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What are people’s thoughts about Story Difficulty? It seems to me like there are three problems with it: (1) there’s no clear definition: is it the challenge of finding an end link? A positive ending? The best ending? (2) it’s arbitrary and most authors don’t seem to pick an appropriate value. (3) I’m guessing that no one really uses it to decide which story to read — although this might be directly related to (2).

I’m wondering what the correct course of action is: should it somehow programmatically calculated (finished vs attempted maybe)? I’m guessing this will yield strange results. Should we remove it altogether? What are your thoughts?

 

Would it mess anything up by removing it completely? I'm cool with getting rid of it.

I can’t think of anything, personally. Can you think of anything that relies on it that would be broken by removing all mentions of it? It would definitely take a decent amount of work!

 

I mean I've only used it as a measure of how many good/bad endings there are in my stories since I'm really not sure how else to apply it for anything without puzzles and such.

Seconded, it's pretty useless. The only thing that can make reaching an end 'difficult' is if there's some puzzle to progress, and the puzzle tag is a good enough indicator of that.

thirded. it means nothing to anyone

If a game I make is more "game" oriented then I end up deciding where it should place based on how hard it is to get a good ending and how many times the player may die. A more story oriented game with few to no variables? I just pick something low on the scale because usually I try to make the endings of equal significance, even the death endings. Never searched for a story by difficulty though.

Overall I'm in favor of getting rid of the difficulty meter should the notion pass.

Unless there are puzzles there really isn't much sense in it.

Honestly, I don't know what its purpose is. How have I used it? In determining how difficult it is to find the ending. Therefore, for nearly all stories, that's a very low number. The only time I made it higher than about a two was for one game that I made that it was actually challenging to find the ending. I have no idea how others use it.