The joy of ridiculously difficult video games?

I wrote a while back about how I don’t really enjoy slow-paced games that require a lot of thinking, and never understood why people would deliberately seek out very difficult games. Much as I loved the setting and style of the original Deus Ex, I don’t think I’ll be returning any time soon, because it just feels like punishment. I gave up on Vampire TMB: Bloodlines annoyingly near the end because I just couldn’t get past that werewolf, and … it just wasn’t fun any more.

This intriguing article from The New Yorker spells out for me what I’d been missing before: it isn’t actually about having fun at all.