I thought it was pretty cool.

Good article. I liked this:

Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all -- and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)

The book world certainly. With so few basic themes and plots, both the worlds of books and games quickly exhaust the permutations. All that is left is who can invent the quirkiest characters and throw them into the most improbable if not impossible situations.

...of course, the difficulty often comes from (or leads to) having to do the same thing over and over again, which will make the game rather tedious and "oppressively close to work" - another thing that is often criticized.

Ardiril: when you've exhausted all the permutations, you simply have to change the game (so to speak), do something different. In the book world, this has happened many times. Different ways of writing are being discovered and rediscovered; as a result, the idea of what a book (a novel, a play, etc) is keep changing. It's the same with video games - over the past few decades, they have undergone radical changes. Not only the graphics have been changing, but also the idea of what a game is. For instance, most games basically used to be about getting straight from point A to point B (and grinding away all the obstacles in your way). Nowadays, it seems that sandbox games are becoming increasingly popular.

I think difficulty in games is neither a virtue nor a vice, it's just a factor or an ingredient. Some people like it, some don't and there are valid reasons for both. If you are gaming for distraction or escape, difficulty or repetitiveness may not be your cup of tea. If you're older, long hours of repetitive motion can be very hard on your hands ( I can only take about 20 minutes with an XBox controller before I get sharp pains in my hands).

Are they truly new, or just wearing a new coat of paint? I can think of few games (and novels) that are no more than accounting for assets and managing logistics. The only difference between tic-tac-toe and Warcraft is complexity. Meanwhile, Goethe quantified emotion while maintaining a firm hand in allocating accented syllables. War and Peace is a blueprint for both strategy games and soap operas.