Why difficulty matters in game narratives

I was playing through Half-Life 2 a few years ago, and I kept dying. 

It was near the end of the game, with alien tripods stalking around and gunning down everybody they saw—and I was seen.  A lot.  Riddled with energy blasts, killed, respawned, riddled, respawned, and so on, which got me thinking about the incredibly small likelihood of anyone correctly navigating the entire area without being seen.  And aiming every rocket perfectly to obliterate each tripod?  What are the chances that you’ll survive alien killing machines after taking down a military base, after surviving savage creatures, after breaking into a prison, after surviving other savage creatures, after outsmarting the military, after…

But Gordon Freeman did it. 

In the Half-Life 2 universe, Gordon Freeman never died—how could he?  They don’t have the technology to resurrect the dead.  No, Gordon Freeman dodged every fatal energy blast, claw, and shotgun in his path.  He’s such a badass that nothing took him down.  Even as players failed time and again—Gordon thrived. 

This may seem to create dissonance between the narrative and the gameplay, but I think the opposite is true—as players, we understand the world better because of the failure. 

Certainly, a game with well-paced difficulty is something to strive for on its own merits—it provides a superior experience to a game that’s too easy, or takes frustrating leaps in difficulty, or is all-around unforgiving—but what I’m claiming is that the difficulty of the game informs the game’s universe.  Half-Life 2 kills the player so often because the situation is unfathomably dangerous.  Multiple alien species hell-bent on killing you and everyone else on the planet?  Traitorous humans using the conquering aliens’ weaponry to subdue all dissent?  Of course you keep dying!  The challenges wouldn’t be believable if they were more forgiving. 

But where does that leave us with all dangerous situations in games?  Do we have to welcome high difficulty whenever we want believable violence in our game universe? 

Nope—just look at HL2 again.  We see plenty of other people get wasted by a single alien claw slice, but Gordon doesn’t.  Why?  He’s got the Hazardous Environment (HEV) suit.  Gordon doesn’t survive because the game is more fun if he’s a bit tougher—there’s an in-game reason for his durability.  Suits of armor or superpowers are great excuses for giving your player character a leg up against his foes, but so is the style of the game.  If your player character is a cartoon, he can safely take a beating without fear of anything more hazardous than a few birds circling his head.  This gives us a way to tweak the power of the character in relation to the world without making the world any safer for NPCs.  Everything’s deadly—but lucky you with your get-out-of-death-free card can survive a few extra blows in order to keep things fun. 

All of which is interesting, sure.  It allows us to marry narrative and gameplay without raising eyebrows—but can it do more?  Can difficulty enhance the narrative?  Can it provide both a satisfying gameplay experience and a more convincing story? 

I bet it can.  I’ve focused on death so far, but—SPOILER ALERT—staying alive isn’t the only thing people worry about.  Other things are difficult.  Y’know, backflips and stealth and turning your employer’s rant about why he should fire you into a discussion about the terms of your raise.  Those things are hard.  Why don’t we see more of that type of difficulty in games—non-lethal difficulty?  Situations where failure doesn’t lead to death, but instead to less-desirable circumstances? 

I’m not advocating for zero death in games—remember the first part of the article?  Death still informs the player of the harshness of the world, and sometimes people screw up badly enough it’s game over.  However, why shouldn’t players sometimes have to live with the consequences of their actions?   If they underperform, well… make them deal with an upset employer.  And what about players who succeed with flying colors?  Why not reward them more for doing a better job?  Otherwise, what’s to keep players from skating through life? 

(Second Life, apparently.) 

Let’s get to an example.  In most games, you’re completing tasks for other characters—they need you to go out and slay the beast, retrieve the treasure, do whatever.  And many of these tasks are binary—either you’ve completed them, or you haven’t. 

But what about tasks with varying levels of success?  Shouldn’t your employer notice that you did a great job and reward you accordingly?  Imagine that your employer hires you to infiltrate his rival’s fortress to retrieve a MacGuffin, and he wants you to leave as little evidence as possible.  If you go in guns blazing and slaughter everyone, your reward for grabbing the MacGuffin is smaller than promised because you just made your employer’s life much more difficult—his rival’s definitely going to seek retribution for all those dead guards, and he’s going to want his MacGuffin back.  Why would your employer reward you for bringing that down on him?    

If instead of murdering everyone you enter the fortress quietly and off a couple of guards who sight you, then return mostly unnoticed—well, your employer’s rival will know the MacGuffin’s gone, but he might not be as upset about it because he only has to hire a couple new guards.  He won’t retaliate against your employer with as much fury, which means your employer’s got a little more money to throw at you.  Good work! 

And then there are the players who will enter the fortress noiselessly, avoiding the attention of all the guards and not harming a single person while retrieving the MacGuffin.  They even have a decoy MacGuffin to replace the original, delaying the discovery of the theft.  And, and—they leave evidence implicating a rival faction in the burglary!  Now your employer won’t even receive any of the blame for this crime.  How handsomely will you be rewarded? 

Incredibly handsomely, of course!  And you’ll receive future jobs, higher-profile jobs that are more challenging (because you can handle them), and you may receive better funding for each mission so that you can tackle the greater challenges.  And sure, maybe you won’t perform as spectacularly because the difficulty has ramped up—but you’ve built up trust with your employer.  They already know you do good work, so a couple mistakes are forgivable. 

This system could apply to virtually any mission in any game—your employer wants the task done soon, so you get a higher reward for swiftness.  They want discretion, so you can’t leave evidence behind.  They want revenge, so destroy as much as possible.  They want to be feared, so maim your target and his family.  They want to be remembered as a humanitarian, so help as many people with their endowment as possible. 

These non-lethal challenges provide players with scaling difficulty—if they’re not great at stealth gameplay, then they can barely scrape by in a stealth mission and continue through the game.  They won’t get a great reward, but they won’t get stuck, either.  If they want to see what happens when they perform those stealth missions well, they can always try again on a second playthrough—look!  Replay value! 

They also create believable consequences for players.  Physics and high-def textures do a good job of making games realistic, but we need to tackle human psychology to take games to the next level.  Granted, these are simplified relationships, but we could provide more subtle modifiers to missions.  Your employer could look down on guns as cowardly weapons, and he might stop hiring you if you rely on your guns too much.  Or perhaps dialogue trees come in handy here—employers reward you depending on how much they like you.  If you keep irking them, don’t expect to keep working with them.  If you make them laugh and get the job done right, though—look forward to a lasting relationship.

Don’t forget that time constraint, either.  If you’re trying to perform missions for multiple NPCs, someone’s going to get tired of waiting for you to do your job.  Eventually, you’ll be left with only a few people that will work with you (or who you still trust to pay you for services rendered), which will change the end-game situation and lead to meaningful alternate endings. 

Because let’s face it—that’s how life works.  We try our best, sometimes we skate by, we like working for some people and give other employers the bird, we’re attracted to work that we’re good at, and we never achieve everything we’d hoped to.  Life is full of compromises—and maybe giving our characters the chance to fail a bit before they die would be a lot more interesting.  Let them grapple with that disappointment, let them lose confidence and have a hard time finding work because of it—and then let them enjoy the rapture of resounding success. 

And let’s not forget that other people are also grappling with the same issues, and vying for the same jobs, and trying to get to the top—and how much more interesting that makes life (and games). 

Next time!