I came across an interesting bit of learning psychology yesterday which is, apparently, widely known in the learning theory world. But I haven’t seen it applied in the game design literature (then again, I didn’t look very hard). The Yerkes-Dodson Law, articulated in 1908, holds that at low and high levels of arousal, performance on a task suffers.

The consequences of this that managed, mid-levels of arousal are best for maximum performance. Likewise (and I’m quoting from the link above), you want different levels of arousal for different types of tasks:

• lower for more difficult or intellectually (cognitive) tasks (the learners need to concentrate on the material)
• higher for tasks requiring endurance and persistence (the learners need more motivation).

This might remind some researchers of the concept of “flow”, much discussed by game researchers. But to me, this casts some additional light on the conversation about adaptive difficulty in games. Scott Miller has a good article on his blog on this subject.

The short of this though is: Games that successfully manage arousal provide players with an ongoing sense of achievement. Finding a game “too hard” or “too boring” may actually be a symptom of arousal mismanagement. That is, “too hard” might be too much stimulation during a complex task and too boring might just be too few explosions and dull music while mindlessly blowing away enemies.