Measuring the level of difficulty in single player video games

In this paper, we discuss the interest and the need to evaluate the difficulty of single player video games. We first show the importance of difficulty, drawing from semiotics to explain the link between tension-resolution cycles and challenge with the player’s enjoyment. Then, we report related work on automatic gameplay analysis. We show through a simple experimentation that automatic video game analysis is both practicable and can lead to interesting results. We argue that automatic analysis tools are limited if they do not consider difficulty from the player point of view. The last two sections provide a player and Game Design oriented definition of the challenge and difficulty notions in games. As a consequence we derive the property that must fulfil a measurable definition of difficulty.

► Difficulty scaling is a core issue of game design.
► Difficulty measuring is currently a heuristic trial and error process.
► We report one of our experiment in automatic difficulty measuring and show its shortcomings.
► We propose a definition of difficulty in games as a measurable function based on a breaking down of gameplay into challenges and abilities.