Why pain is addicting — our brains explained through Dark Souls and video games

7 min readApr 19, 2021

And how video games prove love is so much more than masochism

Written by @alexc_journals, a journalist half-vaxxed.

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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.

2. 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.

3. 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.