Introduction

Broadly speaking, any task that requires non-trivial effort from players is a challenge. Difficulty is often associated with the concept of challenge. They are closely connected, yet different from each other. Challenge relates to the task or the problem at hand whereas difficulty refers to the relationship of the player's skills to those required to overcome the challenge. Flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), for example, focuses on how difficulty, in other words the relationship between skill requirements of the challenge and the player's skills, can affect the player's mental state.

Challenge as defined above implies two things: that there is a goal or an objective the player wants to reach and that there is a possibility of failure. In other words, the outcome of the player's efforts toward the task is uncertain. Without the uncertainty of the outcome, the effort required from the players would be trivial and the challenge would disappear. Note that some games involve challenges of perseverance, such as grinding, where the outcome of the player's immediate actions remains certain, for example, that the player receives a cookie for every click. The uncertainty of the outcome lies in whether the player can be bothered to continue grinding until reaching their objectives.

These two features, goal-orientation and uncertainty of outcome, put challenge firmly in the core of game studies' long-lived debate on defining games (Stenros, 2017). Concepts often used in game definitions such as obstacle, struggle, strife, trial, contest, competition and conflict all imply some sort of challenge. Game design literature often discusses challenge as a major component of engaging gameplay (e.g. Adams, 2014; Fullerton, 2018; Schell, 2014). It is no wonder then, that challenge has featured prominently in the player experience and layer motivation discussions from Malone's (1980) early xperiments to the rise of Games User Research (Drachen et al., 2018) in the 2010s.

Game Definitions and Game Studies

Jaakko Stenros (2017) analyzed over 60 different definitions (see game definitions) in his overview of the scholarly game definition discussions. Conflict and competition alongside associated concepts such as obstacles and struggle emerged as a major theme, as did the importance of goal-orientation. Although Stenros has already demonstrated how challenge has formed the core of game definition discussions, it is still worthwhile to briefly revisit some of the most prominent examples.

Caillois (1958) in his classic treatise Man, Play, and Games defines four axes of games: agôn (competition), alea (chance), ilinx (vertigo) and mimicry (pretend play). Eskelinen and Tronstad (2013) frame Caillois' agôn as "winning through struggling," thus further emphasizing that competition is just one way of creating a challenge for the players. Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971) in their The Study of Games offer a definition: "Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems, in which there is a contest between powers, confined by rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome". Contest as such does not necessarily imply challenge, for example, you can win a lottery contest without any effort at all. However, "an exercise of voluntary control systems" does imply that there is non-trivial effort involved in the "contest between powers". Bernard Suits (1978) in The Grasshopper states that "playing a game is the voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary obstacles". Players need to exert effort to overcome obstacles, in other words, they need to overcome a challenge provided by the game. The players adopt a "lusory attitude", that is they voluntarily accept the arbitrary rules of the game, to experience and appreciate the struggle involved in facing the challenges of the game.Chris Crawford, a famed game designer, claims that

A third element appearing in all games is conflict. Conflict arises naturally from the interaction in a game. The player is actively pursuing some goal. Obstacles prevent him from easily achieving this goal. Conflict is an intrinsic element of all games. It can be direct or indirect, violent or non-violent, but it is always present in every game. (Crawford, 1984)

Espen Aarseth's (1997) notion of ergodic art, which includes videogames, consists of a succession of aporia (obstacles) and epiphany (their solutions). Finally, in the hugely influential Rules of Play, the authors define the game as "[...] a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that result [sic] in a quantifiable outcome" (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003).

Furze (2014) traces this evolution of challenge in the game studies discussions and notes that concepts of competition, contest and conflict have been replaced with challenge in more recent discussions. The earlier pre-digital game scholars focused, understandably, more on games where the challenge arises from the opposition of other players. The rise of video games also heralded the rise of single-player games where the opposition, and thus challenge, was created by the video game itself. Furze (2014) further states (following Suits) that playing games involves voluntary and persistent engagement with a game's rules system and challenges. Conflict, competition, contest, trial and so on are just ways to create those challenges.

Basing his argumentation on Suits' definition, Nguyen (2020) in his brilliant Games: Art of Agency argues for the importance of challenge in the experience of playing games. First, he differentiates between "achievement play" and "aesthetic striving play". Achievement play pursues the goal of the game (and thus overcoming unnecessary obstacles) for the sake of winning or some external rewards. In contrast, aesthetic striving play pursues the goal and overcomes the obstacles for the sake of the struggle and the aesthetic appreciation of experiencing the struggle and the activities involved. For example, a professional golf player might play just for the sake of winning the game against their opponents and cashing in the substantial prize money, thus engaging in achievement play. The same professional player might also play golf outside the tournament season not only for practice, but also for the enjoyment of overcoming the challenge of hitting a ball with a stick into a series of holes in the ground. Nguyen (2020) further argues that games are "a crystallisation of practicality" following Dewey's (1934) argument that arts in general are a crystallisation of ordinary human experiences (cf. Holopainen & Stain, 2015). The notion of practicality includes both goal-orientation and non-trivial effort.

Player Experience and Games User Research

Challenge also forms a major component in constructing player experiences. Already in the early 1980s, Malone (1980; 1981) did a series of studies on what makes computer games "fun" and what motivates people to play them. Challenge emerged as a key theme in addition to other factors such as fantasy and curiosity. Building on these earlier findings, Malone and Lepper (1987) propose a taxonomy of intrinsic motivation for learning with challenge, curiosity, control and fantasy as individual motivations and cooperation, competition and recognition as interpersonal ones. Malone and Lepper further dissect challenge to goals, uncertain outcomes, performance feedback and self-esteem and note that "the activity should provide a continuously optimal (intermediate) level of difficulty" (Malone & Lepper, 1987). Already earlier, Csikszentmihalyi's (1975; 1990) flow theory argues for the importance of matching the challenge of the activity to the performer's (for example, the player's) skill level. The other conditions for achieving the flow state are that the task at hand has clear goals, there is clear feedback on actions and the outcome is uncertain but can be influenced by the player's actions (the so-called paradox of control). Flow theory continues to be highly influential in game design literature (see for example Chen, 2007; Falstein, 2004; Fullerton, 2018; Salisbury & Tomlinson, 2016), including work on dynamic difficulty adjustment systems (Zohaib, 2018).

Similar themes emerged at the beginning of the 2000s when videogames and player experience started to gain credibility as worthwhile of academic study as such. For example, Lazzaro's (2004) "Hard Fun" emotion key focuses on challenge and how it structures the experience of pursuing the game goals and evokes the emotions of frustration and fiero (sense of personal triumph). Ermi and Mäyrä (2005) analyzed the fundamental components of gameplay based on interviews with children and proposed a three-fold model of gameplay experiences: sensory immersion, challenge-based immersion and imaginative immersion. They further discern between mental (strategic thinking and puzzle-solving) and motor skills (hand-eye coordination) challenges. Adams (2014), discussing game design, proposes a similar categorization of cognitive and physical challenges while Karhulahti's (2013) basic challenge structures include the puzzle, the strategic challenge and the kinesthetic challenge (although Karhulahti argues that "the puzzle cannot constitute a game").

Cox et al.'s (2012) investigations on the role of challenge in the player experience (or gaming experience as they call it) emphasize the need for separating challenge from other game experience-related concepts such as immersion and that challenge should be studied in relation to the player's skills, whether perceived or real. The study also indicates the division of cognitive and physical challenges. However, as in the title of the paper, the authors state that player engagement cannot rely only on the activities that the players are doing but should also include cognitive engagement. The studies above have mainly involved mainstream and archetypical (in one way or another) videogames. In order to remedy this omission, Cole et al. (2015) include in their study also a set of avant-garde (Schrank, 2014) and experimental games, which often deal with themes and engagement approaches rarely encountered in mainstream games. Based on the findings, Cole et al. propose a further division into functional and emotional challenges. Functional challenges rely on players' activities within the game and thus include the cognitive and physical challenges mentioned above. Emotional challenges, however, require efforts to engage with emotionally difficult matters and ambiguity in interpreting the gameworld and narratives. Building on this notion of emotional challenge, Bopp et al.'s (2016; 2018) empirical studies indicate that while emotional challenges evoke difficult, even negative, emotions, they can still form an important factor in the overall game experience. These findings provide interesting empirical results for discussing the paradox of painful art below.

Two recent player-experience research efforts have aimed at not only providing a better empirical grounding but also developing better tools for measuring different kinds of challenge in games. The first is the challenge originating from the recent gameplay interaction scale (CORGIS) by Denisova et al. (2020), and the second is the video game challenge inventory (CHA) by Vahlo and Karhulahti (2020). Both approaches develop and validate a psychometric scale (basically a set of questions or statements, each with a rating) and both come up with four, similar factors contributing to challenge. CORGIS (Denisova et al., 2020) proposes cognitive, performative, emotional, and decision-making as factors while CHA (Vahlo & Karhulahti, 2020) offers analytical, physical, socioemotional and insight challenges as factors. The scales are, indeed, similar, but there are slight differences in how the factors are interpreted. The convergence of these scales is notable and points towards a fairly robust understanding of challenge types in video games.

The Paradox of Failure

As already noted in the introduction, challenge implies that there is a possibility of failure, which is a negative emotion. Normally, we humans avoid negative emotions. While playing games, however, we voluntarily put ourselves in situations where we will experience failure and often repeatedly. Why do we play when we know that we have to endure negative emotions aroused by failure? Jesper Juul in his Art of Failure (2013) discusses this paradox of failure in relation to the more general paradox of painful art (Smuts, 2007). According to Smuts (2007), there are three traditional solutions to the paradox of painful art: deflation (we are not really experiencing real emotions when engaging with art), compensation (we gain something positive which offsets negative emotions) and ahedonism (we humans do not solely seek pleasure or avoid pain). None of these solutions are satisfactory by themselves and Juul, following Smuts, proposes a different approach. First, humans are capable of maintaining contradictory desires and emotions. Grodal (1999) argues, based on cognitive neuropsychology, that there are two different emotion systems running parallel when we are emotionally engaged in watching a movie. The local system (in the temporal sense) handles moment-to-moment emotions while the global system makes sense of the whole experience. This leads to the possibility of maintaining two seemingly contradictory desires, the immediate one and the aesthetic one. In tragedy, the immediate desire might be for the protagonist to survive while the aesthetic desire wishes the protagonist to suffer for the sake of the whole aesthetic experience. In games, the immediate desire is to avoid frustration caused by failure while simultaneously desiring an experience that includes partial failure (Frommel et al., 2021). We learn from failure and feel more competent. The feeling of competence, according to self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2012), is a motivating factor in itself. Similarly, game designer Raph Koster (2004) claims that learning is what makes games fun in the first place. Games provide safe places (Apter, 2007) for experiencing failure and this encourages players to experiment and seek even more difficult challenges.

Summary

Challenge motivates players both in the moment-to-moment play and in the overall willingness to engage with the game. No wonder that challenge, with related concepts such as obstacles and struggle, has remained at the core of scholarly game definitions. Recent player experience research has revealed that challenge can take many forms from basic sensory-motoric twitch challenges to complex analytical and socio-emotional ones. Challenge also frustrates players. Games provide safe environments for players to experience the pain of failure. Somewhat paradoxically the possibility of failure entices people to engage with games in the first place and thus makes challenge a core element of gameplay.

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Author Information

Jussi Holopainen holds a PhD in Digital Game Development from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. He has been researching game design and gameplay experiences since 1998, having authored or co-authored scores of academic publications and patents. His PhD thesis, Foundations of Gameplay, focused on understanding how to construct conceptual frameworks to aid game design. One of these frameworks is the influential gameplay design patterns approach, which he developed together with Staffan Björk. He also edited the book Game Design Research: An Overview with Petri Lankoski. Jussi is one of the founding members and continues to be a member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) executive board. Before joining the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, in 2021 as an associate professor he was a senior lecturer of Games Computing at the University of Lincoln, UK, in the School of Computer Science. Before Lincoln, he worked at the Centre for Game Design Research, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, as an associate researcher. He has also served in senior research management positions at the Nokia Research Center (NRC) and has been involved in coordinating several industry and academia collaboration projects.

Citation Information

Holopainen, J. (2022). Challenge. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/challenge

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