Chad, this is an excellent article on understanding and discerning "challenge." I particularly like how you summed up the Mathematical-Logica section; l"The degree of the challenge is proportional to the supply of the resource against its demand. Regardless of what the resource is, the game challenges you understand its value."

Well done.

Categorizing by nature is good, it can be easily done by completing the sentence: "this challenge will test your ______ skills". But the nature of the challenge can be twisted by the player's approach.

Pressing A when prompted by a QTE merely tests your reflexes, which the article puts under "Bodily-Kinesthetic" challenges. A player can react to the challenge, or he can have his pattern recognition anticipate the QTE before it happens, or he can play in a methodical way that makes it impossible for him to be surprised by QTEs, or he previously failed at the challenge and memorized the moment and button to press, or he has a statistical solution for the situation. All these twisting the most obvious nature of the challenge by the nature of the solution.

A game example of this is in skill-based shooters, there's this tactical skill called "crosshair placement" which is a solution for a problem of nature to "twitch aim", but of different nature, that can minimize and sometimes almost completely ignore the perceived initial nature of the challenge.

One way I like to think of challenges is their value nature, which in many cases can be a hint over complexity and IMO also a measure of quality.

Back on the QTE example, in it's simplest form, user can either press the right key in the right time or not, which categorizes the challenge as a binary-value one, for both input (press key or not) and outcome (beat challenge or not). Therefore the player can't evolve past the ability to overcome a challenge, and can't measure his skill progress doing so.

Taking Angry Birds as the example. It's a game that falls under the trajectory calculation genre (almost pure math, but players can simply learn where to pull the bird before releasing it, turning it in a memorization task), summed with a physics layer to it (mostly math and strategy), a bit of timing skill (to activate special abilities of the bird in the right moment), and the challenge is not just one of hit-or-miss anymore, but there are many different spots a player might want to hit (strategy comes from choices) and there's different levels of precision for a hit (which turns the aiming challenge, of mathematical nature, into a task of analog-value). But in the end, a huge amount of people play it as a slot machine, subverting all the challenges and their nature into a matter of chance.

Many challenges in games have more than one nested nature into them. In Quake 3, hitting a player with the Rail Gun and with the Rocket Launcher are tasks that share some natures but also have many differences to it. That's because each task can be split down into smaller tasks many times. Aiming where you want is a "Bodily-Kinesthetic" challenge, both guns share the same componential sub-task (a task which requires analog-value input), but beyond that the differences come in, where math tasks are inserted in the Rocket Launcher case, there's also the explosion radius, changing the resulting aspect of the challenge into an analog-value (how close you hit the rocket defines how much effective it is, which side you hit the rocket defines where the opponent can potentially be thrown), which the Rail Gun, which requires analog-value input, has binary-value outcome (you either hit or miss).

Analog-value tasks have different levels of failure or success, and allow players to evolve inside and measure the quality of their performance.

Binary and analog values are not the only cases tho. Games with special hit-boxes add other layers of strategy to the gameplay. In Counter-Strike, hitting a player in the head is harder than hitting body, but causes much more damage, hitting a player in the body is easier but causes less damage, hitting a player in the legs causes lowest damage, but slows the target down the most. While head-shots are the perceived immediate optimal strategy, the tactical situation of the game, the weapon you have in hand, the health situation of the shooter and the target players, the amount of players involved in the firefight, the amount of time left in the round, the recoil state of the weapon, all affect the management of outcomes and statistics of choosing where to aim for in a split second decision.

Strategic, option-value choices are often limited and clear distinguished from each other (in a logical way, player-perceived way is another subject), where you do one (or more?) of the possible choices in a given action.

Comparing these three basic input and outcome value-types to programming language, a challenge can have it's input and outcome categorized as boolean (binary), int/float/double (analog) or enumeration (finite-option).

Some challenges tho, can have ambiguos/subjective value-type. Doing a test, with score of 0-100, where 70 and above are considered success, can be considered by one player a binary-value challenge, and by another an analog value task. Similarly, the outcome of a finite-choice can be taken as binary-value or analog-value, it all depends where the player draws the line. "I want the S-rank", "the Golden trophy", "to beat the level without killing anybody", "without using ammo from the strongest weapon". Player's can also have different standards for different situation, as in "beat the level saving all Revives for the boss battle", then "just beat the boss, whatever I have to spend in the battle".

Concluding the personal opinion on quality stuff: binary-input, binary-outcome are the weakest, less interesting, less addicting, and negatively affected by repetition, kinds of challenges possible. That's mostly where categorizing challenges by value-type comes handy: to make uninteresting challenges into interesting ones... IMO.

Thanks for a very interesting article. I would suggest adding another category: Strategic Challenge.

That is, challenges in decision making.

As Dixit, Skeath and Nalebuff write: “The simple rule is that unless there are two or more players, each of whom responds to what others do (or what each thinks the others might do), it is not a (strategic) game."

“There must be some cross-effect of actions; what one does must affect the outcome for the other” (AND), the participants must be mutually aware of this cross effect. Going further: “Playing games requires many different kinds of skills. Basic skills such as shooting ability in basketball, knowledge of precedents in law, or a blank face in poker, (or, interfacing with a console or PC to make moves quickly and efficiently) are one kind (of skill): strategic thinking is another.

"Strategic thinking starts with your basic skills and considers how to best use them. Knowing how well your football team can pass or run and how well the other team can defend against each choice, your decision as coach is whether to pass or run. Sometimes, strategic thinking also means knowing when not to play.”

While your "interpersonal" area touches on this, I think it can be refined, ultimately into its own category. In any case, there is rich literature out there on this, just not specifically tailored to (video) games, which I think may be useful in your (likely ongoing) efforts. And thanks again for them! (ChinaGamerGuy.com)

This was a fun article to read. It is not useful though, b/c it spends most of its pages describing challenges that most games do not use and really glosses over the challenges that 99% of game design actually uses.

An interesting article to say the least. It does put an intriguing spin on what fun in gaming is and made me think about my playing habits and how those fit into "my profile" as given by your categories. Pretty accurate I found.

Also, I do agree with Chris above that I feel strategic-thinking components in games are slightly under-represented in your list, although you do touch on various parts of that. What I seem to miss the most is: the needs to plan (far) ahead using limited, incomplete information you do have. Of course you can count information as being a resource, but there is a distinct difference between a resource given to you as a definite number in a game or on the map and a perceived and possible manipulated situation encountered in the game (a ruse for example) which forces you to decide between two or more options. Decision making for long term goals is one of the most satisfying aspects of the RTS and Grand Strategy genres.

While I found your Ultima V story a bit amusing, I don't think it catches the essence of you want to say? (Or maybe I get the situation the player is put into all wrong!) You say yourself it doesn't make any difference in the game, but the choice is not trivial (i.e. it has the big picture question tide to it). The way I understand the situation I have to disagree: it is indeed trivial as the existential outcome is the same too: in both cases the children die, either of starvation, disease, or worse, OR by your sword. It doesn't really change anything. If the outcome basically is the same, the player indeed is faced with a trivial problem and has no incentive to care.

I find some of the no-right-no-wrong choices in The Witcher series to be much better examples here, as they DO change non-trivial things and make you think about similar topics.

Anyway, nice write-up! :) Cheers!