[DaFranker]

>If a game is not stressful that usually is just another way of saying that there is little skill involved.

For some definitions of "stress" and, most particularly, of "skill".

I take rather great pride in my GMing skills when playing a tabletop RPG game, but if there's any amount of "stress¹" involved in the same sense that there is stress¹ when I play RTS games, then I'm definitely doing something wrong. Of course there's "stress²", but that's the tension and uncertainty in the events of the game I run, or the uncertainty relating to my players and what their reactions are going to be.

So "skill" here can't be used as a scalar measure, and there's definitely no single one measure of "skill" across different game genres. Declaring a linear correlation between "skill" and "stress" seems rather premature and, IMO, detrimental to the discussion.

[jules]

I agree that there is not a 1-to-1 relationship, but there is undeniably some correlation. If a game is easy then it is not stressful.

I disagree that there can't be a measure of skill across different games. You can just look at the probability of a top X% player winning against a top Y% player. If an average player has a low probability of winning against a top player, then there is a high degree of skill involved. If an average player has a decent probability of winning against a top player, then there is a high degree of luck involved.

[DaFranker]

> I disagree that there can't be a measure of skill across different games. You can just look at the probability of a top X% player winning against a top Y% player.

Solitaire.

You can't measure my probability of winning against you. This metric sucks.

In a more general way, while in many cases for perhaps a broad range of people stressfulness will correlate, to some nonlinear degree, with the correlation between their choice of action and their odds of achieving a goal (see what I did there, with the second-degree function and everything), the fact that this very (stress-to-skillness) correlation varies in formula from person to person leads me to believe that it's a symptom of a different variable being more meaningful.

What I'm saying isn't that stress doesn't indicate anything, but rather that it's not a very appropriate yardstick to measure things like fun and player engagement when the correlation between stress and skill-dependence varies so much from person to person.

For me, for example, time pressure and assiduousness-related pressures (remembering to always do X when Y or always do Z every time K) will far eclipse any notion of skill-dependency and impact-on-success as far as how stressful I feel is concerned. Give me a game of Chess, and I'll be rather unstressed, despite the high skill-dependency. Put a timer, and my stress level shoots up exponentially, despite skill-dependency remaining more or less unchanged (since the time limit applies to my opponent as well, and doesn't really change the ratio between my choices and my odds of victory).

[jules]

> Solitaire. You can't measure my probability of winning against you.

This applies to any single player game. The discussion was about FPS and RTS.

The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.

[DaFranker]

> This applies to any single player game. The discussion was about FPS and RTS.

Yeah, fair point.

> The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.

Yay! Same here.