Man, if there was a way of hooking up some cables to gamers as they undergo something like a Dark Souls boss fight, the resulting froth-mouthed gamer rage would power a city for a few hundred years. There's just nothing like it; trying in vein to nail some specific platform-jump, shooting a particular enemy in just the right spot or getting a certain world's puzzle just right - there's something about the idea of a controllable interface straight up not doing what you want that's just instantly infuriating. It's the reason people smash their phones into a thousand pieces, why everyone only gives their computer a few seconds before clicking like a gibbon on the mouse or in this case, the reason the phrase "It's just a game" mid-play session is tantamount to someone slapping your mother. It's not just a game, and it never was. In that moment, in that unbridled, rage-filled 'in-the-zone-and-never-leaving' moment of purposeful goal-winning drive, nothing is just a game. Instead, it's the most important thing to you on this earth at that given time, and for those game designers who knew exactly what they were doing programming such Satanistic works of devilry into their games, overcoming and emerging in one piece on the other side with your controller intact always elicited the same reaction; "I am never, EVER, doing that again."
