"Stress and Catharsis" Game Pattern

Brief Explanation

This is one of the most powerful game design pattern I've seen, and also simple to understand.
Every game should have certain kind of "stress" coming ahead, and when a player overcomes that stress, a player should feed some kind of "Relief".
When there's a set of "stress and relief ahead", we start wanting more of them.
As a result, game becomes addictive, as long as they can provide a combination of "stress and catharsis"

In Wikipedia, an explanation of Catharsis is "any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration".

It's almost impossible NOT to find this pattern in a game.
Any game comes with its set of rules, a player inevitably suffer from some sort of stress. It can just be as simple as learning new game rules, stronger enemies, or more complicated game elements.
If we can provide a Catharsis in return, a player then can have motivation to keep playing the game.
Just a simple example of Tetris, a classic game.
When aligning tetris blocks, you have hard time sorting them out. That's the inevitable stress part of the game.
Then, suddenly you have this bar that can destroy so many lines at once. Here, your emotion is changed completely into a joy.

Since it's a broad concept, I don't talke about one new game, but more general advise how to turn a game into a great game.
- Pick one game, and list all the stress point you can think of as a player.
- And also list how they can overcome these stress, and what kind of emotion they'll release.
- Think whether it's too much stress in advance, and also make sure these reward by overcoming stress is well given.

The tetris example above, I've seen an advanced tetris game that adds more complicated blocks that's harder to use.
Stress increases by this feature, but I don't think it adds any extra Catharsis to the game.
If tetris's Catharsis is all about earsing many lines at once, I would add a "dot" block that can penetrate exsiting blocks.
So even if you missed to fill lines, later on, there's a chance to "fill" theses lines by inserting a "dot" block.
That should contribute to the game Catharsis more directly.