Remember that the greatest minds in gaming -- namely, the ex-Infocom people who created the adventure game genre: Steve Meretzky, Dave Lebling, Brian Moriarty, Marc Blank, and others -- have tried this and failed. Infocom games used to come with ratings as to their difficulty. They finally abandoned that when it became just too, too clear that difficulty is immeasurable. There are simply too many factors, many of which are dependent NOT on the game itself, but on the emotional, intellectual, and creative qualities of the PLAYERS. Therefore, you would have to try to figure in things like: How slow/fast does a player's frustration kick in? How much knowledge of simple tools does the player have? What's the player's educational background? How liable is the player to pick up a pencil and paper to figure out a puzzle, and how liable is she to insist on figuring something out in her head? How adept is the player at thinking abstractly or laterally?
If the geniuses at Infocom couldn't do it, with years of effort and their multidisciplinary backgrounds, I'm dubious that anyone can do it without something akin to the music genome project.
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