2012) distinguish difficulty settings for the “Riddle” and “Action” levels. In this way, games provide low-level entry requirements for their challenges, further differentiating players between perceived casual and hardcore audiences.
The choice of lower difficulty levels is one way in which challenge might be reduced, but there are others. Console games frequently include checkpoint systems, and PC games allow free saving options so that players might suffer only minor setbacks in their advance through a game. The environments in Portal are small enough so that, even if Chell dies, the game will restart at a checkpoint the player will remember from seconds—or at most, minutes—before the fatal mistake was made. Moreover, certain games—such as the 2011 re-issue of the 1998 Nintendo 64 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the company’s handheld 3DS platform—include a hint system that pops up if a player appears to be struggling to complete a section, while others allow players to skip a difficult challenge entirely—for example, an action sequence in Rockstar’s LA Noire (2011)—and proceed to the next.
The popularity of strategy guides and walkthroughs also reveals a trend in the relationship between player and game in which challenge as a negotiation of obstacles can be circumvented by the player’s foreknowledge of what the game has to offer. Mastery of a game is possible through many other means too, including, as Mia Consalvo confirms, “hacks, cheat codes, online sites, help from friends.” In addition, commercially available software—such as the GameShark or Action Replay—unlocks hidden data that reduce players’ chances of failing a game’s challenges (2007, p. 87). Moreover, games such as Zynga’s Farmville (2009) and Rovio’s Angry Birds (2009) include opportunities for players to complete challenges much more easily by paying real-world money to vastly improve their chances in overcoming hard-to-complete challenges.
Suits writes that
the attitude of the game-player must be an element in game playing because there has to be an explanation of that curious state of affairs wherein one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end.
(2005, p. 52)
Here, Suits is continuing his thesis that games are essentially challenge-based structures built around the player’s compulsion to adhere to an impractical method of achieving an end, but this is compounded by the player’s willingness to “cheat” the game’s rules or find shortcuts to completing its challenges. The strategy guide for Dark Souls, for instance, includes on its back cover a play on the game’s own tagline: “Prepare to Die Less.” Moreover, as more interactive titles are released—such as The Path (Tale of Tales, 2009) or Dear Esther (thechineseroom, 2012)—which are primarily designed as aesthetic experiments with no obstacles to overcome, the definition of a game as an optimal experience testing player skill is itself being challenged. As Consalvo writes, quoting a GameShark advertisement from the 1990s: “Can you still call it a game if you never lose?” (2007, p. 66).
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