“Games should be fun.”
This statement appalls me, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a misleading notion being perpetuated by and among the majority of game studios. Can you blame them? Fun sells. Entertainment sells. Sure – there’s a time and place for entertainment. I won’t deny I’ve played many games solely for that fun factor. But be clear that I do not object to the entertainment value of modern mainstream games. I object to the word “should.”
“Games should be fun.” Such a statement conveys the sense that the ultimate objective of game developers is to dispense this “fun” at the fastest possible rate into the gaping mouths of a gluttonous audience. The statement says that the inferior game is that which does not “provide amusement or enjoyment“. Did The Passion of the Christ provide such amusement to its audience? I was sickened by it. And yet I (like many others) found it to be an excellent movie – one I could not bear to watch again. So if movies are not bound by such artificial restraints, why should games – just another artistic medium, as far as I’m concerned – adhere to different standards? All this talk of “features” and “replay value” completely obscures the simple yet potent capacity of the genre.
To bind our own beloved medium to such an immature and meaningless purpose is to constrict the possibilities of the art. Games can be fun. Games are often fun. But should they be fun, when there’s a whole gamut of other more admirable objectives to accomplish? Games can inspire, teach, inform, enlighten, frighten, exhaust, relieve, confuse, frustrate, tickle, challenge, gratify, humble, resonate. Games can facilitate a delicate and unspoken conversation between players. Games can be excercise – a way of pushing one’s own capabilities to their limit. Fun plays, at best, a peripheral role – an element that may or may not augment the core experience.
Was I having fun when I played The Marriage or Passage? With their mindnumbingly simple controls and laughable player progression, it’s hard to describe my experiences as “fun”. But the authors’ motivations and ideas, conveyed through the game’s primitive interactions and abstract representations, spoke to me about life (and marriage, in particular) in a way that no book or movie or “fun game” could have ever done.
Was I having fun in EVE Online when the mining barge I had earned after weeks of gathering minerals by myself in low-sec space was destroyed by merciless player pirate renegades. No – I almost cried. But I was engrossed. I saw in it all the human condition – the way the world would be in the absence of social order. I saw – I felt - those primal urges to kill my fellow (virtual) man. All at once, I felt both the victim’s pain and the accompanying tug of vengeance and indignation – the very emotions that, perhaps, led those very same pirates into their life of indiscriminate crime. There was something to be learned and to be experienced there that so fundamentally reflected the realities of our own complex lives. Despite my heavy losses, I marched onward in that cruel and fascinating world.
Was I having fun in Portal as I was shot inward and outward in every direction at blinding speeds? Okay, yes, I was (though I almost threw up). But without its underlying satire, the game would have been no more than a gimmicky tech demo.
Ultimately, to succumb to this naive idea that, somehow, games are nothing but entertainment is to admit that you’ve wasted your life playing those games. If games do not enrich our culture, if they do not provide meaningful social interactions and social commentary, if they do not open our imaginations, if they do not teach us something about ourselves – then games become nothing more than mental masturbation. Game studios are just porn peddlers. And you? You’re just jacking off.
