Why Gamers Love to Suffer in Souls-like Games

Millions of players worldwide spend hundreds of hours in video games designed to kill them repeatedly, creating a puzzling paradox: why do people voluntarily choose suffering for fun? This phenomenon, exemplified by Souls-like games such as Elden Ring and Dark Souls, has captivated researchers seeking to understand how digital play can produce radical forms of pleasure through sustained . With Elden Ring surpassing 30 million copies by April 2025, this is not a marginal trend but a mainstream cultural experience that defies conventional theories of enjoyment. The answer lies not in simple masochism, but in a sophisticated interplay of game design, psychology, and community dynamics that transforms temporary frustration into lasting satisfaction.

Researchers have developed the Ordeal Pleasure Framework to explain this phenomenon, identifying three key mechanisms that work together to create meaningful difficulty. The first mechanism, Ludic Cultivation, involves mastery development through iterative engagement with fair, learnable adversity. Unlike arbitrary punishment, Souls games implement what learning theory calls 'desirable difficulties'—specifically designed s that optimize long-term skill retention. These include spacing effects through checkpoint systems that force players to retrieve combat patterns from memory, interleaving of different skills during combat, and variation in enemy placement that prevents rote memorization. When death functions pedagogically rather than punitively, failure becomes usable information that supports skill development, creating what game designers call 'Hard Fun' through structured adversity.

The second mechanism, Aspirational Deferment, explains how players willingly endure present frustration as an investment in future mastery. This differs from simple delayed gratification where one merely waits for a reward; instead, players actively work through aversive states to transform their own capacities, similar to athletic training. The framework shows how Souls-like games architect this temporal investment through long horizons (30+ hours of gameplay), visible progression where early s become manageable, and 'come back later' affordances that give players agency in managing difficulty timing. Studies of Dark Souls III players found that achievement experiences were overwhelmingly linked to failure yet still rated highly for enjoyment, suggesting that present negative affect becomes meaningful when embedded in a growth-oriented temporal structure. This helps explain the competence frustration paradox where repeated failure appears to amplify eventual satisfaction rather than reduce it.

Communal Mythopoesis, the third mechanism, involves collective construction of shared narrative and meaning through collaborative interpretation and social practice. Souls-like design deliberately withholds full explanations, making complete understanding difficult in isolation and inviting community investigation. This goes beyond generic strategy sharing to include shared ordeal bonding—where players facing similar s develop solidarity—and lore hermeneutics, where communities reconstruct cryptic narrative fragments through discussion and debate. Analysis of Elden Ring Reddit discussions found single threads with over 2,300 comments totaling nearly 117,000 words, demonstrating substantial collective interpretive labor. The game's asynchronous multiplayer mechanics, such as message systems and summoning signs, make this community support visible within gameplay itself, transforming individual struggle into visible collective experience.

These three mechanisms reinforce one another in what researchers describe as a 'Forging Ritual' metaphor, where the player is both smith and metal. Ludic Cultivation provides the foundation of fair, learnable adversity that creates a believable path from incompetence to mastery. Aspirational Deferment gives this ordeal temporal meaning, turning extended struggle into an experience worth narrating. Communal Mythopoesis then completes the cycle by scaffolding individual practice through shared stories and support. Comparative analysis of different games illustrates how this synergy works: Elden Ring achieves strong integration of all three mechanisms, while Hollow Knight shows that cultivation and deferment can sustain engagement without the same degree of community intensity. Games like Lords of the Fallen, with compromised cultivation through perceived unfair mechanics, demonstrate how missing mechanisms lead to frustration rather than meaningful .

The framework has important for both game design and our understanding of human motivation. For designers seeking to create meaningfully difficult experiences, it provides concrete guidance: design for cultivation through fair, learnable s rather than arbitrary punishment; architect temporal investment strategically with visible progression; create rich narrative fragments that invite collaborative interpretation; and build community scaffolding through in-game communication systems. Theoretically, the framework addresses gaps in existing motivation theories by adding temporal dynamics to Self-Determination Theory and specifying social mechanisms beyond generic relatedness. It shows how digital games provide controlled systems for studying how people attach meaning to difficult experiences, with potential applications beyond gaming to athletic training, artistic development, and other contexts where struggle leads to growth.

However, the framework has important limitations that researchers acknowledge. It primarily analyzes successful cases, creating potential survivorship bias by focusing on players who persisted rather than those who disengaged. Steam achievement data shows that only a minority of Dark Souls III players reach the ending, suggesting these mechanisms function as a filter for players with sufficient frustration tolerance rather than generating ordeal pleasure universally. An open question remains whether Ludic Cultivation alone is sufficient or whether the full triad is necessary for the community-wide phenomenon observed in Souls-like games. Future research could test this through controlled experiments manipulating narrative ambiguity or reward structures to establish causality between mechanisms.

The framework also faces boundary conditions regarding community formation and generalizability. Communal Mythopoesis presents a paradox: players benefit from existing communities, but those communities require prior engagement to form. This suggests the mechanism may function more as an intensifier that compounds over time than as a necessary precondition. Additionally, while the framework derives from action RPGs with specific design conventions, its applicability to other difficulty-based genres like roguelikes or competitive games remains an open question requiring further investigation. Future research directions include longitudinal studies tracking individual players, experimental manipulation of specific design elements, cross-cultural comparisons, and neuroimaging during play to better understand the frustration-satisfaction transformation.

Ultimately, the Ordeal Pleasure Framework explains not just why players endure repeated failure, but how some difficult games transform that failure into a durable source of meaning. By showing how Ludic Cultivation, Aspirational Deferment, and Communal Mythopoesis interact, it provides a comparative lens for analyzing when difficult play becomes not merely challenging, but persistently meaningful, communally amplified, and intrinsically valued. The player's ordeal emerges as a forging ritual where both smith and metal are transformed by the fire of , emerging not broken but tempered—with the ordeal itself becoming what forges the pleasure rather than what blocks it.