In a world where games continue to increase in difficulty I firmly believe, a game doesn’t have to be hard to be fun. The level of difficulty comes in many varieties, it may be sheerly next to impossible AI opponents, a huge 3D game environment with lots of buttons and controls to learn or a game that’s designed to be “make it or die” style game play.

Although everyone enjoys a good challenge, the challenge doesn’t have to require lightening reflexes and complete pixel-perfect jumping to offer a fun game experience. Sure, some games in history are traditionally hard (Ninja Gaiden for example) and a few were hard “by accident” where developers didn’t mean for it to be nearly impossible.

Nintendo’s developers have gone on record saying they like fun games, not hard games and look at how well that console is selling. Have you seen many Nintendo games with a difficulty setting? Most have one setting – play it and have fun leaving third parties and other consoles to have varying degrees of difficulty.

Some games do difficulty setting well, like Call of Duty 2 which had a few easy settings to get used to the game, a normal setting and the crazy “veteran” setting. The game was fun on easy, medium and very hard which proves the difficulty settings where there to allow gamers to master impossible challenges. You can apply this to games like Peggle as well, which allowed you to work your “Zen Master” status after defeating the standard game with over-the-top hard challenges.

It’s unfortunate when a game uses the difficulty settings to increase enemy sizes because it shows they didn’t really have anything else to offer but “more” of the same. You play on easy and fight four enemies, hard to fight eight but really it’s no different in level of fun than the original battle against four. In a game like Call of Duty 2 they increased the intelligence of the enemy and made them more accurate thus allowing you to be killed with one or two shots if you were placed in the line of fire.

They could have just tossed more enemies at you to make it more of a battle (a Dead Rising type scenario) but they went about it in a better way.

Will anyone be disappointed if Mario Galaxy only has one degree of difficulty? Probably not, as a matter of fact, you probably didn’t even realize there isn’t a setting at all! Why? Because the game is fun for everyone without the need to “ramp it up” for experienced gamers. Instead, the challenges get harder as you progress through the title (presumably) like other Mario style games.

The opposite can also occur, a game can be too easy and become boring easily. The sign of a great game designer is one where a game is fun and long lasting without any huge level of frustration or boredom. Those that haven’t mastered this trait go on to create extremely difficult and extremely boring game titles.

It seems those that understand this balance of perfection best, are casual game designers.