Practical Game Design

Utilizing threat and anxiety

In games that revolve around challenge and skill, threat and anxiety play a dominant role in setting the intensity, a role that's often mismanaged or misunderstood. The threat itself does not depend entirely on the actual difficulty of the gameplay scenario. Instead, it is based on the perception of adversity and fueled by the negative consequences of failure.

If the stakes are high, a relatively trivial gameplay encounter can be a source of an immense level of threat. For example, when players die in Dark Souls (and other games in the Souls series), they drop any Souls they've amassed but not spent. Souls are a crucial resource that relates to a character's overall progression. If players fail to collect the ...