Do video games have to be fun?

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DaHeckIzDat
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Do video games have to be fun?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » December 6th, 2022, 9:06 pm

I never thought I would seriously be asking this question, but last week Yahtzee posted an Extra Punctuation video on YouTube (here's the link if you're interested: https://youtu.be/ojiCswpHSA4) and it really got me thinking. He posits that since everybody has a different opinion on what "fun" means, it's more important for a game to be engaging. He uses Scorn as an example, saying that it wasn't fun, but "fun" also wasn't what the developers were going for. They wanted the game to be gross and disturbing, and they definitely succeeded in doing that. It isn't a "fun" experience, but it did engage him.

So I'd like to know what your opinions are on this. Does a video game have to be fun to be good?

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VideoGameCritic
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby VideoGameCritic » December 6th, 2022, 9:24 pm

This is an interesting video.

I think of the people who spend all their time on a single game, like Madden or Fortnight, and I wonder, are they really enjoying themselves or is this some kind of obsession?

Like the free-to-play mobile games, these are designed to get you hooked.

DaHeckIzDat
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » December 6th, 2022, 10:18 pm

I'm pretty much in the same boat as Yahtzee. You all know how much I love Dark Souls just from how much I bring it up. The combat is challenging, overcoming that challenge is cathartic, and assuming you pay enough attention to the setting and item descriptions, the story they've hidden in plain sight provides plenty of context too. Incidentally, I know a lot of people would put Dark Souls in the same category as Scorn, where the gameplay isn't "fun" but they're engaged enough to keep at it anyway. I personally just have the right brain chemistry to extract real enjoyment out of what Dark Souls offers.

On the other end of the spectrum, I also enjoy Destiny. It's a shameless a looter shooter that deliberately gets you addicted by constantly showering you with new weapons and armor until it's almost impossible to put down because the dice might roll in just the right way to grant you the best gun in the game if you just keep at it for a few more minutes. But it's only able to get people to that point by being really fun to play. It's not all that challenging, and the story is mostly background flavor, but the pure catharsis of jumping around in your rocket boots and gunning down alien baddies is pure catharsis. The catch is that since looting and shooting are literally all the game offers, I always get bored of it pretty quick. But for the two or three days at a time that it manages to keep my attention, I do genuinely have a good time playing it.

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scotland
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby scotland » December 7th, 2022, 9:23 am

Thanks for posting - this is a fun video.

The reference to Space Invaders got me thinking that old time arcades (pinball and video) were all about challenge and catharsis, to use the terms the video does. After awhile, your skill set peaked, and the fun came from catharsis - getting that new high score, surviving the level, etc.

Perhaps the difference is that the arcade experience was designed to be brief - the business model was to turn over games slowly enough to encourage another play, rapidly enough to get fed many times per hour. You went to an arcade now and then, played an hour, spent $10, and left for pizza. The Mattel and Coleco handheld games of the late 70s (the red LED dots playing football kind of thing) were all about catharsis. Tetris was all about Catharsis, and wasn't it the game that basically made the Gameboy, ramping up a legacy in portable gaming that Nintendo has held all these years.

One of my favorite types of games are rogue-likes. They are all about catharsis too, since surviving longer is often just a matter of a lucky dice roll dropping a good item early on.

ThePixelatedGenocide
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby ThePixelatedGenocide » December 7th, 2022, 11:23 am

Of course not.

The problem's just that we've called an entire entertainment medium "games', and stretched the definition of "game" to include everything from dry simulations to experimental art and longform fiction.

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Stalvern
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby Stalvern » December 7th, 2022, 6:43 pm

How are we defining "fun"? I would expect "engaging" to be synonymous in the context of a game.

DaHeckIzDat
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » December 7th, 2022, 7:00 pm

Stalvern wrote:How are we defining "fun"? I would expect "engaging" to be synonymous in the context of a game.

That's the whole point. There are so many different ways that something could be enjoyed that "fun" ceases to be ab adequate term, so he prefers to use the word "engaging." Just like how you wouldn't describe a movie about, say, the holocaust as "fun". You probably wouldn't even say that you "enjoyed" it. But as long as you wanted to watch it all the way through, and it made you feel the emotions it wanted you to feel, it was still an engaging movie.

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Stalvern
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby Stalvern » December 7th, 2022, 8:12 pm

I think there's a fundamental difference in that video games involve performing an activity according to a set of mechanics. This is typically what people talk about when they talk about a game being fun – is this activity enjoyable to perform? A game might have weighty and emotionally negative narrative themes, but the act of playing it is what would be "fun" or not. In this foundational aspect, I don't see much of a difference between "fun" and "engaging" as concepts.

DaHeckIzDat
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » December 7th, 2022, 8:15 pm

Stalvern wrote:I think there's a fundamental difference in that video games involve performing an activity according to a set of mechanics. This is typically what people talk about when they talk about a game being fun – is this activity enjoyable to perform? A game might have weighty and negative narrative themes, but the act of playing it is what would be "fun" or not. In this foundational aspect, I don't see a difference between "fun" and "engaging" as concepts.

Watch the video. He gives some examples of games that hold up on story and context alone.

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Stalvern
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Re: Do video games have to be fun?

Postby Stalvern » December 7th, 2022, 9:33 pm

Having watched the video, I'm not convinced by the ostensible counterexamples. Scorn and other survival horror games are often cumbersome and disorienting to play in order to create tension, demanding forethought and strategy. Death Stranding focuses heavily on these aspects without even being a survival horror game (although there's obviously an element of horror in it). Is it not fun to understand and overcome these challenges? Nobody who likes the original Resident Evil games through Code Veronica thinks they aren't fun, clunky and confusing as they may be.

In the case of Disco Elysium, the game is about forging a path through the possibilities of its story. While the story is quite serious, the agency that the player has in deciding it is not only fun on its face – as anyone who picked up a Choose Your Own Adventure book as a child knows – but fun understandable in mechanical terms, a strategic challenge in navigating a web of risks and rewards. One might object that the comparison to the Choose Your Own Adventure series is unfitting in terms of narrative sophistication, but Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is widely hailed as a masterpiece of postmodern literature, is dark and horrific at every turn, and is extremely fun to navigate as an agent, not merely a reader, in all its twisted, tangled textual formatting.

Writing this post has clarified to me the definition of "fun" that I've been operating by: Does this experience reward the player's agency? This also accords with the common complaints that games are not fun when they're "unfair" (the player's agency is not rewarded; success feels arbitrarily withheld and out of their hands) or "boring" (the player's agency is rewarded mechanically but not emotionally; success simply feels pointless). You might still disagree with this idea – and if so, I'd love to know where and why – but I find it satisfactory to account for my thoughts and feelings on the topic.
Last edited by Stalvern on December 8th, 2022, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.


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