Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, I found this 34-minute video by Razbuten a bit intense, but I would still recommend it to people who work on onboarding, settings, etc.:

In the video, the author tries to answer the question: how to make any given game a challenge, given there is no universal standard of difficulty and every player arrives at a game not just with different skillset, but also likely different goals.

There are many techniques a game can use to adapt to the player – a simple upfront difficulty selector, complex difficulty settings, a training level, adaptive difficulty, accessibility/​assist modes – but there are no easy answers. Each method comes with pros and cons, and perhaps the very notion that a game should adapt to the user is flawed; some players might find it more rewarding to have to step up to the game instead.

In the video, Razbuten covers a lot of examples really well. I’m not going to say any of this maps 1:1 to productivity software as goals of games are very different than goals of apps… but even though I have never played any of the games mentioned, the examples made me think. After all, some of the psychology of mastery will be the same between these two realms. (I bet there were at least some of you who saw the previous post about LaTeX and thought “this looks hard and fascinating – I’m going in,” and others took a note to never approach it.)