Miles Thorogood

Zhehao Sun, Yuanyuan Xu, Chi Zhen et al.

While traditional game design prioritizes friction-free accessibility, the Soulslike subgenre has achieved commercial dominance through punishing difficulty and frequent failure. This paper challenges the conventional hedonistic paradigm of gaming to investigate the psychological mechanisms behind the Paradox of Failure. By integrating Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory with Juul's ludological framework, we propose the concept of Resilient Flow. We define this as a cognitive state wherein absorption is maintained not despite frustration but through the meaningful framing of it. To validate this model without invasive laboratory constraints, we conducted a qualitative text analysis of 600 helpful user reviews from Elden Ring, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Dark Souls III via the Steam Community platform. Findings reveal that long-term players linguistically reframe death as pedagogy rather than punishment and utilize vocabulary associated with rhythmic synchronization and meditative focus. We conclude that when difficulty is designed with clarity and fairness, it fosters an Ethics of Attention and transforms digital struggle into a profound experience of mastery and mindfulness.

Yuanyuan Xu, Zhehao Sun, Chi Zhen et al.

As the global climate crisis intensifies, 3D video games have emerged as powerful, interactive simulations for Environmental Education (EE). However, empirical assessment of their pedagogical efficacy remains epistemologically challenged. Traditional evaluation metrics, such as pre-post surveys, often suffer from response bias and fail to capture the nuanced, emergent psychological shifts players experience during gameplay. This paper proposes a novel, non-intrusive approach: utilizing Semantic Network Analysis (SNA) to map the 'unsupervised' cognitive structures of players. We scraped and qualitatively filtered 1,825 rich-text user reviews from Steam for two distinct titles representing opposing ecological philosophies: Eco (anthropocentric systemic management) and WolfQuest (biocentric embodied survival). By constructing co-occurrence networks and calculating topological metrics, we visualized the divergence in how players conceptualize human-nature relationships. Results indicate a fundamental pedagogical split: Eco promotes 'Socio-Political Cognition,' where environmental challenges are framed as legislative and economic frictions; conversely, WolfQuest fosters 'Effective Empathy,' where players internalize the fragility of life through the vulnerability of the avatar. We argue that semantic topology offers a rigorous methodological tool for serious games assessment, revealing that effective environmental education requires a strategic tension between systemic logic and emotional resonance.