Frustration: Why Tetsuya Nomura deserves more credit than he gets

Frustration in gaming is a pretty controversial topic. As I discussed in my first post, one side thinks games are too hard, that frustration and "work" should be eliminated from gaming. The other side, possibly filled with hard core gamers, thinks everyone else should grit their teeth and deal with it. It's a hard question, particularly in light of artful game design, with two uncompromising sides and a variety of designers trying to appease them. But one in particular stands out.

If I had to guess, I'd peg Tetsuya Nomura as one of the most openly ridiculed and despised designers in the game industry. Despite his reputation for flamboyant, over dramatic character designs, Mr. Nomura has some ideas for preventing frustration that ought to be revolutionary.

Where does frustration come from? Generally it's a result of failing and not comprehending why or even worse: not knowing how to fix it. In an RPG for example, a player can encounter a set of enemies with just plain better stats, they can't be beat no matter what. The player may use different strategies, failing repeatedly and inexplicably. In action games, players often come across a boss whose attack patterns are too indecipherable for the player to figure out, or who may be quicker than the player's reaction time can account for. Players inevitably get stuck in these spots. They strive to keep playing, but until they progress, they are frustrated.

Avoiding frustration is a crucial concern for games seeking artistic merit. When a player is faced with a frustrating problem the natural reaction is to solve it, inevitably leading to abstraction. By abstracting the player reduces the game to its basic rules and suddenly our player's identity has moved away from the characters and world in the game, and back to his own at the end of the Player Identity Scale.

Nintendo's current plan to avoid this situation is to implement the Super Guide feature in all of their future games. The goal is to make sure there are no sticking spots; to make sure the player's flow through the game is constant. But the Super Guide comes at the cost of making the player essentially beg for help. While the Super Guide is innovative, Mr. Nomura devised a much more elegant and less insulting solution in last year's The World Ends With You.

In TWEWY, the player is handed almost complete control over the relative difficulty of the game. Any time outside battle, they can impose restrictions on their health, the amount of auto-pilot their in game partner uses, and the strength and number of the enemies they face. In exchange for upping the challenge, the player is rewarded with better items, more money, and more experience; but if the going gets too tough the difficulty can always reduced. This presents the player with an easily accessible and game justified method of setting the difficulty to match their skill level.

With this mechanism in hand, TWEWY is always a smooth yet challenging ride. If a battle surprises you, lower the enemy's attack power. If things are too easy, take a hit in life and get some better loot. The player stays engaged because the game retains its fun.

Is this applicable to other genres? Easily. In New Super Mario Bros for example, players could be given control over power-ups, number of enemies, or character jump height. The levels would need to be designed to accommodate modifications, and a simple reward structure for playing the game as difficultly as possible would need to be designed (Maybe a star coin just for beating the level on the hardest difficulty?), but these are minor details for most designers. In flight simulators like Ace Combat, players could change the number of missiles they carry, the level of the AI, or the speed of their air craft in exchange for further credits at the end of a mission. With just a little thought and planning, any game could be altered to handle customized difficulty.

By implementing methods for players to customize the difficulty of their games, immersion breaking frustration is avoided; and with just a little bit of clever thinking, the justification for the customized difficulty can bring the player even further into your world. Getting the player to strive for higher and higher challenges is a great way to get them connected to the protagonist.

It should be noted that there are times when you want your player to be frustrated. If forced to realize that the only solution to a problem is an element of the story, a player will pull an Apollo 13 and orbit around their own identity and sling shot back with even more velocity into the game world. Such an experience is the current height of game design. Until it becomes the standard affair, Nomura's ideas deserve to spread like wildfire.