Why We Love Difficult Games: The Masochist's Manifesto

I have died 4,217 times in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. I know this because the game counts. It counts every single death, and it tells you the number with the detached precision of a coroner filling out paperwork.

Normal people would have quit after death number 50. Reasonable people would have quit after death number 500. I am apparently neither normal nor reasonable, because after death 4,217 I loaded the game again, grabbed the hammer, and started climbing.

This raises an obvious question: what is wrong with me?

But a more interesting version of that question is: what is wrong with all of us? Because difficult games—punishingly, unfairly, obscenely difficult games—are not niche products enjoyed by a small community of masochists. They are among the most popular and critically acclaimed games ever made. Dark Souls. Celeste. Cuphead. Sekiro. Geometry Dash. Super Meat Boy. These games are defined by their difficulty, and they are beloved for it.

Why? Why do we voluntarily subject ourselves to experiences designed to frustrate us?

The Flow State Hypothesis

The most commonly cited explanation comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his theory of "flow"—the mental state in which a person is fully immersed in an activity, experiencing energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment.

Csikszentmihalyi's research found that flow occurs when the difficulty of a task is precisely matched to the skill level of the person performing it. Too easy, and you're bored. Too hard, and you're anxious. But when the challenge is just barely within your capability—when success requires full engagement but remains achievable—that's when flow happens.

Difficult games are flow machines. They place you in a constant state of near-failure, where every successful jump, dodge, or kill requires your complete attention. The difficulty isn't the punishment—it's the mechanism that generates the flow state. Without it, there is no absorption, no timelessness, no euphoria.

"Difficulty isn't the obstacle between you and the fun. Difficulty is the fun. It's the friction that generates the heat."

The Problem with Easy Games

This framework explains something that game designers have known intuitively for decades: easy games are boring. Not because they lack content, but because they fail to generate flow.

When a game doesn't threaten you with failure, your brain shifts into a low-engagement mode. You're processing inputs and executing responses, but you're not present. Your mind wanders. You check your phone. You think about what you're having for dinner.

Difficult games eliminate this mental wandering by demanding your complete cognitive bandwidth. There is no room to think about dinner when a wall of spikes is approaching at 60 pixels per second.

The Competence Paradox

Here is where things get psychologically interesting. We've already established (in my article on idle games) that humans have a core need for competence—the feeling of being good at things. Difficult games seem to violate this need, because they make you feel incompetent for most of the time you spend playing them.

But the paradox resolves when you examine the quality of the competence signal, not just its frequency.

In an easy game, you succeed constantly. But each individual success carries almost no information about your actual ability, because the game never seriously tested you. The competence signal is frequent but weak.

In a difficult game, you fail constantly. But when you finally succeed—when you beat the boss, complete the level, reach the next checkpoint—the competence signal is rare but overwhelming. You know, with absolute certainty, that you earned that victory. No one gave it to you. The game didn't lower the bar. You rose to meet it.

This is why beating Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls produces a rush that no amount of winning in a casual game can replicate. The difficulty calibrates the emotional reward. Higher difficulty equals higher significance of success.

The Identity Effect

Difficult games also create something I call the "Identity Effect"—the tendency for players to incorporate their gaming achievements into their self-concept.

Nobody tells stories about easy games. You never hear someone say, "Let me tell you about the time I walked through that corridor in a walking simulator." But Dark Souls players will recount their first Ornstein and Smough victory with the specificity and emotion of a war story. Speedrunners remember the exact run where they first broke a personal record. Geometry Dash players know the exact percentage where they always choke on a specific level.

These experiences become part of your identity because they cost you something. The difficulty transforms gameplay from consumption into achievement—and achievements, unlike consumed content, become part of who you are.

The Design of Fair Difficulty

Not all difficulty is created equal. There is a crucial distinction between difficulty that feels fair and difficulty that feels cheap, and the best difficult games obsess over this distinction.

Fair difficulty means the player always knows why they died and always believes they could have avoided it. The game's rules are consistent. The obstacles are visible. The controls are responsive. Death is always the player's fault—never the game's.

Cheap difficulty means the player dies to obstacles they couldn't see, enemies that spawn without warning, or controls that don't respond reliably. The game blames the player for failures that were actually caused by bad design.

Celeste is the gold standard of fair difficulty. Every death in Celeste is your fault. The controls are pixel-perfect. The level design telegraphs every hazard. The respawn is instant (less than 0.5 seconds). The game never punishes you for dying—it simply invites you to try again, immediately, with no friction.

This design philosophy creates what I call "productive frustration"—the specific type of frustration that motivates retry behavior rather than quit behavior. You die, you understand why, you believe you can do better, and you try again. The loop is self-reinforcing.

The Browser Game Sweet Spot

Browser games occupy a unique position in the difficulty spectrum because of their instant accessibility. There's no installation barrier, no financial commitment, and no sunk cost preventing you from quitting. This means that browser games must earn the player's continued engagement purely through game feel.

Games like Geometry Dash (the Lite browser version) thrive because they nail the difficulty-fairness balance. You die hundreds of times, but each death teaches you something, the restart is instant, and the music keeps you in a rhythmic trance that makes retry behavior feel natural rather than punishing.

The next time you rage-quit a difficult game, take a moment to notice what happens next. If you close the tab and never return, the game failed you. But if you close the tab, stew for five minutes, and then open it again... congratulations. You've been designed.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.