It's hard to make a game easy

I'm just getting to the end of Prince of Persia. It's considered by gamers to be an easy game - too easy, some say. For me, it's just hard enough to make it rewarding but not so hard as to be frustrating.

The first computer game I ever played was Zork. Now there was a frustrating game. I spent literally hours getting nowhere, simply because I didn't use the right combination of words to get something to happen. That, of course, was the challenge of the game. It was a difficult puzzle to solve. It wasn't particularly fair, either. Logic took a back seat to obscurity sometimes. On the other hand, finding one of those obscure combinations of words was tremendously satisfying.

Another way games like this can be hard is to not permit escape from prior bad choices. You didn't pick up that item in the room you were in three weeks ago (in real time)? Too bad - now you're stuck. You have to go back to that point (if you even have a saved game from then) and do it all over. This is not fun by anyone's definition.

But both kinds of game design are easy for the designer. It's actually quite easy to make a game hard. What's hard is to make it easy.

Which is where Prince of Persia comes in. I don't have a lot of time for gaming. I spend perhaps an hour a day, and a few more on weekends. If I choose to stick out a game to the end, it's because it consistently gives me more fun than doing something else. Prince of Persia does that by having puzzles that are just hard enough to make me think (a little bit, at least), but allowing me the freedom to swing across vines without worrying about painting myself in a corner.

Of course, the game is famous for "not being able to die." If you fall off a ledge or get beaten in combat, your companion Elika saves you and you start again from a checkpoint that's usually not too far before the point when you died. Some would say that this isn't challenging enough - that there's not enough "penalty" for doing something wrong. Good! I don't play games to inflict pain on myself, and I don't like having to repeat a sequence of events over and over until I get it right. (This does happen in Prince of Persia, but it's nothing like one situation I was in in Halo 3, where I would spend at least a minute gathering weapons, spend another couple of minutes killing Brutes, die, lather, rinse, and repeat.)

But easy resurrection is just a part of it. Much harder, it seems to me, is the ability Prince of Persia gives you to follow paths wherever and whenever you want, without fear of being unable to get back to where you are. Although the game is essential a platformer, with narrowly-defined places you can go, there are usually at least two ways to get to every important place.

And doing this without making it obvious takes design skill. I suppose one could win the game merely by trying every path in every combination. But it doesn't seem that way. I really feel like I'm exploring, not just following a script.