Overcoming difficult problems feels good. The more insurmountable a task appears, the better it feels to conquer it, and to look back upon how much you’ve improved since the start. It’s the driving force behind the continued popularity of difficult games like Beat Saber, Celeste, Baba is You, and many others. The most dedicated players beat the original games and improve beyond the point of feeling challenged by them, instead turning to creating and consuming community content. Humans will summit the highest mountain, only to build an even taller one out of boredom.
This behavior can be observed in interpretive difficulty too. Some works of literature are infamous for their excessive length and/or difficulty to comprehend. Some are notorious for not being worth one’s time to read, and yet people still try to read them anyway because of the challenge and not in spite of it.
In mechanical challenges, improvement revolves around honing one’s reaction time, muscle memory, spatial reasoning, etc. In interpretive difficulty, one might hone their ability to parse language, understand abstract concepts, and make mental connections. Affective difficulty, on the other hand, is more broad in its effects. Overcoming it has wildly varying implications.
If a game lends itself to fueling frustration, anger, or fear, overcoming such emotions seems fairly positive.
What about disgust, fear, or shame? Does overcoming these emotions mean to tune them out? To become accustomed to things that cause discomfort?
And for sadness, regret, or guilt— There are certainly different ways one can deal with such emotions, but doing so in the same way that one improves at a mechanical challenge is concerning. If improving mechanically means that difficult jumps or timings become easy, does “improving” at a sad narrative event means to stop being sad? Should modders be expected to create increasingly tragic stories and horrific scenarios? To “improve” means to no longer feel challenged, and to no longer feel challenged emotionally means to grow numb.
Undertale’s genocide route is a perfect example of this less-paletteable form of self-improvement. A player doesn’t just need to be able to fight Sans; They need to be able to casually set aside the fear in their victims’ eyes, the dead silence of empty towns, and the weight of their own sins.
The observation you make on the human desire to improve, or even to prove, seems incredibly relevant to the conversation we had in class on gamification. The phenomena of gamification uses neoliberal principles of labour and reward and I think that relation between labour and reward is relevant to your point on difficulty. I wonder how much our desire to go past a difficult level, or improve, is a result of a learnt behaviour that stems from how we have set up reward systems societally.