Why we love hard games – The science behind the urge to ‘Git Gud!
During my first playthrough of Elden Ring, I made a terrible decision. I beat Demon’s Souls. I beat Bloodborne. I beat Dark Souls as well as Dark Souls III. My friends advised me to not bother with Dark Souls II but I would like to think that I could beat that. But, despite all those games, the FromSoftware oeuvre affectionately called Soulsborne, I didn’t do one thing: I never counted.
This time I decided to count. It’s making my feelings awful, not only awful but also pathetic, diminutive. I hear the wind picking up as I pass through the fog wall and enter Malenia’s wooded chamber. I then add another vertical line in my head to the tally charts. Eighteen.
What is the point of doing this to myself? What did I do to make me feel that I deserve this level of pain? Are you prone to stubbornness or a need for validation Do I fear missing out, being rejected, or feeling like the one who didn’t make it through the end? In a panicked state, I ask myself “Why am I here?” “Why are we all here?”
Jesse Schell is a game designer and professor of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. He calls it the “sword-in-the stone effect”. This is the belief that even though something may seem impossible, people will still try it because they have a chance of succeeding. This is how we motivate ourselves to play difficult or frustrating games: kudos. We want to be proud of our accomplishments or at the very least, to belong to a select group of gamers who are more serious about gaming than those who just play for fun.
The plaudits are the reputation that we get from finishing difficult games. They go beyond mechanical plaudits and the idea of being good at gaming games. You are open to doing something that is not enjoyable in the traditional videogame sense. This implies that you appreciate and value video games beyond their outputs.
When I was a film student, I watched the entire of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. This four-hour black-and-white historical epic dates back to 1916 and was a great memory. Although I didn’t like it, it made me feel smarter, more knowledgeable, and more in control. Maybe we don’t play hard games to prove we can do them but because we recognize that video games as a cultural form have more value than fun.
However, I find that this explanation isn’t satisfactory. What number of people have beat Elden Ring? How many connoisseurs do you know? It’s easy to believe that I play difficult games to appear more intelligent and cultural than others. But, the truth is that millions of people have mastered the same game, which can only be undermined by the fact there are many other connoisseurs.
“Our brains are designed to be very complex constraint-satisfaction machines”, Paul Schrater, a computer scientist from the University of Minnesota, told Scientific American. We are goal-seekers. Having a goal is a way to set a limit on the outcome. To satisfy that constraint, you might have to follow along a path in order to achieve the goal. For example, climbing a mountain for food or safety.
We don’t like things even though they are hard. They are enjoyable and we assign them a certain value simply because they’re hard. When we think about the things we value in real-life (real life is the life that doesn’t involve video games) they are often things that are difficult or require a lot of work to attain: wealth, a good job, and a happy, lasting relationship.
I was reminded of an episode on The Twilight Zone called “A Nice Place To Visit”. In it, a gangster named Rocky is shot and awakens to discover that everything he requests, any request at all, will be granted immediately. He has all of the money in the universe. He is the man all women want. He never loses when he gambles at the casino. He eventually becomes depressed and depressed, and it is revealed that Rocky is not in Heaven but Hell. There he cannot ever feel the satisfaction of earning something for himself.
