How would you conceptualise "difficulty" in video games?

Difficulty = proportion of effort versus achieving a desired result.

>>388411185
so if you have to grind 2 weeks = more difficult?

Ive thought about it alot and it seems to me like ultimately all difficulty can be summarized as time taken to see something you haven't seen before

Dark souls is (relatively) difficult because it takes some time invested to beat enemies/areas consistently

Final Fantasy 1 is (relatively) difficult compared to something like FF9 because it takes more time to acquire experience to the level you need to progress to next area

Or to compare across genres a shmup like Deathsmiles is difficult compared to a game like Breath of the wild because it'll involve a lot of memorization and practice to consistently get further (on 1 credit anyway)

not having to replay sections to attain mastery or items/experience etc is a key component I feel like otherwise visual novels would be difficult and i dont think anybody would really agree with that definition

Nes games

>>388411265
Not that anon but it indeed is more difficult. I played Ragnarok Online and some drops had 0,01% rate in an enemy that was unique on the map with a long (hours and days) respawn time. It was difficult to be properly geared because you had to grind the enemy and compete for the loot with other players.

Most people didn't see Naxx in WoW not because it was mechanically hard to defeat the raid or the raids prior. It was bullshit like you had to have 40 people all farming cloak for 6 months to be able to do Onyxia, or nature resist for Huhuran.

Harder indeed is more difficult. If you have a hard time doing something you want to do it's difficult.

>>388411571
that's just artificial difficulty by time gating. that's just putting the time required higher than a normal person is willing to spend. is that really difficulty in the game or just moving the difficulty into the life of the player? in any case it's horrible

>>388411067
Smaller margin of error
You could argue that giving a boss more HP makes the battle harder because it means the battle goes on longer and you have less chances to screw up, but really that's just dragging out an existing task.

Grinding on the other hand makes the margin of error greater. That's why people like to do low-level challenges.

There's a good kind of difficulty and a bad kind of difficulty. The good kind requires mechanical precision, the bad kind just takes longer even though you don't improve as a player.

>>388411890
Giving a boss more hp absolutely makes it harder though

to take the opposite stance make a boss die in 3 hits and even if he has the hardest pattern ever its not gonna be difficult

giving the boss higher hp demands you show greater mastery of the task asked of you as a player

>>388411786
Artificial difficulty is still difficulty. While I agree with you it's hard to get that desired item and progress further.