{"id":274,"date":"2006-07-18T09:43:10","date_gmt":"2006-07-18T08:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=274"},"modified":"2006-07-18T09:43:10","modified_gmt":"2006-07-18T08:43:10","slug":"this-game-is-way-too-balanced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2006\/07\/18\/this-game-is-way-too-balanced\/","title":{"rendered":"This Game is Way Too Balanced"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Businessweek, an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/innovate\/content\/jul2006\/id20060717_278706.htm?campaign_id=rss_innovate\">interview with Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Smith and Simon Byron on game designs they dislike<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Peter Molyneux picks cutscenes (that old chestnut).<\/li>\n<li>Simon Byron says stealth.<\/li>\n<li>More interesting, Jonathan Smith points to games that are too balanced(!).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Jonathan Smith&#8217;s basic argument is that if the game is never too easy or too hard, as a player you feel &#8220;you might not be there at all&#8221;. This is a bit controversial in relation to current research (such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.northwestern.edu\/~hunicke\/thesis.html\">Robin Hunicke<\/a>&#8216;s) of auto-adjusting difficulty, where the game is supposed to match itself to the player.<br \/>\nJonathan Smith&#8217;s point ties in with Noah Falstein&#8217;s article in Steve Rabin&#8217;s <em>Introduction To Game Development<\/em>, where he describes the ideal game difficulty as one that shifts between being hard and easy. As I recall, the basic argument is that as a player I should first try something very hard, and then a bit later get the experience that a challenge has become easy because of my newly acquired skills:<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"450\" height=\"175\" alt=\"Noah Falstein - Convexities\" id=\"image273\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/07\/falstein-convexities.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That sounds like an argument against perfect balance and against automatic difficulty adjustment, doesn&#8217;t it? But perhaps the better conclusion is not to avoid balancing and difficulty adjustment, but to balance and diffulty-adjust as to aim for something like the ebb and flow in the model above.<\/p>\n<p>Good balancing is paramount, but balancing should not aim for a straight line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Businessweek, an interview with Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Smith and Simon Byron on game designs they dislike: Peter Molyneux picks cutscenes (that old chestnut). Simon Byron says stealth. More interesting, Jonathan Smith points to games that are too balanced(!). Jonathan Smith&#8217;s basic argument is that if the game is never too easy or too hard, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2006\/07\/18\/this-game-is-way-too-balanced\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;This Game is Way Too Balanced&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2973,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/2973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}