Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 300)

Trigger Happy
302
In other words, there would be no great incentive to
play the game and to get better at it.
But the videogame must not be too difficult: there
must be some initial reinforcement for the player to
want to keep going. Darling agrees: “You need to be
given rewards in a short enough timespan in order to
encourage you to carry on and improve yourself.”
Sailing between these two perils is no easy business.
It’s a very difficult balance to strike. The way we’ve started
to go in recent games is to have selectable levels of
difficulty—but you still need to hold back rewards, I think, so
that certain rewards are only available if you’ve chosen the
expert level of difficulty. But at least somebody who’s
choosing the standard level can actually feel they’ve
completed the game.
There are more cunning methods of doing it which we
have tried in some games, which is to actually make the game
adapt to how good you are. So, for example, in a racing game
if you’re driving along and you crash, and the pack goes
ahead of you, you won’t necessarily notice if they all slow
down a bit so you get a chance to catch up to them, and you
feel like you’re still in the game— whereas a good player
wouldn’t have crashed in the first place, and so the cars
wouldn’t have slowed down, so you can have a competitive
time either way. But it’s very difficult to keep it fair. For
example, a good strategy to beat a game like that might be to
deliberately hold back