Opinion: Why we spend so much money to be so stressed out

Chris Dahlen writing for Polygon:

Like most people who use an alarm clock, I have an unhealthy relationship with stress. It hits me in the chest, disrupts my digestion, and wakes me up at all hours of the night — but it’s also the reason I’m going to meet my deadline for this column. Life brings stress, but stress is also a self-inflicted wound, like we’re suffering a blow that may never come.

Not many people would call stress “fun,” and yet video games can be stressful. We sometimes willingly pay money to be more stressed. This year gave us a bumper crop of stressful games, and the other day as I was tossing and turning at 5:00 am., I decided to rank them on the inside wall of my cranium. Lucas Pope’s recent Papers, Please made it onto the list, and so did Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life. But I started with Nintendo’s Pikmin 3.

A great piece on the arc of human development and stress as depicted by three games: