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2016-08-23

What Videogames Taught Me About Frustration

Life is frustrating with a regularity that makes dietary fiber manufacturers jealous.

However, video games take frustration to a torturous level that makes me believe game designers are actually in league with the devil. Sometimes I ask myself why I keep playing (why anyone keeps playing) and I think part of the answer is that diabolically frustrating games put life into perspective, but there’s more to it than a simply setting a higher tolerance threshold--it could be worse, we could trapped in an undersea laboratory overrun with escaped subjects from the sentient jellyfish experiments--I think that games actually teach us how to deal with frustration.

For comparison, I present two scenarios: a clutch or kick moment in Rainbow Six vs catching that water-loving Slowpoke in Pokémon GO.