Certainly I’d agree that WoW works on a social level as well as the game-qua-game level, but take away all the other players and my point on systemic pacing would still stand.

And yes Jesper, “interactive” by now is fairly hard to nail to one definition. It’s a shame, but also a bit inevitable. On the subject of whether or not games are interactive, I did write a little article about how games might not be considered interactive, in that your interactions do not change the game’s system… your choice interactions merely reveal different paths through the possibility space thrown up by a system – so you’re exploring a static possibility space. The only time this space may change would be in the case of meta-interaction… giving feedback to the developer who then patches the game to create a slightly changed space.

I think you may have read it, Jesper, and correctly surmised that it really depends on how granularly you look at things: the game as a whole may not be modified by your low level interactions, but the game state and all the variables that constitute that state certainly are interactive – their bounds and legal combinations are the only limits (implied by the overall system).

As far as I can tell, reaction is a prerequistite to interaction. I don’t like to put words in ryan’s mouth, but maybe he’s pointing out that a game doesn’t exactly “care” what you say… rather, it acts in the way it’s been told to act. And I can dig that. But taken to extremes, that means that absolutely nothing in the entire universe can be called interactive: We’re all deterterministic – complex, yes, but as predictable as clockwork. And at that point, whether complex (man) or simple (game system), we’re all just reacting to one another… a sort of “inter-reaction”. Also known as “interaction”.

If difficulty increases linearly, it’s essentially incrementing the difficulty by a tiny amout, very rapidly. This pattern of constant, small increase is recognized very quickly, and thus becomes a little dull. Put some infrequent difficulty peaks and troughs, and you have another, composite set of beats to recognize, but over a longer period of time. Gah. This is so much wider a phenomenon than just difficulty and pacing… sort of gets me annoyed that there’s such a fixation on this one thing.

What I never see mentioned much, despite loads of (accidental?) precedence, is that since these are patterns, they can be easily generated out of the natural flow of the game mechanics. So there’s no reason for us to contrive them, as so many linear shooters are forced to.

Good point about Jenova’s stuff, there. That’s one example where the player is empowered to create their own difficulty. Happens in World of Warcraft, too, as you naturally bounce back and forth between high risk, high reward, and lower risk, lower reward mobs. There’s countless other examples of low level mechanics which push back just as hard as you push them – far more elegant than complicated, top-down difficulty managers.

I mean, frankly, in an interactive medium, we’re able to let the player be the barometer of hardship, and thus we don’t have to worry about the subjectivity of a fixed difficulty curve.

There’s no ideal difficulty level that maps to all games! Just as there isn’t an ideal purpose for all games (to be fun, etc.).