Written by @alexc_journals, a journalist half-vaxxed.
A 5 minute read
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THE GUIDING QUESTION
Why do we enjoy playing painfully difficult games?
THE TEASER
Ask any player if they like the game Dark Souls.
Chances are, you’ll get the world's weirdest reaction. Simultaneous sheer rage… and elated almost-addiction.
Games like Dark Souls comprise an entire genre, almost entirely based on their oppressively painful difficulty.
We spoke to Professor C. Thi Nguyen, professor of Philosophy and Tech, to understand exactly what goes on in our heads when we commit ourselves to something wonderfully painful.
We uncovered the good and the bad.
The good?
Pain and difficulty through games is a natural way humans exercise our biology and experience total fulfillment in ways the world simply can’t do for us.
The bad?
That same psychology that makes difficulty fun might be the driving factor behind some of the most damaging behavior in social media and economics.
Check out Nguyen’s commentary re: Jeff Bezos in the podcast. It blew this writer's mind.
THE DEEP DIVE
We’ve all seen gamers rage. It’s a subculture in and of itself.
Just look at the consistent, decade-long increase of videos on YouTube just outright called “rage compilation.”
Some might argue that rage-y content developed with gamers on YouTube since, let’s be honest, it’s extremely entertaining to watch someone else’s frustration. Call it schadenfreude.
But we’d argue that the opposite, overlooked option, actually came first.
The rage genre was developed because humans love pain as a game.
But why?
Your gut reaction may be to reduce this down to the easy answer.
Masochism.
Right? There’s a little masochist in us all, maybe?
That might be true for some, but is it true for 27 million people? Because that’s how many people bought the Dark Souls series—one of the most famously difficult and rage-inducing games ever created.
Take a look at a more nuanced answer.
According to Professor C. Thi Nguyen, professor of Philosophy and Tech at the University of Utah, there are a couple of key reasons humans play difficult things—which he talks about in more depth in our podcast. (Keep in mind, this love of painful difficulty goes beyond video games and applies to everything difficult, from rock climbing to chess and the Sunday crossword.)
Difficult games force you to learn a new logical language.
For example, a game like Portal forces you to think in a way you’ve never had to think before, i.e. solving puzzles through using wormholes in space.
Compare that to running marathons—something objectively difficult for most people—and there is a new layer of intellectual difficulty added onto the game, one in which the process of figuring out how to get better is half of the appeal.
Difficult games give you instant feedback when you fail.
And you fail a lot. By definition, that means there are more points in which you can see exactly where and how you can improve, and relish in the results you work for. Nguyen argues this is what makes for gestalt moments, or vistas of discovery as he calls it.
That is the opposite of something like an easy game, in which there are always simple ways to win i.e. gain more gold, experience points, whatever. He calls it the “Pringles, one more chip” factor—there’s always another tiny thing you can do to get another point, but it’s not that hard. Without that difficulty, the moment of eureka and achievement feels almost stolen from players.
There’s also a hilariously depressing way to look at why we love difficult things. Nguyen says…
“In the actual world, we almost never fit. Shit's terrible in two dimensions. Either. It's way too hard and we can never get it done. Or it's way too easy and it's boring and you want to die… Rarely is all of us used to finish a task.”
Games however are perfectly designed to use as much of ourselves as possible, all while being tractable enough to win. That feeling of fit is what he describes in his book as being a perfectly harmonious being.
But there’s the ‘Bezos problem.’
Now, don’t overlook the obvious:
Everything can be done to a detrimental extreme. Games included.
One of the most interesting concerns Nguyen mentioned was that the same personality that loves hyper difficult games loves hyper difficult gamified things in real life—so much so that they might not consider the effect of their efforts on the rest of the world.
“That's one of the joys of being in a game—absorption, a simple goal. But if you have that taste in your mouth and you look forward again in life, what you might end up is finding some system in which you get clear points like money, and then doing everything you can to make more money.
So the worry is that someone like Jeff Bezos is taking a game like attitude towards money. Like more money's not going to actually help him do anything, but it does count as points. So the worry is that becoming the richest person in the world is a really interesting, difficult game for Jeff Bezos.”
A game with black and white winners and losers.
A game that doesn’t consider the nuance of the real world.
Money is a clear, ready-made goal and scoring system for everyone…
Whether that be Jeff Bezos or anyone participating in GameStop stock buying on Reddit or anyone purchasing cryptocurrency.
Lovers of pain and difficulty need to be aware of when they can look at the world as a game... and when they shouldn’t.
WHY THIS STORY IS WORTH IT
This makes a great evergreen piece, but if you’re smart and hold on to the story, you can time this story with the release of From Software’s next game, Elden Ring, made in collaboration with George R.R. Martin.
PEOPLE WORTH INTERVIEWING
C. Thi Nguyen, professor of Philosophy and Tech at the University of Utah.
Brownie points—the creators of Dark Souls themselves—From Software. They are famously tight-lipped, but if you could get them to speak on how they design difficulty, it could bring this piece to life for those who might not play games regularly.
This was oddly difficult to find, but a great expert would be one who could speak on the biology of why we love difficult and challenging things.
WHAT WE DON’T HAVE ANSWERS TO
This story could absolutely do with a player interview, particularly if that player consistently does difficult things beyond playing games. The ideal interview would be someone who plays games like Dark Souls but also engages with difficulty beyond games, for instance, they run ultramarathons or solve complex puzzles. They should be able to speak on embracing difficulty in its entirety in multiple facets of life.
OTHER PITCHES AND ANGLES
Here are more gaming and culture pitches along the same vein that you can run with:
Why can’t we distinguish right from wrong when presented with a logical versus emotional choice?
Why does the love we’re taught to want in games warps how we expect to experience love in real life? There is similar logic here as to the love of difficulty since there is a win condition that’s easy to distill into points.
An exploration of gambling psychology: Why making death in games real changes how we’re willing to gamble.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Games: Agency as Art - C. Thi Nguyen
Do You Play Games On The Hardest Difficulty?
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world | TED Talk
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TRANSCRIPT
KATE: I am not a gamer. In fact, I’m what most gamers would probably call a “filthy casual.” As a kid, I was a strictly Animal Crossing, Nintendogs, Cooking Mama type of player… even Pokemon was too intense for me. I was more interested in tending my flowers, catching my bugs, and paying back my house loans to Tom Nook.
But my friends insisted that I get my money’s worth out of my Nintendo Switch and download their new favorite game: Hades. And it’s… beautiful. I mean, BAFTA Game of the Year for a reason. But part of that beauty comes from dying. Dying is part of the game. I mean, it’s Hell. You run, you die, and you return.
HADES AUDIO - MEGAERA: Now you can turn back, like a good little man, or I can send you home the painful way. What’ll it be?
HADES AUDIO - ZAGREUS: I’ll have to go with the painful way.
HADES AUDIO - MEGAERA: A man after my own heart.
KATE: But I die… a lot. So much, in fact, that I have the game on God Mode, where it adjusts to get easier so I can make progress on the story. Feel free to laugh.
I don’t know much about video games, but from what I can tell, the dying is… the point. And people really like the dying. Or at least the extreme challenge it presents. And while I certainly don’t get it, I know someone who does.
I’m Kate Redding and this is Case By Case: a resource for journalists looking for their next great story. This story was produced by myself and my colleague Alex Cardinale.
KATE: When I’m playing a video game—or watching TV, or a movie—it’s usually in my free time, when I’m trying to decompress from the rest of my life. Maybe cure some boredom. I’m usually actively avoiding the feeling of frustration.
ALEX: Right. It sounds almost counterintuitive to play something you’ll be frustrated by.
KATE: That’s why I always… okay, don’t laugh, but I always play on easy mode.
I’m way on the baby gamer end of the spectrum! The other end is, honestly, what I might call a try-hard. I have mad respect for people who get really into their hobbies, and there’s nothing wrong with really loving video games, but they do try hard. Way harder than I do.
There does seem to be one really obvious conclusion to make from this, and that’s just reducing this down to a feeling of accomplishment. Right? Like the harder something is, the more you feel like you accomplished when you finish it. But we know that already, and you also know gaming way better than I do. So what do you think? Why do people turn to something so difficult just for entertainment?
ALEX: So I did some digging on this, because this was a question that was really gnawing at me too.
And first, let me preface this with, this is way more of a philosophical question than it is a black and white way to explain the weirdness of human behavior. But you can argue that the answer begins in a kind of simple, non-complicated way.
Video games were always hard. They started hard. And we grew to love them when they were hard. Ever played the original donkey kong game? Like, in an arcade? There is no difficulty setting—easy, normal, hard —like we see in games now. You couldn’t make it easier, it just was what it was, and you either learned the system, or you didn’t play. And every early game was like that. Pac Man, Asteroids, Snake, you name it.
And as games became more complex, more beautiful works of art, game designers leaned into our love of a challenge––our love of achievement. And that led us to one game in particular, one game that I think explains everything about why we love the pain of difficulty.
Dark Souls.
KATE: Oooo sounds… ominous.
ALEX: It is! And unless you’re a serious gamer, you might not know it. It is one of a series of games, called Souls games, that skyrocketed to such mind boggling popularity that it fathered an entire genre of game, called Souls-like, almost exclusively known for its oppressive difficulty.
KATE: Okay, since it doesn’t sound like I’ll be playing these anytime soon… give me the details.
[DARK SOULS SOUNDTRACK PLAYS]
ALEX: Visually, these games have a pretty particular look. They’re kind of high-fantasy stories set in medieval environments. Your camera hovers over your character you hack and slash your way through fighting colossal monsters with swords and magic.
But as opposed to being a traditional hero, saving a damsel in distress, the plotlines are usually much darker than that. There’s a strong element of horror. Things are very dark and broody. Think dark color palettes of black and brown and deep blood red with a backdrop of gorgeous and soul-wrenching classical, orchestral, almost church-like, music.
KATE: Ooh, spooky. But people love that kind of thing.
ALEX: Without a doubt, you can’t deny that these games are total eye candy. Dark Souls in particular appeals to people who like difficulty because of its environmental storytelling.
KATE: Oh! I actually know what that is! It’s kind of like… experiencing the story in and of itself is difficult to do. Environmental storytelling means that games tell their narrative without much, or sometimes even any, dialogue. Your experience of the game and what you know about the story is all dependent on how much you choose to engage with the environment.
But what’s that like in something like Dark Souls?
ALEX: All right, so mini-spoiler alert on this one: in one Souls-like game called Bloodborne, there’s a whole storyline of a girl whose parents go missing, and she can at one point leave the safety of her home to find refuge elsewhere. But unless you stopped by her house and inquired inside, you would never know she even exists, or that later, that she is eaten by a giant pig lurking in a sewer. Unless you went into the sewer, killed the pig, checked out its carcass to find a little girl's bow, and managed to put two and two together, you just wouldn’t have known that storyline even took place.
KATE: So these Souls-likes… these super difficult games... they’re trying to get you to put in the investment to get fully engaged. Nothing comes easy, not even the story.
ALEX: Exactly. Everything has to be hard. But do you know what that tells me? It tells me that people who play souls-like games are players who, to oversimplify for just a moment, arecomplete masochists. And for the life of me, I could never understand them. Because the gameplay is brutal. And just like in old arcade games, there is no “easy” mode. It’s just oppressively difficult. You die CONSTANTLY.
In fact, did you know there’s actually a Dark Souls death counter I found online? Do you know how often the average person dies in just one play through? FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY ONE.
KATE: Oh my God. That is super weird and also super awesome. It’s like this culture that embraces the pain.
ALEX: Yup, and these players are some of the most committed players to pain I’ve ever seen. To put that into perspective, the second most popular internet name for a famous pair of bosses you fight is literally just, and I quote, “Fuck This I Quit.”
Souls like games have a cult-like following, and From Software, the developers of Dark Souls are legends… because of this one game. They sold 27 million copies of just the Dark Souls series alone.
KATE: Wow, so it’s not like this is just a totally niche market. This is mind boggling. So why is pain fun to play through?
I mean, let me guess first: I would say it’s an ego thing, maybe. Like, so many of us tie our ability to take an intense challenge to our idea of self worth. The harder you play, the better you are, and the easier you play, then you’re kind of wimpy. You give up a sense of identity, as if “Oh you didn’t play this game on hard mode? You’re not a real gamer.” Not playing difficult things is sometimes viewed as playing with a handicap, kind of like when you have the rails up when you’re bowling. But I promise, even though I play on easy, I don’t put up the bumpers when I bowl.
ALEX: HA! That’s a great point, and honestly, that might well be the case for a few people, but after talking to some game designers, it actually turns out to be something unexpected.
There’s actually someone who can explain this so much better than I can. So among the experts I talked to, I spent some time talking to a Professor of Philosophy and Tech at the University of Utah named Professor Thi Nguyen. He’s the guy who helped me bridge the gap between understanding what these games were and why we love them so obsessively.
<Music transition>
ALEX: Okay, hitting record...
THI: Okay! Quicktime is recording on my end!
ALEX: So, we have a question.
THI: Yeah.
ALEX: We’re trying to figure out why humans love pain.
THI: Yeah.
ALEX: But there’s an even more basic question I have first.
THI: Right.
ALEX: Define difficult. Like, what makes a game appealingly difficult?
THI: There's the pure difficulty of doing a hard thing in the game and there's the additional difficulty of having to learn a new skill that you've never seen before. So, some games are difficult, but they're not new skills. So I think a lot, you might, okay, here's: this will be controversial, but ultra marathoning, like running a marathon of a hundred miles, it's not necessarily a new skill for us. It's just a really obvious, difficult version of a familiar skill. And then there are these other games, like 18XX or the puzzle game, Baba Is You, which is extraordinary. And one of the ways that's extraordinary is it asks you to do something with your mind that you've never done before.
The clearest example of this is something like Portal. I think a lot of people in the audience have probably heard about Portal; it’s a fabulous computer game. It's a puzzle game. And the way Portal works is, for those of you that haven't played it, you're given a wormhole gun.
So you have these complex virtual environments to navigate, with all kinds of traps and things. And the way you get past them is, you have this gun and it fires two gates, an orange gate and a blue gate. They stick to whatever wall you fire them on. And when you run into one, you come out the other. So you get to solve puzzles by connecting any two arbitrary points in space. And so one of the very first puzzles in the game works like this: you walk into a room. There’s a huge chasm in the middle of the room—you can’t jump over it, right, it’s like 50 feet deep. And the way you solve the puzzle is, you fire one gate down into the bottom of the chasm, and you fire the other end of the gate way up high behind you.
And then you jump into the chasm, you gain all this velocity as you're falling down, and then you shoot out the other gate way above you. And you go flying across the chasm. I mean, this is difficult because solving problems by creating wormholes in space is not a thing we've done before. And I think a lot of the pleasure for people, a lot of the pleasure of this game for me, is like being like, Oh my God, I've never thought this way. I have to make my mind speak a new logical language and you have to force yourself into this new shape. So that's another form of difficulty.
ALEX: And the way I always understood it is that games are, by definition, fun because they’re a challenge, right?
THI: Right. So, the philosopher in me is going to stand up and say okay, I actually don't think I have a great definition of “games” that captures the colloquial use because I don't think there's a clear definition that captures all the wild ways that people use the term. But there's one account that I think captures a lot of it in a really interesting way.
This is an account from Bernard Suits, his book “The Grasshopper.” It's a philosophy book from the seventies. He was like the one great early philosopher of games. And he suggested the following definition. A game, he says, is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of creating the activity of struggling to overcome them.
So any game is—your face just went, like, Whoa!
ALEX: Hahahaha it totally did
THI: So his account is basically saying that the point in a game is not just to get to the win condition, it's to get the win condition under certain constraints. So he's saying, I think it's really interesting. So he's saying so if you're running, there's a finish line, but the point of playing a game is not just to be at that point in space, because there are all kinds of easier ways to get there, like hiring an Uber. But what it is to run a marathon, is that it doesn't count as doing the thing if you just got there any old way. It only counts if you're doing it under a particular constraint. So whatever is valuable is achieving that goal within the constraint system.
ALEX: And so does that just mean difficult games create more restrictions? And that’s the appeal? Or is it that restrictions are hard to learn in the first place?
THI: I think for some people, they just want to know that they've beaten something hard, but I think that's not—I don't actually think that's all of it or even most of it. That's, I think, more often people that aren't into difficult games, that's what they think is going on. I think what's actually going on is there's an incredible experience of being skilled and doing, like, doing things just right.
So the way I put it in my book is something like, harmony isn't just for things outside of you like paintings and sculptures, you can be harmonious too. You can be elegant, you can be beautiful. And what makes you beautiful, what makes you beautiful as an actor, as an agent, as a practical being is when you do a task perfectly well. And it's even more beautiful when the task is hard, because it's not just that your actions fit the task, it's that your whole capacity fits the task, right? So if there's a simple task that I do an action and it fits, that's nice, but if it takes every inch of me, every ounce of my ability, then I know that my whole self fits the world. Does that make sense? Does that sound nuts?
ALEX: Not at all! What a cool way to think about identity through the context of a challenge! “I’m beautiful because I can execute this thing like a master.” I’m almost imagining a martial artist.
THI: Yeah, and, but also in the moment, like I think there's, I don't know. The way—that sense of fitting—it's not just the improvement. It's that when you actually get there and you get the thing done, the harder it is, and the more of you it takes, the more completely your entire self and your whole practical being fits the world.
ALEX: I love this idea, that learning something difficult makes us feel like we fit more comfortably in a world someone has built for us.
THI: Right, right.
ALEX: So the act of skills development is it’s own kind of reward we seek out.
THI: Here's a really depressing way to put it that might appeal to you: In the actual world we almost never fit. Shit's terrible in two dimensions. It's way too hard and we can never get it done. Or it's way too easy, and it's boring, and you want to die and you just have to fucking do your taxes because it doesn't matter that it's boring.
So like rarely is all of us used to finish a task either. It's a tiny bit of us and we're bored or like the task is too much for us and we're overwhelmed and it's just terrible and miserable. And games, because they're artificial environments where you artificially create what you can do and what your goals are, and you artificially can create the world… Games can be made so you just fit. So for once in your life, your abilities are just enough to fit the task. Not too much, not too little, just enough, right?
It's not just feeling yourself get better, but the process of figuring out how to get better. It's not just the fact that you're getting better. It's the fact that you have to do, like, the unlocking of figuring out what the next skill looks like.
So some people, I think, like the refinement you get from being really good at something and pushing to get slightly better, and those are the people who I think turn into like lifetime Go players or poker players or rock climbers who devote themselves completely to one game. Me, I'm a gaming dilettante. I really like changing games and playing it for 10 or 20 times. And I think the reason is I love being on the opening part of that difficulty curve, where you're like learning things really fast. And, like, every time you play it, you see a whole new vista and you pick up new skills and everyone else is picking up new skills and then suddenly, like, the game gets more complicated again and you figure out new stuff and the change is rapid.
That pleasure is not something we often get in normal life cause normal life we're often stuck in the same skill set. Like you're in a job. It uses one skill set, it took you forever to get that job, you have a skill set. And now you're just doing that skill set over and over again. With games you get to, if you're like me and you like that part of the difficulty curve, you just get to, like, surf being a beginner in the coolest way.
ALEX: So as long as you get over that initial hump, chances are you’re the kind of person who would be obsessed with high difficulty for a long time.
THI: Yeah.
ALEX: That’s such an interesting way of looking at this basic element of games! It feeds this need we don’t have satisfied in normal life.
THI: Right.
ALEX: So what is the distinction between what an easy game gives us versus something super difficult? Because easy games are just as appealing too right?
THI: Right, so I think there's something—so one thing you might say is—look, all the stuff I've said so far could be available in easy games too. But I think in a lot of easy games, there aren't levels of understanding. And it feels like there are a lot of games that are simple, where the first moment you play it, you're like, Oh, I understand what to do. And then you get slightly better at doing that thing. And that's it.
But there are other—for really hard things, there are these, like, gestalt transformative experiences where whole new vistas open up to you. Like my dad was really into jazz, but he's really into New Orleans jazz. He got me into Louis Armstrong, and I totally got that, but I didn't get at all, like, Coltrane. Coltrane was just this opaque realm of noise. And then someone I trusted was like, no, listen to this. Listen to it 20 times, you'll get it. So I was listening to it. And then one day I'm driving down the road. I'm listening to, I think I remember it was Coltrane's album “My Favorite Things” where he does some, like, truly fucked up stuff to some classic standards.
And there's this moment where what seemed like noise just suddenly all fell into place. And you're like, Oh, it just went from random gibberish to, like, beauty. And I saw that happen. And again, that’s really rare in ordinary life. Like, for me, in philosophy I fight for seven years and I get like one of those. With difficult games, the difficulty involved creates the possibility for new levels of understanding.
So here's the thing: difficult games aren't actually that difficult.What’s difficult is solving COVID, right? What's difficult is figuring out how to not let Twitter burn down the world. That stuff is difficult. We can't actually do that. The thing about Dark Souls is it's not actually that difficult compared to the world, but it's difficult for a game, but it's difficult, but also pitched to be tractable to human beings.
So it's hard, but not too hard. So we do get to quickly go up these levels and feel this, “Oh my God, I see how to do that. Oh my God. I see how you do that. Oh my God. I see how these two buildings are locked together now.” And it’s delicious.
ALEX: I see and so an easy game just doesn’t give you that I-see-the-matrix moment. Now, I know feedback is one of the really key things in video games that make them engaging. So how do difficult games use feedback to make us enjoy them in a way easy games don’t?
THI: Here, difficult games and steady feedback come slightly apart. So a lot of what I know about this comes from Natasha Dow Schüll's book, “Addiction by Design,” which is a really important book. It's a study of the Las Vegas gambling industry and how engineers and neuroscientists carefully used what they knew about how our brain works to build addiction into, like, video poker machines. And then afterwards, when this book comes out, Natasha Dow Schüll quickly starts like going on interviews being like, Oh, since the book has come out, those Vegas gambling people have been hired by like Facebook and Zynga and Blizzard to build like World of Warcraft and Twitter and all those like blingy points.
So one of the things that we learned is there's this thing that she calls the “ludic loop”—and basically, games can be engineered for addiction if, for a small amount of effort at regular intervals, you get some sign of progress. And you can see this built into, like, World of Warcraft, right? Like when you're doing stuff, it's really—you can always get some more, you can always get some more experience points. You can always get a little more gold. There's plenty of ways to grind.
A lot of difficult games actually don't have that structure. If you play a game that's been designed for addiction, the typical experience is there's a steady trickle of little things. You can always do a little bit more. So people call it like the Pringles, one more chip factor. There's always another tiny thing you can do to get another point. And it's not that hard. One reason it's supposed to be not that hard is, and this goes back to the old Vegas gambling thing, if it's too hard, people get frustrated, they walk away. So if you want to design people to stay on your video slot machine for a long time, if you want people to stay on your social media thing to get people to stay as long as possible to get as much ad revenue, then you don't want to give them a frustration that they'll walk away.
So a lot of difficult games have a very different structure where you can beat your head against something difficult: there’s some puzzle you can’t solve, some boss you can't get over, a rock climb. You can just fail. You can just walk away and be like, “I give up, I’m never doing this again.” I think in many ways what you're getting from me here is a view that, in a lot of ways, difficult games are aesthetically better and artistically better than these other games. Because what you get are these extraordinary things, the stuff I was talking about before, these transformations of vision, these gestalt moments, these things where there's a whole new avenue of skill opened up to you, this thing where you have to pull off this wildly difficult thing, and it came from you and you figured out how to put all those moves together.
But when you open the door to that stuff, you also open the door to failure and frustration and walking away and not being able to do it.
ALEX: So why do people stick around at all then? To even get over that first hurdle of something hard?
THI: I think to have a reason to think that it's worth it in the end. maybe because someone told you, or maybe because of past experience, this is almost one of the things that I think this is parallel to is difficult art. So I've been writing about difficult art. And I think one of the interesting things is, again, something like Coltrane, something, when you start listening to it, it's so hard. It makes no sense. The reason you're doing it is because you catch these, someone tells you're set to catch some glimmer of some possibility down there. Or you've been down this road before. And you know that maybe if you try hard enough, you'll get something amazing.
ALEX: So you have these intellectual reasons why a difficult game is addictively appealing. What about the emotional reasons that make us so loyal to hyper-difficult games?
THI: I started rock climbing in the middle of graduate school. And one of the reasons I did it was because I couldn't find any other way to shut up my brain. Like my brain just kept talking at me and yelling at me and I, like, couldn't sleep. And rock climbing is sufficiently intense that it could actually make me forget about philosophy. Like, it's so difficult. It's also important that it's kind of painful and the painfulness helps it cut through the brain fog. There's normally, like my mind is like full of a hundred things, trying to track a hundred things at once ,and in rock climbing, like, you pay attention to a few things and because it's so hard, you can't let any of your mind like, be thinking about something else—the rock will kick you off. It demands, and through feedback, forces this, like, complete focus and this complete absorption and that's delicious.
ALEX: This is probably obvious, but that absorption doesn’t just happen in games, right? I imagine it’s probably a pretty ubiquitous feeling.
THI: I mean, one—some people don’t like difficulty. I suspect, actually, that many people like difficulty, but find it in different places. I think I know a lot of people that do simple casual games, but also search for intense difficulty in their literary reading or in their social engagements or in their community work.
ALEX: So I get how the feedback is probably appealing, but do we actually want people to think about life in the same way they think about playing games? I know some people argue that if you gamify the world, just make it super appealing to the inner gamer in all of us, then we can make the world better,
THI: Right, right, right.
ALEX: But I feel like I’m a bit skeptical about that.
THI: This is the Jane McGonigal view. This is the view that like gamification will save the world. So Jane McGonigal, for those of you who don't know, is a gamification advocate and in some ways what she starts at is exactly what the thing that I said before: reality is boring and harsh and difficult and games are like incredibly pleasurable and fun. So just make life more like a game and life will be more fun too. And I think actually, if you think more about why games are so fun, you'll actually see why gamification is incredibly dangerous. And the reason games are fun is because the entire world has been engineered to be tractable and to fit with your very specific abilities and your very specific target. Games are incredibly pleasurable because you get to be narrow-minded and pursue this incredibly simple goal. So to get that into life, to gamify life, you have to make the values that you're pursuing not complicated, not hard, not beyond reach, but simple things that are easy to track and easy to count.
I mean, one of my worries is—something like Twitter offers us a gamification by giving us points. But those points don't track. How deep your connection is, what your understanding of other people is, your bridge building. It just tracks likes and likes are just popularity. So the reason it gives you points is because it's changing what you value from anything else to popularity.
ALEX: That makes sense. Communicating with other humans isn’t like a game in that there is a black-and-white, win-or-lose, binary state. There’s levels of grey, and games aren’t great at measuring that.
THI: So my worry is—to make life like a game, you have to redefine the values. To make life more tractable and doable and into the kind of thing that you are given steady points and progress over. But a lot of life isn't like that and so you have to ignore those parts or re-describe why you care about them until they fit and they seem like a game.
ALEX: So if you look at the world and try to over-gamify it, you’ll realize that you can’t really change the world, you can only change yourself and your behaviors. And it sounds like by taking that to the extreme, humans train themselves into behaviors that don’t actually do us much justice, like minimizing the value of complex communication.
THI: My biggest worry is that what people export from the game is this glorious feeling of values being clear and purposes being quantified. And what they'll want is other systems in the world where you can get clear, quantified measures of value. I’m also worried that, in a game, you get permission to have a certain attitude.
So, you know, out in normal life, I have to consider everyone else's emotions and feelings and all the—negotiate the complexity. But in the game you can just be like a pure scalpel and just be like, “I'm going to kill everything and use everything to win.” And that's a very satisfying sense of total clarity. That's one of the joys of being in a game— absorption of a simple goal. But if you have that taste in your mouth and you look for it again in life, what you might end up is finding some system in which you get clear points, like money, and then doing everything you can to make more money.
So the worry is that someone like Jeff Bezos is taking a game-like attitude towards money, like, more money's not going to actually help him do anything, but it does count as points.
So the worry is that becoming the richest person in the world is a really interesting, difficult game for Jeff Bezos.
One of the funny things when I teach this stuff to my students that I talk about—there are certain sociological theories that, like, what games are is a place where we can take our hyper-violent tendencies and then exercise them in a place where they're safe.
Here's a question, like why do we engage in kind of rough sports? One answer might be, it's better than World War Three, right? There is a place to vent off a lot of those killer impulses. And so maybe my thought about Jeff Bezos is… It would have been better if he was really into Dark Souls or, like, Defense of the Ancients, and just cared about those points.
But yeah, no, the worry is that for people like Bezos, business is now a delicious, difficult game. And if you take—if you take the game-like attitude and you want the flow that comes from total absorption in the pursuit of a clear goal, then the world has a few ready-made clear goals for you. Money. The world has a built in scoring system. So if you're looking around for scoring systems, there's one.
ALEX: Ooh, that’s a freaky way to look at it, because the next thing that immediately comes to mind is something like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies that kind of encourage people to play like a game, when underneath it all, there’s this undercurrent of “oh, well, this could one day turn into something that destabilizes entire economies if we don’t manage it well”
THI: Yeah, my worry is that Bitcoin isn't actually a game and that the stock market isn't actually a game, but its game-like features make people play it as a game. So here's the basic difference between most games and real world activities is that in most games, the goal is an artificial construct that is not directly connected to the rest of the world.
ALEX: It almost makes me wonder if there is a biological component, you know, kind of working together with these intellectual and emotional draws to hyper-difficult games. Is that something people have ever looked into? Like is there a fundamental, built-into-our-DNA reason why we love crazy-difficult things?
THI: Yeah, I think it's really clear at some point that we just, a lot of us just take pleasure from doing difficult things. philosopher, I think it's Burke—Burke's theory was that basically our various parts would decay unless they got exercise. And so nature built us to take pleasure in exercising capacities when they were not in use to keep them up to snuff. He—interestingly, one of the places he was doing this—he was trying to explain why people Horror books and scary stories. And his explanation was—we're just trying to exercise our capacity for fear so it's not totally stale when the mountain lion actually jumps out at us and we need to like, have our fear be like, lubricated. so you can think of yeah,we like exercising our skills and, we take pleasure in doing so you can easily tell an evolutionary cycle, psychological theory, like, of course things would do better when they aren’t lying around, when we’re exercising our skills.
If you play chess, you're exercising your capacity to do logic and look ahead, like if you play, but this is the oldest saw we have—like, games build skills, right? So it's totally unsurprising that we would take pleasure in the complex exercise of our skills when we didn't need to, right? That's how you build skillful beings.
ALEX: So by that logic, then, our desire to constantly do increasingly difficult things isn’t just tied to video games, it’s an urge that’s just been around for basically… ever.
THI: One of the reasons, I suspect—you're seeing a lot of people talk about very difficult games as if they're new. And I think one of the things that you're seeing is that the first generation of video games couldn't be, on some objective scale, that difficult because they were the first ones out there. People were just learning the skill set. And now what you have is a generation of people who are 45 and grew up—their first memories are playing, like, Super Mario Brothers and building skill sets in a certain kind of game forever. And now if they want that challenge, they need something gruelingly, gruelingly difficult.
We've seen this before—like chess, Go, rock climbing—there's incredible difficulty out there before, it's not new. Like, people are like, “Oh my God, Dead Souls is so weird. What are people doing playing really hard games?” And then in the background, people have been, like, memorizing chess openings since the age of five, or like learning, like reading their hundredth book of bridge strategy or, like, training for their entire life to climb up K2 or doing ultra-hard rock climbs on route. Like, this is not new. The only weird thing is that it’s in video games. People have been looking for the hardest game they can find, like, as long as I’m aware of the recorded history of games.
ALEX: Man. I love talking to philosophizing gamers.
KATE: Ha! Same! This is so fascinating. You have this quiet yet dedicated and near-obsessive subculture of gaming, and I really thought it only included a few people with a weird masochistic streak. But it turns out the way they think applies to anyone who likes anything difficult.
ALEX: Yes! And if anything I am honestly shocked at how I came out of talking to Thi, because I actually empathize with these gamers who play things I basically never touch. The way they think is the same kind of thinking that applies to rock climbing or improvising tango or the Sunday Crossword, things that people like you and I, even if we’re not gamers, interact with all the time.
KATE: And even people who aren’t like you and I! People like Jeff Bezos, who play with money and business on hard mode. It seems like almost everyone craves some kind of challenge in some kind of game, whether it’s Dark Souls or Redditors trading GameStop. And it’s not just about these games we play, regardless of difficulty. It’s about applying the way we think about games to the rest of our lives. Human thinking isn’t an on and off switch that changes when we’re playing video games versus when we’re not.
ALEX: Exactly, it’s a kind of thought training, something that feeds our desire to get feedback, validation, that we’re doing a good job. Which is a really basic human comfort when you think about it.
KATE: I think the important takeaway here isn’t that difficult games are good or bad in this arbitrary way some people like to use their taste to judge, but rather that we want to be conscious of how we are trained to want this kind of feedback. How we might apply this appealing characteristic of difficulty to things that are more complex than just games?
ALEX: Definitely. There’s more variety in the world than just a win or lose scenario. The world comes in shades of grey, whereas games come in a very very appealing shade of simply black… and white. Recognizing that difference is worth it. Because in the space of games, that pain is so very fun.
I think the best way I heard it put is it’s like hitting your head against a brick wall… over and over again, but you don’t know how good it feels when your head finally wins.
ALEX: Thank you all so much for listening to today’s episode. Thank you so much to Professor Nguyen for talking with us and you can check out his book “Games: Agency as Art” and learn more about his work in the show notes.
KATE: Be sure to rate us on whichever podcasting app you’re listening on. And if you’re a newsperson, be sure to check us out at casebycase.substack.com, where we publish a weekly newsletter of free pitches for journalists.
ALEX: Case By Case was produced by myself, Alex Cardinale…
KATE: And me, Kate Redding.
ALEX: More podcasts to come. We’ll see you on the wire.
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