Balancing Challenge Against Frustration In Games

Game-ism has an article discussing the balance game developers strive to achieve between making games challenging enough to be interesting, but not so much that they are frustrating. The author points to Assassin's Creed and GTA IV as examples of recent major titles which may have suffered from gameplay that was too easy to master. Conversely, a minor title like Bionic Commando Rearmed achieved more success than expected in part due to the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing parts of the game.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It is important to balance the difficulty of successfully trolling slashdot with the difficulty of moderation.

Ninja Gaiden

[LameAssTheMity]

Ninja Gaiden. If it were mentioned in the Bible, the passage would be, "And then God said, '**** THIS GAME,' and promptly threw his controller across the room."

it's simple

[ILuvRamen]

If you make it a performance based type of thing like Dance Dance Revolution or a racing game, the person loses and knows if they reacted faster and stuff, they would have done better. They usually don't blame the game for that and get all mad. But if you're playing Splinter Cell and the enemies keep seeing you cuz there's literally no way to not be in the shadows to get past a certain point, that's seem as a game design problem. The most common problem like that is not being able to find a person or item in an RPG. You walk around town for 15 minutes and the person is nowhere in sight. Now that pisses people off cuz they have no control over it.