Comment on The Purpose of Difficulty | GMTK Mini
BunScientist@lemmy.zip 10 hours agomost runbacks are nothing but time wasters, some are platforming challenges and others are avoid the enemies in the way which you’ve avoided plenty of times before if you are having actual problems with the boss.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.
But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.
Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!