Not to be confused with Schizophrenic Difficulty, where the difficulty goes up and down unpredictably, regardless of the player's performance. Speedrunners, on the other hand, delight in exploiting the nuances of adaptive difficulty settings and will happily use them to manipulate the game into doing whatever is fastest for them. There are also some players who simply don't want an adaptive challenge, be they a casual gamer who enjoys the power trip of kicking ass on Easy mode, or the hardcore masochist who will happily fight That One Boss over and over again on the hardest difficulty and will feel cheated if the game just 'lets them win'. In the worst case, this can result in Do Well, But Not Perfect, where players learn that the game will punish them if they are too good, and thus will deliberately refuse to play their best game. This can often go wrong in unforeseen and unexpected ways, particularly if the player does something the game wasn't expecting. There is no 100% reliable way to tell how good a player is, other than to check in-game metrics and try to interpret their success from those. The downside of Dynamic Difficulty is that, like AI, implementing it well is hard. It is considered good design practice in tabletop and board games, as a player will likely not enjoy such a game if they feel they have no chance of ever catching up or winning. It can also address the problem of Unstable Equilibrium by preventing a player from gaining a runaway advantage. Implementing Dynamic Difficulty can be a nice equalizer, allowing players to just play the game at their own pace without worrying about difficulty, and it also frees the game designers from having to spend time tuning the difficulty since the game will tune itself. If done correctly, all players should experience the 'same' level of challenge from the game - it's just that the challenge level automatically rises or falls to adapt to the person playing it.

Instead, some games take a different approach: they automatically adjust their own difficulty to match the player's skill. (Particularly if the game insults them over it). One common solution is to allow the player to select their own difficulty level, but this can be unsatisfying in its own way - it might make the player feel like they aren't playing the 'real' game, or feel inadequate for not being able to play the harder difficulties. But this raises a problem: how do you create a game experience that is satisfying for players who might have wildly different skill levels? Video games attract all kinds of people, from the casual gamer to the hardcore tournament champion. Jason Rubin, Making Crash Bandicoot - part 6

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