Don't Put A Cap On How Good Someone Can Get At The Game

This is the "Hard To Master" part of "Simple to Learn, Hard To Master", and what brought it to my mind was reading about Quake Done Naked. When a game gets enough attention, people can really get into it. And I think almost any game has the potential for infinite (if marginal) improvement, at the very least in time trials. Typical ways we tend to put caps on our games are by

- having an optimal strategy

- providing puzzles that can be solved in only one way

- having letter grades instead of raw scores

This applies only to OnePlayerGames. (Including most computer/video games.) Competitive two-player skill games will never have a cap; except for the lucky best person in the world, there will always be someone better than you.

"Don't neglect the hard puzzles", -Alexey_Pajitnov? in Game_Design:_SotS?.

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