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Narrative
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A hypothetical: You're playing John Madden Football. Your team is up by 13, there's three and a half minutes left until the end of the game, and you have the ball. Your victory is assured, right?
Wrong, because suddenly the AI is twice as fast as you, knows what play you're going to do, and shuts down your offense, forcing you to punt. On their drive, the AI marches downfield with no difficulty by completing several consecutive bombs, scoring an easy touchdown. Rinse and repeat, and before you know it you've lost what you thought was a safe lead. The video game has just experienced a Miracle Rally.
Why does this happen? It's a subset of Fake Difficulty, and it's called Rubber Band AI. The further you stretch a rubber band, the harder it pulls. It's the same idea here. Basically, the better you are doing at a game, the harder the game gets in order to continue to present a challenge. This isn't just the idea of making the game harder and harder as you progress farther and farther, this means that the level you're on right now will, for seemingly no reason, ramp up its difficulty if it thinks you're doing too well. This may, in some cases, be coupled with the computer actually cheating, rather than just getting better.
Of course to be fair this sometimes happens in reverse, the AI easing up when winning to give you a chance to come back, stealing any satisfaction the player might gain from "victory". It would be nice to see at least some attempt at including plot-relevant Enemy Chatter to justify this, such as opponent teams speaking overconfidently when the difficulty eases up, or receiving a much-needed pep talk from their NPC coach when they're doing poorly.
Also seen in a few RPGs, where enemies are adjusted according to your character's levels, which can make any non-levelable stuff (like items) useless pretty quick. This is sometimes referred to as "punishing you for your experience".
Casually, Wikipedia has a comprehensive article
Examples:
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