An exploratory study of the relationship between objective game difficulty and subjective game difficulty

Design issues related to game difficulty in video games have attracted much attention. Although existing studies suggest a discrepancy between subjective game difficulty (SGD) and objective game difficulty (OGD), research exploring this relationship and its impacts on players remains limited. This study investigates whether there is a mismatch between OGD and SGD and their impacts on player enjoyment, engagement, and self-efficacy. A research framework is proposed, accompanied by seven hypotheses for testing. We first determined six dimensions of SGD as a new measuring structure to develop the questionnaire. While OGD is measured by the failure rate, which is a universal method to quantify it. We experimented to validate whether SGDs match OGDs in different OGD conditions in the designed Match-3 game. The three factors of player enjoyment, engagement, and self-efficacy were also measured to assess how the two difficulties affected them. A semi-structured interview was adopted to provide further insight into the experimental results. We found that OGD and SGD only partially match each other and that SGD acts as a mediator between the effects of OGD on player enjoyment, engagement, and self-efficacy. Although preliminary, our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of game difficulty and offer insights for future game difficulty design and human–computer interaction (HCI) research.