This post is part two in a series of two.
Climbing mountains, teaching inner city high school kids, going on scavenger hunts, staging jewel heists, only stepping on every other sidewalk square. We all take on challenges, large or small, that color our day-to-day lives with purpose and scent them with the anxiety of failure and the thrill of success.
In part one of this post, I talked a bit about how different people define games and how having some sort of challenge in the game is central to many of those definitions. Now I’d like to focus more on the different types of challenges we can experience in games.
But before I move on to the different types of challenges, I want to dawdle a minute more on challenge in the definition of a game, specifically in reference to a post by Keith Burgun at Dinofarm Games. I came across his piece after writing the first half of this post. Burgun charts a series of concentric circles (look right!), which states the differences between interactive systems, puzzles, contests, and games.
In short: Interactive System + Problem = Puzzle, Puzzle + Competition = Contest, and Contest + Decisions = Games. So in Burgun’s formulation, having a problem or a challenge is a prerequisite for a game, but you also need competition and decision making on the part of the player. Analyzing this definition further could produce an entire post of it’s own but I’m loathe to get sidetracked too much, and Burgun’s ideas about execution, ambiguity, and decision making in games, which are the true focus of the post, deserve a more thorough treatment than I’m ready to give them just now.
When I was first thinking of different types of challenges I started by examining the purposes that challenges serve in a game. The first thing that came to mind is that they show progression through the game. You know you’re moving further along in many games because you feel the difficulty increasing. However, novelty can sometimes serve that function as well.
The example that came to mind for me is Plants vs. Zombies, but a lot of social media games capitalize on this as well. Rather than a game growing progressively harder, you uncover more and more new things: characters, objects, and stories. In these games there is sometimes a type of challenge—often these new things that players encounter are reflected in their status—but ultimately, novelty and curiosity are what drive players to shoot for the next level or accomplishment.
Thinking about social media games made me wonder if fellowship can also be a substitute for, or serve to shift the focus away from, challenges in games? Games that involve fellowship put a premium on interpersonal interactions and shared narratives over driving up the numbers in the corner of the screen or completing a particular objective.
For example, in a Farmville-style game, some of the main narratives (from my understanding as someone who has spent very little time playing these types of games) are that your farm [or insert other backdrop you are feverishly clicking on] is either thriving or in neglect and disrepair. And your friends are encouraged to play a role in that narrative. So even though one player can clearly have met the challenge of accumulating bric-a-bric for her or his farm more thoroughly than another player, the focus is on how the players interact with one another and the developing story of their proverbial five digital acres.
One person who commented on the first half of the post said that, “Sometimes I play not-so-challenging, time-wasting iOS games. Sometimes I play the hardest game ever: NetHack. I don’t want all the games in the world to be only one of these things.” This feedback highlighted for me that having games with challenges and games without challenges is not an either/or proposition. It also made me wonder, after Googling NetHack and other games that are embraced by their fans for their almost Kafkaesque difficulty, if hopeless challenges are yet another variety of the species, and one that players appreciate, however counterintuitive it may seem.
After further thought, the model of different types of challenges in games that felt the most comprehensive to me was one I based on Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. In the 80’s, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner proposed that rather than viewing a person’s intelligence as a single ability, it was actually composed of multiple types of intelligence.
"My mom says I have naturalistic intelligence."
The nine main categories of intelligence that he broke out were: logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and existential. Using a model like this presents a way to argue that Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia, and other games for change that raise awareness of a particular topic or issue definitely challenge us, if not in the ways that we’re used to from games.
I think the first four intelligences are the ones we most commonly find being tested in the games we play, especially casual games. But you could make a case that dys4ia challenges players on an interpersonal, intrapersonal, or even existential level depending on the views and preconceptions they bring to the table when playing it.
If you can think of other types of challenges or examples of games that don’t present any of these types of challenges, leave your thoughts in the comments.
