Why Do We Suffer for Fun? Ordeal Pleasure in Souls-like Games
It addresses how challenging games create complex satisfaction for players and designers, offering a framework that adds temporal and social dimensions to motivation theory, though it is incremental in building on existing game design and psychology concepts.
The paper theorizes ordeal pleasure in Souls-like games as a community-level phenomenon arising from three reinforcing mechanisms—Ludic Cultivation, Aspirational Deferment, and Communal Mythopoesis—and shows how these games produce pleasure through coordinated difficulty, temporal structure, and social meaning-making, with comparative analysis of titles like Elden Ring and Hollow Knight.
Souls-like games exemplify how digital play can produce radical forms of pleasure through sustained challenge: players voluntarily invest tens or hundreds of hours in experiences designed to kill them repeatedly. This paper theorizes ordeal pleasure as a community-level phenomenon that emerges most fully when three mechanisms reinforce one another: Ludic Cultivation (mastery through fair adversity), Aspirational Deferment (delayed gratification oriented toward future growth), and Communal Mythopoesis (collective construction of shared meaning). Drawing on game design analysis, empirical player studies, and community discourse, we show how Souls-like games produce pleasure by coordinating difficulty, temporal structure, and social meaning-making. Comparative analysis (Elden Ring, Hollow Knight, Lords of the Fallen, The Surge) illustrates how specific design choices enable or undermine ordeal pleasure. The framework adds a temporal dimension to motivation theory and specifies social mechanisms beyond generic relatedness. It also offers design principles for designers seeking to create challenging games that transform suffering into complex satisfaction.