Once upon a time, when there was no such thing as a home console, getting the player to keep feeding quarters into your coin-operated game cabinet was the primary concern, and one of the ways to manage this concern is allowing the player some slack with regard to their developing skills. Not everyone can master Tempest in an hour's time. Those players who had progressed to a particularly advanced level would be horrified at the thought of having to start over form the beginning after having spent so much time and effort getting to where they were. So the Continue function was enabled, giving players a chance to feel that their precious arcade time -- sometimes measured in minutes, rather than hours -- was money well-spent.

But there is no such limitation on home consoles. Time issues aside, these systems and the games that run on them are purchased outright, leavening the concern that the player will find them too difficult to keep playing, and thus the game developers losing money with each player lost. So, fear is a factor -- fear that players will give up in disgust if a task is deemed too difficult. Is it really that horrible to make a player work hard to master a game?

Remember that the entire reason people play games in the first place is that they crave that one-on-one challenge. Something about video games offers players something their lives otherwise lack. A game, therefore, ought to be assessed by the amount of challenge it provides. Certainly the player ought to be given all the tools she needs to accomplish her goals, and the mechanics and strategies of the game should be communicated directly and early. But at some point, if the game is considered too hard to finish, then it needs to be reworked. Instead, what we see more often is the inclusion of the double-jump -- a way to give the player a hand, to tell them "It's okay, we know this is hard. Here, this will make it easier." And that, friends and neighbors, is a mistake.

The double-jump is a way of admitting defeat. Here, obviously, I'm talking about every game mechanic that shares commonality with the double-jump in essence, if not in function. It's acknowledging that the designers worked themselves into a corner and couldn't (or didn't want to) figure out a more clever solution to the problem at hand. It's a way of taking the game player too lightly, of saying that you don't expect her to have the intelligence and tenacity to work through the challenges as they're offered, with the tools she possesses. In a great game, the challenge and the tool should be equivalent in power. You want the player to feel heroic, to come out the other end banged-up and bruised, but feeling the sense of accomplishment that only comes after defeating adversity. Part of the reason that so many gamers assess a game's worth by number of hours it takes to finish it, is that true adversity is lost from so many titles. Instead, the average gamer is so canny, so familiar with these easy-out tools so common in so many games, that winning is merely a matter of time.

We need more innovatively challenging games, like Jonathan Blow's Braid, where the main gameplay mechanic -- the reversal of time -- could easily have been the ultimate easy way out, but instead has been turned into an essential tool in the hands of the player. One that needs to be understood and mastered to provide the key to true victory. This is the way forward; to stop being afraid of challenge, of player reaction. Only once we stop being afraid of failure, both on the part of the developer and the player, can we truly evolve this pastime into something great.