We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Well, if we take Sid Meier’s definition of a game into consideration[1], my personal view (as someone who has designed exactly zero successful games and is therefore an expert) is that difficulty can be its own reward but it’s not for everyone. Most choices I would find interesting in a game mean that there is some complexity involved in the means available to me and that I’ve been fooled into thinking I have more control over a situation than I know I do. The only thing difficulty has to play in this is whether I’m up to the task or not (it is relative to the player, and can come from a number of factors such as ability and experience), and Nintendo’s target demographic (children) has only so much experience and can only handle so much complexity.

The item/mechanic creep that has come into many franchises of late (Zelda and Assassin’s Creed come to mind?) can be framed in terms of interestingness (I have also seen related concepts termed “meaningful skill”, “deep mechanic”, and “roguelike item orthogonality”; slightly different, but I think they kind of cut to the same core issue). Just throwing more in is not making things better. The additions need to interact in some meaningful way (and it’s certainly debatable how, but ultimately players can kind of tell if you’re insulting someone’s intelligence by adding a “kill everything” / “win the game” button or making an impossible situation).

Certain games (e.g. Roguelikes like NetHack, Roguelikelikes like Dwarf Fortress and FTL, some strategy games like Paradox’s grand campaign games) strongly violate the “easy to learn” part of the oft-cited “easy to learn, difficult to master” principle, but once you get into them, they can be very satisfying because (perhaps by accident more than by design in some cases) the choices are apparent to you and they are interesting (well, until you get blindside-clotheslined by something you never saw coming, at which point it gets added to your list of things to watch out for). Though they can also quickly turn into boredom if against all the odds you know the strategy too well.

tl;dr If the player can bring about the direct result of an action and it doesn’t really tie into any/enough other actions, you probably need to complect[2] your gameplay up a bit.

[1] (Partially in his own words). It is often summarized something like this: a (good) game is a series of interesting choices; interesting choices usually involve some sort of tradeoff between options in the outcome, where options are not all equally attractive (or at least not attractive in the same way), and the player is informed in their choice (though maybe the consequences turn out to be unexpected—this is a bit tricky to get right). Despite being a useful working definition or guiding principle in the game design phase, particularly in the turn-based strategy genre where he is a giant, some people see weaknesses in this definition. One of the greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses is that there is considerable flexibility and subjectivity in meaning of “interesting choice” even once you have taken Meier’s elaborations into account (if you even do). It takes some of the concept of “play” out of the equation; perhaps you may find futzing around with a physics sandbox to involve “interesting choices” (If I’m remembering correctly, Meier himself has contended that even rhythm games can be considered to consist of such choices, though in the linked article he concedes that it is probably not the best model), but some people consider these things to be a part of a “game” without necessarily being “interesting” or “choices”. Nonetheless, I find it a satisfactory explanation for why a lot of endgames stink from a player standpoint (that is to say, without considering the production issue where “few players even get there so why bother trying to put anything there?”); they tend to have run out of choices for you to make, and you can often feel it coming on as you see those choices going away and getting simpler to make, hence the ennui. I would personally contend that this is often mistaken for “difficulty” being too easy or too difficult; as I mentioned above, difficulty is relative to the player anyway. I don’t know that I could hazard a guess at tackling these particular problems. See also: paradox of choice. :truckpump:

[2] 1. (v., arch.) To join by weaving. To embrace, hence
2. (v.) To make complex, especially a sequence through interdependency (neologism, Rich Hickey, 2011).

[3] There is no [3] up there but god I wish I had organized this post better.