The Stigma of Fun

WARNING SPOILER ALERT FOR FARCRY 3

When I was young I became incredibly excited at the prospect of family game night. As I got older and became a rebellious teen my excitement transformed to expectant dread. But when I was little game night was always an awesome chance to sit around the table and play a board game just for the Fun of it. Once I got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas sometimes this even happened around the television. But the more I played games the more I found I could have fun playing games without making it a family event. I quickly learned I could have fun gaming anytime, and with my Gameboy, almost anywhere. Having Fun became a driving reason for using my allowance during this time.  I didn’t care what the game was about, what you did in it, or whom you did it as. So long as it was Fun, I really didn’t care.

But after a decade or more of gaming I’m coming to realize there are only so many times you can shoot a bad guy or jump on a Goomba before you want to spend what little free time you have playing something with a bit more substance. Not that there is anything wrong with classic platformers or simple shooters when function and designed well. On a personal basis I just generally want a gaming experience where I walk away feeling like I gained something more than puzzle solving skills, and reaction speed. That’s not to say I don’t have Fun with ‘shallower’ gaming experiences. But if I’m just going to be shooting or beating up on baddies I want to be able to do it in novel ways. I’m not hating on games that have a more limited in scope. In fact, I loved Xcom: Enemy Unknown from last year even though the whole thing is just one big puzzle, the same can be said of Vanquish, in spite of the fact it is one big shooting gallery with some of the most one dimensional-caricatures that may exist in gaming. But I could go on forever about ‘simple’ games I love but that are a post for another time. I really want to talk about a topic I have been thinking about a lot since seeing this video.

Basically Adam Sessler asked the question of, whether or not Naughty Dog’s recent, fantastic release The Last Of Us is Fun? He settles on uncertainty and then suggests that it doesn’t really need to be Fun. My initial reaction was one of disbelief, I thought, it’s a video GAME surely it needs to be Fun. But as I’ve reflected I find that this doesn’t really seem to be the case. I think that my reaction was spawned from a conflation of Fun and Enjoyment when it comes to the experience of art, (especially narrative driven art.) It is my belief that this substitution can oftentimes break a game that is striving to explore themes, or create narratives that on the more mature spectrum of things. But in order to get there I’m going to need to define my two terms here otherwise I can see myself getting yelled at in the comments. By saying Fun I’m trying to evoke that sort of game night Fun or that Fun I had gunning down tons of baddies in Contra or jumping around and solving puzzles in almost any platformer. My basic criteria for the sort of Fun I’m talking about is a level of mechanical accessibility. Or in other words, the actual play is easy to pick-up and difficult to master. Think of a game like Mario Kart, your grandparents could get up and racing in no time, even if they didn’t stand a chance of beating a seasoned gamer like yourself. But unless you have really cool Grandparents I doubt they would stand any chance of having Fun with a game like Gran Turismo. I would call these sorts of games conceptually accessible, easy to grasp the point, hard to perform, very hard to master. It is of course possible that conceptual accessibility can turn into mechanical accessibility if you are conditioned by playing many games of that sort. This assumed level of competency is the same in literature. You could explain the plot of Crime and Punishment to a five year old and they would understand it conceptually. But in most cases they wouldn’t stand a chance of getting through the actual book. In the same way, your grandparents probably couldn’t pick up and play Call of Duty even if they get the point, but get them to put in some hours on Goldeneye and they could be getting kill streaks with the best of them. There is a second criteria for Fun as I define it that is quite possibly more important than the first.

Fun, as I define it, also involves things that are inherently rewarding to the player-as-player. Racking up points in a Mario game, or gunning through mobs of giant bugs, or leveling up in an RPG are all variations on this idea. This criterion comes down to what different people find rewarding. Most people would not consider torturing Riley after spending hours trying to rescue him in Farcry 3 an inherently rewarding experience. Further, most people wouldn’t consider it enjoyable out of context. However, that moment goes a long way to make the narrative experience of Farcry a lot more enjoyable. But why is that the case?

(for those of you who haven’t seen it and read far enough without caring about spoilers here it is)

It’s the same reason people find enjoyment from watching horrible things happen in movies, or from reading about them in classic books. I think it is because these oftentimes-horrific moments can really sell a narrative by poking at our realities and fears, and so on. But at the same time, these moments allow us to use art as a buffer to safely reflect and in some ways indulge in these parts of us. Of course this is not just the case for horrific moments of violence and disturbing imagery. People can find enjoyment from beautiful imagery in the case of a game like Journey or experience all the highs of and lows of a romantic drama. So basically enjoyment is any reason you play a game even if it isn’t fun. There is of course overlap between these things. In other words, Fun is almost always enjoyable. But enjoyable does not equate to Fun.

Unfortunately video games are an especially tricky medium because it is hard to create an artistic space to explore heavy issues without losing out on some of the traditional Fun we grew up with. But if we are not willing to make that sacrifice it can lead to games that give up on long-term enjoyment and possibly widespread recognition of artistry. To go back to Farcry 3 ensuring that the game is Fun, by throwing tons of soldiers at you to murder in all kinds of ways certainly makes it Fun. But this really takes a lot of the emotional and intellectual punch out of the games themes of survival, insanity, and violence at a cost. It has the potential to make narrative set pieces like the one above seem absurd and not in the playful sense of the word. After you have murdered hundreds, if not thousands of pirates for no reason other than they were between you and your objective it seems a bit ridiculous for the story to make this moment seem so intense. I mean after all you’re just beating him up and pressing his bullet wounds. Due to preceding gameplay this seems pretty tame, after all, ten minutes before that you were gutting pirates with a machete for being on patrol near you. This sort of inconsistency in the sake of Fun has the power to unintentionally make a sequence meant to drive home the ambiguity between sanity and insanity feel a lot more like this.

    

Not there is anything wrong with Tarantino’s films, they can be incredibly serious but they are also consistently ridiculous and darkly funny. It all sinks or swims on the execution and consistency of these sorts of things. More often then not games sink in this department and this fact seems to lead ‘mainstream’ outlets and audiences to believe games are merely childish and simple Fun.

Many gamers are demanding that what they spend there time doing is considered enjoying art, that is on a level of equal quality to the written word and to film. But when we really look at the majority of gaming experiences given  ‘mainstream’ exposure it is easy to see why gaming is written-off as a trivial artistic medium. Oftentimes games end up trivializing whatever they are setting out to do artistically, by making the gameplay fun and appealing to a broad audience. I’m not saying that all games need to tell a story or be artistically important. But if the game is clearly attempting to create a weighty narrative don’t limit that with light-hearted gameplay. If your characters are constantly regretting and being haunted by all the lives they ended in a cut scene don’t throw the player into a fight with a bunch of nameless thugs to kill immediately afterwards. It cheapens the narrative and makes the gameplay seem absurd.

Even when games manage to pull of something truly artful in terms of its consistency, weightiness, design, or visual composition it is very hard to get a layman to understand why games can compete in the artistic arena. I can think of countless times where a game deeply impacted my worldview and emotional state. But trying to communicate that with a non-gamer who hasn’t had those experiences is like trying to talk to them in a different language.

The most recent example of this is The Last of Us, a game that commits as deeply as I have seen in a long time to a particular set of themes, and motifs in its narrative that it is able to translate into how you feel actually playing the game itself. Is it dark? Very. Is it violent? Absolutely, to the point of emotional trauma in my case. Is it Fun? Not really. That is not to say it doesn’t play well or run smoothly. But even the Fun I would get from progressing to the next level is more a sheer desperation to survive at any cost than it is getting all the points or trying to execute the level perfectly. Does it feel more like a film or a movie or book than a traditional game? Definitely. But that isn’t a bad thing about it. Gaming experiences like The Last of Us are the bridges that can allow others to understand what is artful about more traditional gaming experiences. Should the gaming community shun more traditional games based on shallow Fun? Absolutely not, but developers and consumers need to realize that when it comes to telling a mature narrative or exploring mature themes there is a lot more to consider than whether it is Fun. Echoing Sesser’s exquisite point there are a lot of movies, books, and music we all enjoy, even if they are not all that Fun. Most of all we need to realize there is a place and a role for artistic experiences in both camps.