Difficult Games Versus Tedious Games

A DIFFICULT GAME

Requires creativity, imagination, awareness, strategy and problem solving skills from the player to discover an unknown or an undefined solution, and it results in satisfaction and gives a feeling of being rewarded and doesn't require excessively long time or mind numbing repetition to solve.

Unfortunately, once a solution is discovered it may lose a reply value, unless there are multiple solutions to be found, multiple means and paths to the solution, or the process of arriving at a solution is interesting, engaging and fun enough to redo it all again.

This kind of difficulty is hard to achieve and requires extraordinary creativity, extended development time and more resources from game developers.

A TEDIOUS GAME

Requires large, often excessive, amounts of time and numerous, often mind numbing, repetitive tasks based on previous knowledge and/or button mashing in order to accumulate arbitrarily scarce and limited resources to unlock the ending or to defeat a bullet sponge boss.

There is no element of surprise, no engagement and no discovery involved, it requires little imagination and little skills, so it gets boring, tiresome, becomes unrewarding and leads to feeling of relief rather than satisfaction when completed.

There are some who enjoy this and it has reply value for those who relish repetitiveness and tedium. Some level of tedium has its place in games and can serve a purpose but way too often "tedious" is a cheap replacement for "difficult" and often gets taken to the extremes.

This is also often used to artificially lengthen the game to compensate for lack of content, lack of interesting mechanics or lack of engaging writing. This is easy to implement as it requires much less creativity, less time and fewer resources from the developers.

-- Henry Lootgraab