> 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).
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).