This connection took shape during a conversation today with a team playing a Marathon, and its conclusion may be interesting to others too. So I thought I’d write it down.
The team played two rooms one after the other as a Marathon Challenge: the first was the Magic World – The Burrow and the second Magic World – Prisoner of the Wizard Prison. The Burrow is a relatively hard room, roughly 7/10, and teams have 60 minutes to solve it. The Wizard Prison is the easiest of all our rooms, perhaps around 5/10, and runs 75 minutes.
They made it out of the Burrow in the final minutes, while in the Wizard Prison they practically — with slight exaggeration — ran through the room. They didn’t set a record even so, but they had 37 of the 75 minutes left. And then came the philosophical, and entirely fair, question: “But why do you give more time to the easier room?”
There are several factors by which we set a room’s difficulty, and several tools with which we can make it easier or harder, according to our vision for that room. The main factor we work with is statistics: from which room our players escape, in what proportion, with what spread, and in how much time.
And among the many things we can play with to make rooms easier or harder (the difficulty of the padlocks, the nature of the puzzles, whether the room is linear, and so on) is the time given for the room.
Establishing a room’s difficulty rests on the opinions of a great many test teams. A puzzle we thought trivial may turn out mid-game to be anything but obvious — and vice versa. Fine-tuning these is a process. Sometimes we remove a puzzle outright, or increase the time allotted to the room.
And if a room proves too easy during testing, we can add more puzzles, make the existing ones harder, or again: reduce the time allotted to it.
Returning to the example that started this off: the Burrow is a relatively harder room because there are quite a lot of puzzles to solve in 60 minutes and they aren’t linear. In themselves the puzzles are neither easy nor hard; it is the available time that makes them hard. So if — since we are talking about a hard room — we followed our player’s reasoning and gave the room, say, 90 minutes, most teams would certainly finish it. Which isn’t a problem as such, but this is where the spread in team performance mentioned above comes in:
The Burrow is a 7/10, 60-minute room… and yet the record on it is 22 minutes. The Wizard Prison is a 5/10, relatively easy, 75-minute room, and there the record is 31 minutes. So our best team may have needed more time to complete the easier room — but proportionally fewer teams escape the Burrow, and on average they need more help there than in the other room.
And to complicate the picture, there is the The Chamber of Secrets, which although it runs 75 minutes is nevertheless — again thinking in averages — harder than our other two Magic World rooms…
So among many other factors, the time given for a room is one that sometimes constitutes the challenge: a hard 60-minute room is easily completed in 90 minutes, while the easiest 75-minute room will defeat anyone in 30, purely for lack of time.
