Perverse Pleasure: A Defence of Difficulty Without Resolution
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Games scholarship has often discussed difficulty in relation to its mechanics (Juul 2008; 2016), or, using Jagoda’s (2018) instructional framework, as a tripartite concept involving mechanical, interpretive, and affective dimensions. Whilst the latter expands the ways in which game studies scholars examine difficulty as not just a mechanical issue but one involving player states of boredom, frustration, and other such negative affects, much of the research provoked by this framework stops short at addressing the relationship between difficulty and pleasure, particularly pleasure arising from difficulty without resolution, as is common in games with a high level of interpretive difficulty. This paper proposes that drawing from literary critical theory can help illuminate alternate motivations for experiencing difficult games, arguing that pleasure can arise not simply from overcoming demanding challenges, but from the discomfort of staying in it. Specifically, in games such as Pathologic Classic HD (2015), unresolvable interpretive difficulty intermingles with mechanical and affective difficulty to induce Barthesian bliss - a form of pleasure that arises when a player willingly embraces a “state of loss” in a game that “discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom)”, that “unsettles the [player’s] assumptions”, and that “brings to a crisis his relation with language” (Barthes 14). Using Barthes’ conceptualization of “texts of bliss” (14) to examine games that unsettle the assumed agency of the player through a strategy of indefinite disempowerment, this paper argues that such games can nevertheless instantiate a type of perverse - or perhaps even sublime - pleasure.
Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, 37. print, Hill and Wang, 1980.
Ice Pick Lodge and General Arcade. Pathologic Classic HD. Remastered Steam version for Windows PC, Good Shepherd Entertainment, 2015.
Jagoda, Patrick. “On Difficulty in Video Games.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, JSTOR, pp. 199–233.
Juul, Jesper. “Fear of Failing?: The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games.” The Video Game Theory Reader 2, edited by Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008, https://go.exlibris.link/hnb81WWB.
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press, 2013, https://go.exlibris.link/zQlRDKYg.
Perverse Pleasure: A Defence of Difficulty Without Resolution
Hypertexts & Fictions
Games scholarship has often discussed difficulty in relation to its mechanics (Juul 2008; 2016), or, using Jagoda’s (2018) instructional framework, as a tripartite concept involving mechanical, interpretive, and affective dimensions. Whilst the latter expands the ways in which game studies scholars examine difficulty as not just a mechanical issue but one involving player states of boredom, frustration, and other such negative affects, much of the research provoked by this framework stops short at addressing the relationship between difficulty and pleasure, particularly pleasure arising from difficulty without resolution, as is common in games with a high level of interpretive difficulty. This paper proposes that drawing from literary critical theory can help illuminate alternate motivations for experiencing difficult games, arguing that pleasure can arise not simply from overcoming demanding challenges, but from the discomfort of staying in it. Specifically, in games such as Pathologic Classic HD (2015), unresolvable interpretive difficulty intermingles with mechanical and affective difficulty to induce Barthesian bliss - a form of pleasure that arises when a player willingly embraces a “state of loss” in a game that “discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom)”, that “unsettles the [player’s] assumptions”, and that “brings to a crisis his relation with language” (Barthes 14). Using Barthes’ conceptualization of “texts of bliss” (14) to examine games that unsettle the assumed agency of the player through a strategy of indefinite disempowerment, this paper argues that such games can nevertheless instantiate a type of perverse - or perhaps even sublime - pleasure.
Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, 37. print, Hill and Wang, 1980.
Ice Pick Lodge and General Arcade. Pathologic Classic HD. Remastered Steam version for Windows PC, Good Shepherd Entertainment, 2015.
Jagoda, Patrick. “On Difficulty in Video Games.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, JSTOR, pp. 199–233.
Juul, Jesper. “Fear of Failing?: The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games.” The Video Game Theory Reader 2, edited by Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008, https://go.exlibris.link/hnb81WWB.
Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press, 2013, https://go.exlibris.link/zQlRDKYg.
Bio
Currently in doing their Masters in Research in English Literature at the National University of Singapore, Joy is an aspiring games scholar working within the Venn diagram between difficult games and difficult literature. Their undergraduate thesis was on the ways in which subversion in sci-fi novels can be examined as a metafictive game played between author and reader, opening up new approaches to knowledge production and meaning-making within the genre.