Challenge Vs. Punishment

One of the fundamental components of an engaging game (card, board, electronic, party, etc.) is that there is some degree of difficulty between starting the game and arriving at the success state, whatever that may be. While this can be applied to games of all lengths and depths, the bottom line is that a player that goes unchallenged for too long is going to get bored. It's one of the amazing properties we possess as living creatures; we need to go face to face with our environment in SOME way or else we start feeling numb.

The geniuses that developed the first arcade games realized that tapping into this evolutionary compulsion was the perfect business model. They realized that by engaging players hard enough with a game they must pay to play, then they will happily pay to play...over and over again. This is why coin-operated games were often times so difficult yet so successful; they managed to find the sweet spot between compelling and punishing. The problem here is that a lot of us game designers who grew up playing those games still think that challenge must be appropriated in those archaic ways. But times have changed. Different kinds people are playing different kinds of games and expectations have mutated, for better or worse.

Now I want to talk about Super Meat Boy for a quick second. Edmund McMillen (one of the two developers of the game) wrote an awesome post on the Team Meat blog about challenge in games and he broke it down into a really straightforward formula; (% chance the player will die) x (Penalty for dying) = Difficulty. This formula is basically addressing the player concern of "How often will I fail and how much and I going to be punished for it?" Super Meat Boy answers this question in a very distinct way - you die very often and are punished very little. This was a conscious decision on the part of Team Meat and they have specifically constructed all of their levels around this equation.

So what does this have to do with Aztez? It has to do with the fact that we are also going to answer this question in a very distinct way; by making it very difficult to die in addition to punishing you very little when you do. Of course this seems to introduce the problem of having too little challenge, and I absolutely agree that the danger is there. So my perceived solution to this potential problem is to alter the nature of the challenge itself and design accordingly. Instead of challenging the player to not die, Aztez will challenge the player to perform very well (phase 1 of the game). Games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Off-Road Velociraptor Safari have done this to great effect; the onus is on the player to accumulate high scores in creative ways as opposed to avoiding a death state. The only problem with those types of games is they are timed and you are restricted to experiencing the game in specific difficulty levels in specific amounts of time. I believe there is a way to circumvent these traditional restrictions and still create an engaging game.

How are we going to do this? Don't know yet! But I'll tell you this much - I'm asking the following questions: What if the player had control over the difficulty of the game on a moment-to-moment basis? What if the player could end the current gameplay segment whenever they wanted? What if the player was rewarded for taking creative risks by having their punishment states delayed, or even eliminated? Help me out here, gamers!