By contrast, chess is all about the intellectual challenge. Boxing, for example, is a sport where the intellectual challenge is negligible it's all about physical challenge. In video games, as in sports in general, this challenge can exist in two forms: physical or intellectual. Challenging video games, as well as sports, offer players and spectators "opportunities to immerse themselves in the realm of presence", as Hans Gumbrecht wrote in In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006).įrom left to right: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht at Stanford University (2019) Age of Empires II: Rise of the Rajas (2016), by Microsoft. Video games less focused on deep symbolic representation and more on an interactive challenge are cases in which what is most interesting is not the exercise of hermeneutics (the interpretation of meanings) but in its materiality and presence. This component in video games tends to bring them closer to sports that can be played with a single player or with many players. The challenge design in a video game plays an interesting role in making the player engage in events that are "outside the real world" and the laws of nature but still obey certain rules of the game. Some games have a greater representative focus (with more elaborate plots, for example), while others have a greater focus on challenge, which can be physical and/or intellectual. What is intellectual difficulty?Īs we have known since at least Homo Ludens (1938), by Johan Huizinga, games (in general, not just video games) can be analyzed in two ways: for what they represent and for the challenge they provide. some tips on how to make tactical or puzzle games fairer.the concept of "fairness" applied to video games with an emphasis on intellectual difficulty.the distinction between "intellectual difficulty" and "physical difficulty".In order to provide a good technical answer on what fair difficulty means in tactical and puzzle games, this article will be divided into three topics: Similarly, puzzle games also involve error recognition, but the emphasis is placed on the player's own errors (usually there is not even an opponent) and the solution is more directly obtained by logical-mathematical deduction. I believe this also serves as a good intuition to understand what tactical games are in general: they are about recognizing your errors as well as your opponent's and using them to your advantage. Prominent chess player Johannes Zukertort once stated that "chess is the struggle against the error". Based on that reasoning, today we are going to discuss what "intellectual difficulty" is, what the differences are compared to physical difficulty, and what makes gameplay fair or unfair when it comes to tactical and puzzle games. If, when we talk about video games like the Souls series there is a border that separates fair physical difficulty games from those that are unfair, then there must also be a border between tactical and puzzle games with fair and unfair ones in terms of intellectual difficulty.
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