Bennett Foddy doesn’t like fantasy games. “I’m not trying to escape anything,” he says. “I’ve been playing videogames since I was 3 years old. I don’t want to play a game with a gun or a space marine anymore.” What Foddy—who has a day job teaching bioethics at Oxford—does like is realism: soul-crushing, low-reward realism. And he inflicts it with titles like QWOP, which game-enthusiast site Kotaku calls “one of life’s hardest activities.”

At first the game, coded in Flash, seems simple: It’s named for the four keyboard keys players use to control an avatar’s thighs and calves during a 100-meter dash (that’s it—there aren’t even any other racers). But the game quickly gets maddening: Coordinating individual body parts with keyboard controls requires hundreds of awkward white-knuckle false starts and a deep respect for the rhythm required to jog. Get it wrong and your runner collapses to the ground without taking a single stride. Get it right and he just might cross the finish line. “If it wasn’t such an everyday task that the guy was performing,” Foddy argues, “you wouldn’t think of it as hard. You expect to know how to do it, and you fail horribly. For a certain group of people, that is motivating.”

Indeed, QWOP is a runaway success, helping Foddy’s site reach 30 million pageviews and spurring a full-blown meme. One photo, for instance, shows a fallen, crumpled athlete overlayed with “IRL QWOP.”

Foddy’s newest creation, GIRP, is a mountain-climbing game. The controls are no easier than QWOP’s, entrapping your fingers in keyboard Twister as you try to ascend a rock face. Foddy claims he designed GIRP for a general audience but admits that making games for everyone is something he hasn’t mastered: “I haven’t managed to make a game that my wife wants to play.”