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Videogames, as everyone knows, are for losers—literally. In defiance of our participation-trophy culture, videogames demand that their players fail, repeatedly. Not many games can make you cry, but scores of them can make you feel frustrated, angry and impotent. The word that we gamers use for this cocktail of sensations is “fun.” Today’s most challenging games are dubbed “masocore,” a combination of “masochist” and “hard-core.” Masocore games are nearly devoid of instructions, kill new players within seconds, and require repeated trial and error to succeed. But it’s not all pointless vexation. These games reinforce a character-building truism: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” And they also inculcate some practical virtues. All of that losing, it turns out, teaches you how to win, and not just in videogames. Few games illustrate this as starkly as “Dark Souls,” developed by the Japanese studio FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco. The third entry in the series was released last month. Bandai Namco says that three million copies of “Dark Souls III” have been shipped to retailers world-wide. The series has sold 13 million copies since the release of the first “Dark Souls” in 2011. “Dark Souls III” begins with the player alone in a nearly silent cemetery. There is no music and no dialogue, just a watery path to follow through an almost colorless landscape of browns, grays and blacks. Glowing markers on the ground explain how to attack the skeletons and other undead creatures that lurk ahead. Bloodstains show where players who came before you have died. Like them, you won’t survive. A new book on “Dark Souls” is entitled, aptly, “You Died.” A writer for Wired reported dying 437 times over the 74 hours it took him to complete “Dark Souls III.” I died seven times in the first 45 minutes. The game isn’t merely hard; it’s punishing. If you fail, you can be forced to retrace your steps and again defeat previously vanquished foes. Players who don’t get back to the spot of their demise lose their accumulated progress. Yet the interaction among player, controller and screen is so well tuned that death almost always feels like the player’s fault, not the game’s. To defeat these games, players collaborate online and in person, sharing advice over the Internet much the same way schoolchildren of my generation did on the playground to master “Super Mario Bros.” In “You Died,” a former psychological-operations specialist in the U.S. Army—who has now spent, he says, 1,400 hours playing “Dark Souls”—compares the “persistence and resilience” taught by the game to the virtues that he learned during his military career. “The game demands that you fully commit, have the guts to continue on and the patience to learn from your mistakes,” he says. Another player compares the game to confronting a field of land mines, finding a manual to disarm them, then learning that the manual is in Swahili. “But ‘Dark Souls’ also gives you a Swahili dictionary,” she says, continuing the metaphor. “It expects you to listen and to learn and to improve.” The data bear out these observations. More than a decade ago, John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, who now work at the consulting firm Accenture, surveyed 2,500 business professionals and concluded that people who played videogames as teenagers were better at business than people who didn’t. Their 2004 book “Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever” found that videogame players were more likely to consider themselves experts, to want more pay for better performance and to see persistence as the secret to success. Of course, games can be fun without being edifying. In “The Art of Failure,” the Danish game theorist Jesper Juul compares videogame players who seek out defeat (by playing games that they know they will lose) to moviegoers and readers drawn to works that evoke unpleasant feelings like sadness, fear and disgust. Playing “Dark Souls,” like watching “Old Yeller,” “Psycho” or “Alien,” can be time well wasted even if it brings no practical benefits. Even those who don’t have the dexterity (or time) to master masocore games can draw a lesson from their inadequacy: that, in the real world, sometimes it’s just time to quit. I know enough about the compulsive qualities of some videogames not to let our preschool-age daughters play much of anything. But when they get a little older, I will happily let them play “Dark Souls” or another well-crafted game. They teach patience, doggedness and the rewards that come from hard work.

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