>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.
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.
> 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).
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.