Iâve been roasted by a dragon, used as a pincushion for ghoul spears, and hacked to death by an axe knight, repeatedly. I keep trying, and I die and die again. Are we having fun yet?
No, actually, Iâm not. Iâve been playing Demonâs Souls â a game even its developer admits isnât âa fun game.â The action-adventure game casts you as a hero confronting where progress is hard-won, recovery supplies are limited and equipment can wear out. The twist is that when players die, they return as phantoms to navigate the same environments in a weakened state in the hopes of earning their bodies back â thatâs right, the game actually gets more challenging the more you fail.
And yet I love it.
I canât stop playing, and I canât really figure out why. Arenât games supposed to be accessible, and isnât frustration supposed to be a killjoy? Whatâs the allure in this difficult game?
Expanded audiences and accessibility are major watchwords in the present era of gaming. Microsoft Game Studiosâ Bruce Philips recently unveiled research at Gamasutra showing that even among Xbox 360 games where completion rates are highest, most users only get about half the potential Gamerscore. And 30 percent of users donât finish some of the most popular and widely-played titles Philips studied. His theory â and that of numerous other designers crafting games designed to be appealing to wider audiences â is that frustration is what makes players give up.
But even though Iâm definitely frustrated with Demonâs Souls at times, Iâd say Iâm even more driven to succeed and to conquer than Iâve been in a long time. What gives?
âI do not think that games must be accessible to be appealing,â Demonâs Souls producer Takeshi Kajii told me in an interview. âIf you make a game accessible it will expand the audience. However, if we were to make all games accessible, wouldnât you eventually get tired of the same thing?â
Kajii explained that in creating Demonâs Souls the team sought to return to the core of whatâs fun about games, and relied on three tenets: challenge, discovery and accomplishment. âPeople commonly say Demonâs Souls is hard because of this, but we never made the difficulty needlessly high for the sake of being hard, nor did we intend for it to be a selling point,â he said.
Steep difficulty can be appealing. Take the case of indie action-adventure title Spelunky, where the sense of discovery and achievement is maximized by stiff odds. âI think that a tough challenge can make a game much more enjoyable,â said creator Derek Yu. âDonât we feel the most fulfilled when we overcome something difficult? Without that feeling of getting better, a game turns into a chore â something that you do as a distraction rather than something you do for fulfillment.â
The key to effective difficulty, as opposed to frustration thatâs just frustrating, is all in the implementation. âDoing something hard isnât fun in and of itself,â said Yu. â Itâs not fun to sit in an empty room and try to balance a ball on your head for 10 hours straight. To make challenge effective, you have to provide an interesting game world and create deep mechanics that are entertaining to play with and very satisfying to master.â
Nels Anderson, gameplay programmer at Hothead Games, also feels itâs important to delineate between frustration and meaningful challenge. âBeing frustrated usually means the player cannot determine a way to improve or progress,â he said. âPart of the reason Demonâs Souls works so well is because you understand why you failed.â
Demonâs Soulsâ Kajii says that failure needs to be an ever-present possibility if the player is to feel a sense of accomplishment. âWe designed it so that players are likely to die if they arenât paying attention,â he says. âBy maintaining this intensity, players will be constantly nervous while playing, but [will feel] a tremendous sense of accomplishment is their reward for doing so.â
Achievements are more valuable, then, when thereâs a lot at stake â and failure is less frustrating when itâs clear to the player where they messed up. âDemonâs Souls is a game where you âdie a lot,â but as Iâve already said, it is geared so that you will acknowledge that it was your own fault,â said Kajii. âPlayers will keep playing because they know they can get past a certain point by taking a different approach, using their imagination, and thinking about how to overcome obstacles.â
In a game like Demonâs Souls, then, a frustrating death is simply the game informing me that my strategy didnât work. The mechanics are such that I canât blame the game, and my failures never feel unfair. I can then tackle the exact same obstacle with a different approach, until I figure out a tactic that will help me succeed â and victoryâs all the sweeter thanks to all of my struggles on the way.
âDying in a video game is like losing a tennis match, or getting rejected when you ask a girl out, or looking at a painting and not understanding its meaning. Youâll always learn something and the next time will be better,â said Yu. He says that if dyingâs fun, that makes it all the better â and Demonâs Souls also features an interesting twist on death.
Enriched by its multiplayer element, the game allows players to see the bloodstains of other fallen heroes, and touch them to view how they died. Players can leave notes and messages for one another warning of tough spots up ahead, and can also recruit the phantoms of players that have died to help them handle challenges. Kajii says this system of strangers helping strangers came from a real-life experience of his, a time when his car was stuck on a snowy mountainside.
Numerous stranded drivers all banded together to push each of the cars in turn, but Kajji couldnât stay behind to thank his benefactors, lest he end up stranded again. âI wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether Iâd ever meet the people who helped me again⊠Maybe if Iâd met them somewhere else, I wouldâve made friends with them⊠Many thoughts crossed my mind,â he said. âThis occurrence of helping complete strangers was strangely very memorable, and I kept thinking about it for a very long time.
âDemonâs Souls is a game where you die many times, so I thought this idea of helping others would be a great fit. Itâs as simple as, âWe all die so easily, so letâs help each other out,'â he adds. âUnlike other RPGs, each player unfolds their own story, and each encounter with a phantom player expands and diversifies their experience.â
Designers are right to be concerned with players finishing fewer titles, and theyâre right to offer low barriers to entry for expanded audiences â to a point. âI think in an attempt to avoid frustrating players, the baby often gets thrown out with the bathwater in terms of difficulty,â said Hotheadâs Anderson. âItâs a pretty common misconception that players want easier games.â
He paraphrases some research from Jesper Juul of MITâs Gambit Game Lab: âPlayers are more critical of a game thatâs too easy than one thatâs too hard. The player can improve and make a difficult game fun, but short of handicapping oneself, thereâs no way to make a game thatâs too easy harder,â Anderson continued. âHowever, as soon as players feel they donât have any way to improve, their assessment of difficulty turns much more negative.â
Frequent death and frustration donât need to be viewed as engagement-breakers in games â as long as the deaths are meaningful and educational, and as long as the playerâs frustrated with themselves, not the game. The most important factor is clearly that players must be able to see what they can do differently to surmount a challenge.
The tactic that finally gets me over a bridge swarmed with archers, or through a narrow hallway packed with vicious wolves, might not be the same one that works for another player, but itâs one Iâve developed on my own, through trial and error, experimenting with the environment and with my own abilities.
âThis act of trial and error in a tense atmosphere is the heart of challenge and discovery, leading to the strong satisfaction of accomplishment,â says Kajii. âIâd say Demonâs Souls is not a âfun game,â but a âgame to have fun with,'â says Kajii. âThe goal is not to find a pre-defined answer â instead the answer is something created by the player on their own through their own play-styles.â
[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]
