As regular readers of this column know, difficulty, challenge and progression are three of my pet topics when it comes to videogames. The extremes are easy to agree on: no one wants to press a button marked ‘Win’ to complete a game, and no one wants to play a game that’s so impossibly hard that it’s unbeatable. But the vast landscape in between is often tricky for developers and players  alike to navigate.

Like other media, videogames may be mass produced, but the ability of an individual player to progress from beginning to end can be halted at any time by the mechanics of that particular game, something that you don’t have to worry about when you’re keeping your eyes open to watch a movie or turning the pages of a book. At the same time, developers can’t live in fear of a player’s progress being halted by failure, because failure is one of the ways in which players learn how to play and how to get better. But as triple-A games become more and more expensive, the developer-as-torturer model of game design is harder than ever to justify. As Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami told me as far back as 2001, players used to want to scale mountains in terms of game difficulty; these days, many of them want a gentle hike.

One of the simplest solutions has been around for years: let the player choose among three or four difficulty settings. But an issue that quickly arises is that players are often asked to decide on a difficulty setting before they’ve even seen the game’s opening cutscene, let alone experienced a second of gameplay. This in turn places a lot of pressure on the developer to balance their game in such a way that it meets the expectation of individual players that they’ve never met, while also placing pressure on the player to make a decision at the start in hope that the ramifications of that decision will still be to their liking five or ten hours into the game. Some games, like Call Of Duty 4, use your performance on an early mission to suggest a difficulty level; that’s better, but it’s still too early to be truly representative. Dynamic difficulty adjustment is a favourite tool of certain developers, but it inevitably runs the risk of making the game easier than the player wants or harder than the player can handle.

Nevertheless, developers who try to come up with unique solutions to this problem can quickly find themselves under fire from gamers who not only want to climb a sheer rock face, they want everyone else to do so as well. Take a look at the response to the news of Nintendo’s Demo Play patent, which proposed three solutions to assist players when they get stuck. The first, ‘Game’, lets players bring up video-recorded hints. The second, ‘Digest’, allows players to see video of the game being played; what’s more, they can jump into the actual game at any time, thanks to game saves that are downloaded in the background. The third and final solution, ‘Scene Menu’, lets players navigate through sections of the game in a manner similar to the chapter function on the DVD. The responses on a number of blogs and message boards were fairly negative, and that only intensified when a USA Today interview with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto suggested that players could use Demo Play to have the AI to take control of the player’s avatar, then resume play at the moment of their choosing.

Developers I spoke with directly also expressed scepticism. “A game is not just an interactive story,” says Pete Wanat, who has produced such games as The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay and Scarface: The World Is Yours. “Beating the game is important, and having the game play the hard parts for you cheapens the bulk of the interactive experience.” All things being equal, Wanat prefers dynamic difficulty adjustment, though he acknowledges that it requires a lot of “tweak time” that developers don’t always have. Mark DeLoura, a veteran of companies like Nintendo, Sony and Ubisoft, was dubious about Demo Play as well. “Demo Play on its own is deficient from what I ideally want as a player because it is all or nothing,” he told me.

While I’m not as opposed to that aspect of Demo Play, I do wonder whether a better compromise for veteran gamers might be to let them ‘play’ with difficulty settings at any time. The God Of War games, for instance, ask players if they want to drop down in difficulty after they’ve failed  repeatedly. I like this system – but I’ve only ever used it on the final boss. Why? Because I don’t feel as though I should reset the difficulty of the rest of the game simply because I’m having trouble with one particular section. What I’d like is for the game to ask me whether I want to reduce the difficulty until the next checkpoint, at which point the game will return to its original difficulty setting. Or better yet, let me change the difficulty at any checkpoint, if I so choose. After all, the only person who knows exactly how much of a challenge I’m looking for at any given time is me.

N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.