I hate the rubber band effect of video games. The phrase was coined in relation to racing games – in some games, no matter how well you do the other cars are always 2 seconds behind you. You could drive a perfect race, easily passing everyone else only screw up at the very end, and watch as the rest of the cars all pass you perfectly. It’s almost like they are attached to your car with a rubber band, and it sucks.

The effect also applies to other games where the game is made artificially hard be changing the chance of success outside of the players skill. Instead of developing a better AI for the opposing forces, which makes you play smarter and harder, the game takes shortcuts. Giving an enemy a one-shot-kills weapon is a perfect example of this. It doesn’t matter how much health you have – if you linger just a little too long, you die. It doesn’t reward the skill of the gamer, it just makes it a matter of luck if you get through.

My most recent encounter with this is Lux Touch, a Risk-style game for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It’s a quick diversion while waiting for the bus, or to fire up when Qais is sleeping in my lap. My frustration comes in that I will often have 10 or 15 armies attacking a country with 2 or 3. I wind up with nothing, and the defender has 1 or 2 left – which they use the next round to invade me. It seems that instead of making the AI harder, the developers just skewed the statistics against the player.

It’s maddening, frustrating, and makes me want to stop playing the game.