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Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
Increasingly, digital game designers are incorporating more sophisticated feedback techniques into their game designs.The game developer Naughty Dog Entertainment is known in the game industry for what it calls "Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment," a technique it has used in the Crash Bandicoot series of games, as well as the more recent Jak and Daxter. Dynamic Difficult Adjustment, or DDA, uses feedback loops to adjust the difficulty of play. For example, in the original Crash Bandicoot game, the player is generally maneuvering the character Crash through a series of jumping and dodging obstacles, trying to overcome damaging hazards and reach objectives to finish the level. When a player dies, the game restarts at the beginning of the level or at the most recent "save point" reached in the level.
The danger in designing this kind of game is that players possess widely varying skill levels. An experienced gamer might breeze through a level, whereas a beginner might become frustrated after dying several times without making any progress. The DDA operations in Crash Bandicoot evaluate the number of times that a player is dying at a particular location in a level, and make the game easier as a result. A player having trouble might suddenly find that there are more helpful objects nearby, or fewer enemies to avoid. This kind of attention to the balancing of player experience is evident in the play of Crash Bandicoot games, and it helps explain the fact that a wide audience of both hardcore and less experienced players enjoys them. Using DDA and other feedback mechanisms in games raises some fascinating game design issues. If we consider the millen-nia-old tradition of pre-computer play, games are traditionally about a player or players competing within a formal system that does not adjust itself automatically to player performance. As you play a game such as Baseball or Othello, your fluency with the system and your ability to manipulate it grows. The game itself and the other players provide the challenge for you. As your play deepens, you find new forms of play, new ways of expressing yourself within the system of the game. DDA points to a different kind of game, a game that constantly anticipates the abilities of the player, reads the player's behavior, and makes adjustments accordingly. Playing a game becomes less like learning an expressive language and more like being the sole audience member for a participatory, improvisational performance, where the performers adjust their actions according to how you interact with them. Are you then playing the game, or is it playing you? Is a game "cheating" if it constantly adjusts its own rules? Could such a scheme be designed into a multiplayer experience and still feel "fair" for everyone involved? These questions have no definitive answers, as there are always many solutions for any given game design problem. Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment could be considered a heavy-handed design tool that takes agency away from the player, or it could be considered an elegant way of invisibly shaping game play so that every player has an optimal experience. Regardless of your opinion on the matter, DDA is an important tool, and as digital games rely more and more on their ability to automate complex processes, this kind of design strategy will become more common.
