It's an interesting observation, I think. That people generally enjoy progressing in a game more than they enjoy the gameplay itself (which is why having to repeat sections after dying frustrates many people.) For as big an impact as gameplay is supposed to have, it always seems to pale in comparison to having an end goal to reach and the ability to make progress to it.

That's one of the methods I use to judge whether I enjoy a game. If I dread the thought of reloading a saved game or returning to a checkpoint, that's a pretty good indication that I don't find the gameplay enjoyable.

Of course, that's only true to a certain point. No matter how fun the gameplay is, if I keep having to replay the same section over and over again because I keep dying at the same frustratingly difficult challenge, that fun gameplay is eventually going to get stale and repetitive -- and, thus, will no longer be fun.

Simple answer with a sweeping brushstroke - a lot of people game to escape the setbacks life throws at them. Having a setback in game brings them down to a level of normality they do not want at that moment. Adversely without the potentiality of a setback, games can seem dull to some of the same crowd.
Summary: the "power fantasy" of not having setbacks is popular enough.

Why do we not eat a whole cake if cake tastes good? Because after a while it gets old.

Something i've slowly learned over time, though, especially pushing myself to get better by playing certain games like SiNiSister: if you're dying alot, odds are you're doing something wrong. The thing is, the frustration comes from not being able to figure out what that actually is. A series really, really good at teaching this is Monster Hunter. Unfortunately, sometimes once you get too good at it, you often forget the lesson.

Then there's things that just aren't fun, like a final boss with a monsterous difficulty spike where you have to whack on it for an hour or something without making a single mistake, when you have diarrhea, and your eyes are burning from the lack of sleep 'cause you know you're at the end of the game and it's 2AM and you just want to claim victory. Nah, not so much. Usually i find people really appreciate when they can find out how to overcome the setback. Especially frustrating seems to be the cases where you don't know what to do, or especially how in alot of older games you have to fight down a long corridor and watch a 30 second boss intro and your tension is high and the game's forcing you to try to calm down before it throws you right back into high tension. If you think you got teh motions down to defeat said boss, this is just aggravating.

Yes, i know, there's a monster in the black goop over there, and he comes out, roars, scary as shit, looks real badass, what ever, just let me kill him, already!

I think that actually makes the most sense.

After all, goal-less games aren't quite as popular as goal oriented games. Why bother with all the story stuff and intelligent level design if the player just wants to have a gun and shoot everything in sight? I would say that progressing to a goal with the game trying to deter you from it fits that "power fantasy" quite nicely... while just randomly shooting people who are shooting at you for senseless violence sake doesn't give you that rush of overtaking an obstruction.

Care to elaborate? As far as i'm aware, all games inherently have the goal of surviving and beating the game. If random enemies shooting you are less popular than "goal-oriented games" then what would examples of such games be?

Not necessarily; there's enough diversity in games that you can't make a blanket statement like that and expect it to always hold true. Specifically:
* Not all games have a failure condition; in such games, there is no notion of having to survive.
* Not all games have a victory condition; in such games, there's no notion of "beating" the game. though you might run out of content.

Take, for example, Cookie Clicker:
* You can't lose the game. While some events later on can cause you to lose cookies, you can always get them back; it just takes time.
* You can't win the game, as there's no limit to the number of cookies you can get (other than those imposed by the double precision floating point type). You'll eventually run out of ways to significantly boost cookie production, and there's only finitely many achievements (some of which are a bit ridiculous), but even if you get them all, there's no ending.

and i forgot Animal Crossing. That said, though, these examples don't stick out in ways that would explain his argument. I can't really fathom what he precisely means by his statements. No one's shooting at us in either games.

Pretty much. Escapism and power trip. Failing cancels both, the latter very obviously but also the former because it pulls you out of the atmosphere/world/story.

And if you're reading a good book, will read the same page five times? If a movie is good, will you rewind every five minutes to watch them over and over? Sure, there may be instances where you might, but 9 times out of 10 the answer is no. Because you want to move on, see what happens next, because what you have not seen or read yet is more interesting and exciting, because the same thing over and over will get tedious even if it's great the first time around and because being stuck in a loop like that will take you out of it, ruin the pacing, ruin immersion.

And losing progress you already made is infuriating, because it just doesn't feel fair. not being able to beat some point in the game is one thing, but having to redo stuff you did beat just to get to that point just feel like the game deliberately wasting your time. Time is precious. Many people don't have that much to spare in their daily routine so wasting a cummulative hour just to get through a tough spot in game that would only take you 15 minutes if you didn't lose progress every time is intolerable. Hell, even if you have all the time in the world having your time wasted sucks.

In any endeavor -- even those that are enjoyed -- humans process whether the reward is worth the effort. If all reward is removed from an endeavor, they lose interest... even if the endeavor is somewhat enjoyable.

I played SimCity with disasters on. Why? They brought extra, unexpected fun. Especially with the rebuilding after. I would never have done wholesale bulldozing like that, but after a disaster, it's already done, so let's get building.

I do mostly agree with your point, but, for me, a significant part of it is, when I feel bad about "progress lost", it's usually from bad design decisions: "gotcha!" encounters*, unnecessary restrictions against saving that made me lose a lot, or "I just completed a super challenging part and had no breather before the next one, and if I lose here, it's right back to the beginning, so I got no reward rush for that hard bit".

When I lose progress, as an adult, I always have to weigh in with the free time cost. The game can be fun, but perhaps it's not fun enough for the time it takes to redo the work. I'm not a 10 year old who leave the NES on for days at a time in the summer to be able to beat Ninja Gaiden anymore.

* One of my most vile remembered "gotcha" encounters that caused loss of progress is the near-end sequence in Arcanum. There are a ton of instadeath traps all over in there. I rage quit and never went back. I even had a rogue-type build!

I think it depends heavily on the game, what the fun derives from, and the person playing.

In Arkham City for example I'd often willingly give up progress by loading an earlier checkpoint, just so that I could replay an awesome fight scene again. I might even do it 2 or 3 times.

However in a city builder I won't ever want to load an earlier save again just to redo the laying out of a city block because of how fun it is.

In the former losing progress can be unpleasant if the novelty of the fight scenes and locations have worn off, or if you were really engaged in the story and are anxious to see how it unfolds.

In the latter losing progress is (almost) always painful, because the fun mostly (not exclusively) derives from inching towards the next milestone.

The thing is, some parts of a game are more fun than others, and having to replay unfun parts of a game to get another go at the fun parts is just not fun.

I played Hollow Knight immediately after playing Celeste, and the difference in how death is handled was rather stark, and I found myself wishing that Hollow Knight were more like Celeste in this regard (though I would have settled for something more like Bloodstained, where you load your last save, though maybe with the load time cut out).

Some of the fun parts of the game with better abilities,items or skills may only be be accessible after the boring parts.

P.S It's coincidental that the last new post is similar after I had left this thread open to reply to hours ago.