There is a popular story about technology in which virtual objects and virtual reality are, or will soon become, “digital twins” of the regular world. In this story, a virtual experience possesses (or will possess) all the details of what it represents, making virtual reality “transparent,” with no need to design or learn new interfaces. This story is propagated not only by technology companies but also by designers seeking perfect immersion and presence, and by what we term “Matrix philosophy”: a focus on hypothetical future technologies, such as seen in movies, at the expense of existing technologies and experiences.

Which is more important: the business of games, the design of a game, or the way players play a game? Unfortunately, we face the problem that our answers tend to depend on our disciplinary background.

Some time ago, when most video games gave players a limited number of lives, or retries, the difficulty of a game could be measured by how often the player failed in a game. In this paper, I will argue that since video games moved toward giving players infinite retries, the amount of time the player loses when failing is now a better measure of how difficulty impacts the player.

In video game literature and video game reviews, video games are often divided into two distinct parts: interface and gameplay. Good video games, it is assumed, have easy to use interfaces, but they also provide difficult gameplay challenges to the player. But must a good game follow this pattern, and what is the difference between interface and gameplay? When does the easy-to-use interface stop, and when does the challenging gameplay begin? By analyzing a number of games, the paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that "easy interface and challenging gameplay" is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.