 So now that we've explored a bit about the philosophy of difficulty, let's explore its sister topic of skill and rewards. When you are designing a game, it's important to know what kind of skills you want to reward the players for. Do you want to reward players who have good reaction time? Do you want to reward players who have airtight frame perfect execution? What about rewarding a player who has good memory? Or rewarding players who have good strategy? In your game, who should win between a player who has better reaction time and execution versus a player who has worse execution, but better strategy? Do you want to bias the game towards players who have been playing longer so they have an inherent advantage over new players even if those new players are technically more skilled than they are? These are all questions that you as the dev need to ask yourself and have answers to if you want your target audience to enjoy the game because that's how you make them feel like they're being rewarded for their skills. If your game is about strategy, but they find themselves losing to players who have clearly worse strategy, they're just getting outplayed technically, then players who enjoy strategy are not going to enjoy your game because the skills that they're good at are not the skills that are being rewarded. Now all that being said, there is no right and wrong answer here. It's really just depends on what type of game you want to build and the type of players you're hoping enjoy the game. And it's perfectly acceptable if you decide to reward all skills both strategically and technically, such as the case with something like Starcraft. Just keep in mind though, when you do that, you are going to magnify the skill gap between new and old players to the point where new players are going to get completely mopped by veterans for years until they acquire all the skills they need in order to compete at mid-level gameplay. Sometimes devs decide to make games that really just focus on one or two of these types of skills. For example, Puzzles and Dragons is a turn based game where you have an infinite amount of time to plan your combo. This makes it to where players with good reaction speed and frame perfect execution virtually have no reward or advantage over players who just like to take their time and win with good strategy. Contrast that to a traditional fighting game where at high level play, even though strategy is definitely important, a player with good strategy will probably lose to players with worse strategy if their reaction speed is slow and they can't mentally keep up with the opponent's superior speed timing and execution. So just think about all this stuff as you are designing your next project. Hope that helps and as always I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.