The Different Flavors of Video-Game Pain

Why games are a great way to talk about the pleasures of difficulty

Clive Thompson
6 min readOct 1, 2021

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“Bullet hell” games test the limits of my endurance, but I love them anyway

Video games are difficult — yet we love playing them anyway.

In fact, we love them because they’re difficult. We play them specifically to experience different flavors of difficulty.

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Clive Thompson

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net