Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories

Speakers: Ernest Adams

Track: Game Design

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: All

Description: In this wide-ranging lecture, Ernest Adams takes a second look at the role of challenges in gameplay * how they construct the player's experience and affect his or her emotional response to the game. Starting with a new proposal for determining the difficulty of a challenge, he goes on to question the assumption that games should be challenging at all, and makes a case for other forms of computerized play beyond the traditional challenge-achievement-reward structure. Adams also addresses the effect of challenges on storytelling, and discusses how different mechanisms for influencing the plot of a story produce different feelings in the player. The lecture ends with a suggestion for a unifying meta-approach to interactive storytelling that obviates all the debate about the "right way" to do it.