Part of me wonders if it's all right to accept a sense of accomplishment as part of an artistic experience - games are a medium that requires effort, and I still hold that if there is any artistic merit to them then effort, the drive to accomplish some goal, is at least one criteria by which the experience can be measured.
Take something like the first Super Mario Bros. (because it's the easiest to reference for me) - I only beat the game in earnest for the first time last year. It takes a tremendous and intimate familiarity with the game and the way it works in order to beat it, and you have to be able to circumvent a lot of challenges. In a way, the game trains you almost solely for your run through the final level, with Hammer Bros. and spinning fire sticks everywhere - not to mention Bowser.
When I finally beat it, I had a sort of euphoric feeling that cam not just from having completed a challenge, but that I had internalized the mechanics necessary to beat the game, as if I had actually learned something in conquering it. When I play the game, the way that I think and operate is intrinsically changed, in a way that is more easily identifiable than with other hard games. Could a game's ability to elicit effort, to train a person to be able to experience the whole thing, be taken as one of the design elements necessary for critical analysis?
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