/;; 

So, there's a game called "flOw" that's supposed to be designed based on this guy's thesis on game difficulty and fun.

http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/flowing.htm

But what's interesting is this page where he talks about how to implement difficulty:

http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/designfig.htm

Summary: he rejects both static difficulty tuning (quake's skill settings) and adaptive difficulty (sin episodes) and suggests creating systems where player choices affect the level of difficulty.

This is pretty much what I was suggesting earlier in the thread, where the player has choices that determine exactly what obstacles they have to face, and has multipule approaches available to each obstacle. 

Almost everything on that site is dead, thanks no doubt to the fact that /. just posted a direct link to download flOwoOWowowow.

It makes sense though. Tuning static levels is half guesswork, as anyone who's had to flag entities in a quake map would know. Adaptive difficulty almost seems like the designers don't trust that they've made a game that can actually be finished unless there's software in place to catch cases where the player winds up SOL. 

Me and my friend played this today - we had a lengthy discussion about it, which I will try to convey if I have time.
Short version: chen's 'subliminal dynamic skill adjustemnt' doesn't seem to solve a problem as much as create one. The game is certainly addictive, or at any rate attractive, to play. But that is not at all related to the skill adjustment. I remain unconvinced. And that graph comparing challenge to ability is a little too James Edmund Pritchard for my liking. 

If the game's too easy for you you get bored, and if it's too hard for you you throw the controller at the wall and hopefully go outside. Someone just graphed it as a function of one thing over the other, which you can theoretically do with just about anything.

Below is a graph of what has been called "fatassedness" by world renowned diet doctor and professor and doctor Mikhailnikov Cznelzignyschkzovkyia, graphed as a function of metabolic rate against how much shit you eat:

http://lunaran.com/pics/foodflow.jpg

According to this graph, it can be seen that eating too much for your metabolic process to handle leads to a rise in body weight, or "fatassedness", while the opposite leads to a corresponding drop in such. Proper amount of food consumption for one's metabolism leads to a perfect wavy red line within a transparent oval, within which you are always hot and sexy. Only choices on the part of the eater can maintain position within the ovoid of sexiness.

Stunning! 

was the one in which self esteem tied to metabolism equals a deep dismal feeling of unworthiness that eventually
works its way out by either a warm 357 Magmum and thousands of skull fragments on the wall, or a lane jump in front of a freight truck. 

quite 

doesn't the name Flow on that graph look like the logo for a feminine hygiene product?

http://jenovachen.com/flowingames/images/flowchart.gif

Absorbant. 

I was wondering why I was getting a creepy feeling with this game. It's the ol' fear of vagina issue. 

that's what my fake graph should have been about. Aunt Flow. 

so i actually played through the game (at least I think i did ... i beat the entire blue level sequence, and then did the entire orange level sequence, and then at the end of that there was nowhere to go.)

I think it's a fun game with some interesting design touches (like seeing the next level's bad guys as a blurry, faded image in the background -- this is especially cool when you first see a really huge manta-ray type creature, and builds anticipation.)

But, I don't see much here that seems to be related to the guy's thesis. The only thing I can connect to his thesis is the red/blue gateways to the next/previous levels, which are available at any time. And since fighting guys makes you stronger, skipping guys means that you can get to the end sooner, but with a weaker creature. Just like any RPG (though RPGs are less skill-based.)

Problem: looking for the red/blue portal things is ITSELF boring, since it involves waiting for a sonar ping thing, then travelling in that direction, then waiting for another one, etc. So you can't really skip boredom entirely, even though that's what the system was designed for. 

For 2019.