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 count.
I decided to count this time. It’s making my feelings awful, not only awful but also pathetic, diminutive. As I pass through the fog wall into Malenia’s wooded room, I hear the wind picking up again. 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 should be suffering this pain level? Are you a victim of stubbornness or a need to be validated? 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 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 naming games. You are open to doing something not enjoyable in the traditional videogame sense. This implies that you appreciate and value video games more than 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 it was a great memory. Although I wouldn’t say I liked 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 we recognize that video games as a cultural form have more value than fun.
However, I find that this explanation is not 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 that 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 defining a constraint for an outcome. To satisfy that constraint, you might have to follow along the path to achieve the goal. For example, climbing a mountain for food or safety.
