Video Games For Fun & Enlightenment

The Game Room
1

Initial Note: Open spoilers are likely in this thread if it takes off since games used as examples are likely to be plot heavy.

In the Pit, the Gamergate thread has spun off into a discussion about “fun” in games and how important it is. The catalyst for this was a quote from an article which recommended that:

You can adhere as strictly as you want to the definition of “fun” but for my own purposes I’m using it broadly to mean “entertaining” even if you’re not broadly grinning all the way through. Amnesia: The Dark Descent may not be a laugh riot but it’s also not what the author likely intended when he said to use other criteria for determining a good game. Also, while he doesn’t say that games can’t be fun, he is clear that “fun” should be a secondary consideration at best for deciding if a game is “good”.

Anyway, I thought a thread in this forum may be more fruitful since it would hopefully attract more eyeballs who are interested in discussing video games versus those debating the Pit topic and because this way the thread won’t become derailed should the Pit topic flare up again. I’m hoping to leave the Gamergate thing out of this entirely even if it was the genesis of the quote in question.

Do you agree with the premise of the above quote? Do you think video games are already accomplishing this? Do you think that they are capable of doing so and achieving any sort of mass appeal? Do you think that the mechanics of game play stand between a game being “good” and being (say) “socially conscious” and that you’ll only see this in projects that stretch the definition of “game” such as Dinner Date or The Graveyard?

I have my own thoughts but hoped to get the ball rolling.

2

Games, having the broadest potential of any medium, are capable of being anything from the interactive equivalent of an arm wrestle to the interactive equivalent of epic literature. The latter end of the spectrum is a lot more difficult to do well and may grow increasingly unmanageable.
Fun, however, is one thing that games tend to do well because an interactive version of a sports match or cowboys and Indians is a lot easier to make than an interactive version of a Jane Austen novel or an interactive version of Gibbons’ study of Rome.

3

I prefer to sidestep the above quote entirely, as it is a poor framing of the issue and the author was aiming to supplant storytelling and game design with a social message. Now, I’m far from being a successful writer myself, but I’ve read and heard, numerous times from successful and respected fiction writers, that if your purpose in writing a story is “the message”, then you are doing it wrong.

Fiction is meant to entertain. It can certainly do so by being fun, but the definition of “entertain” is much more sophisticated than merely being fun. I could go on about this, but I doubt I’d be telling anyone here anything new. And of course I’d eventually come full circle and talk about how fiction can be great at getting a message across - it’s just that the writer who starts with the message as the point usually does a much poorer job than the writer who holds entertainment as their first principle.

Video games are special. They are far more immersive than a text- or movie- based medium can be. The act of making choices, even forced ones, creates a psychological environment that engages the consumer on a much deeper level than merely following along can do (and there are numerous vectors by which we can understand this, thanks to the breadth of psychological studies that examine the aspects involved in becoming invested in something).

Video games are a very young medium, and the immersive nature of a story that can be told best under such a medium has hardly been explored to its fullest, IMO.

This is a very exciting time to be a video game player. As long as we don’t restrict ourselves to the old and the familiar, as long as we don’t let ourselves become comfortable with merely experiencing staid old “gameplay” tropes, we have the opportunity to explore and create new avenues of artistic creativity that have never before been available to human experience.

And that is fucking cool.

I rankle at the thought that anyone would suppress such grand avenues of creativity through either puritanical and fear-based concerns, or through narrow-minded attempts at enforcing a limited cultural viewpoint. The issues raised by people concerned with such things should not be ignored - far from it - but the breadth of artistic expression that can potentially be engendered through video games as a medium should not be curtailed. We have too much to explore.

4

Orr,

I would like you to go on about the ways in which one can entertain, if you will.

What works do you think have done the best job of communicating a message, even if that was a secondary consideration?
I do get the impression that some who are against fun as a criterion are not looking to broaden the range of games, they want a narrow focus on their particular cause. If someone wants to make or fundraise/commission a game that will act as a PSA for their cause, they’re quite free to do so. If we go by what Christian games have so far turned out to be, it won’t be pretty.

5

Well, the definition of “entertain” breaks down into two definitions. One being to provide amusement or enjoyment. For most people, that might mean “fun”, but I think it’s easy to see where many people can enjoy a wide range of experiences, even downbeat experiences, that would not be well categorized as “fun”. The second definition is to give attention or consideration to an idea, suggestion, or feeling. This seems much broader, but for me, most of what fits the second definition can easily fit the first. If an idea, etc., is worthy of grabbing my attention, it also provides me with enjoyment, even if the idea, etc., is not something people would label as “fun”.

In fiction, I am often entertained by stories that involve me in perspectives that I could not ordinarily encounter all by my lonesome. Some stories involve identifying with a hero that does awesome stuff and who is rewarded for being awesome. That’s fun. Most stories that I love best, however, explore any of a great variety of situations, many of which are dark and depressing - these stories, while not being fun, nevertheless capture my attention and imagination.

Oh, so many. Unfortunately I have memory deficits, and have a great deal of trouble drawing forth specifics. Probably nearly any Hugo or Nebula award winning story would qualify (and probably many, many others, but I can vouch for good science fiction). I’ve been re-reading the collected works of Theodore Sturgeon, and many of his stories certainly qualify, in that the stories are often very entertaining tales of wonder and mystery, as the reader unravels what is happening in the story, and also meaningful tales that explore an aspect of humanity that is often ignored by larger society. Many of Sturgeon’s “messages” have addressed racism, sexism, homosexuality and even incest. Yet each of these stories are entertaining mysteries or adventures in their own right as well.

It would be easier (in the sense of reducing numbers) to talk about stories (that we’ve actually heard of, at least), where the author valued the message over entertainment and therefore failed to be very entertaining to many people (Ayn Rand’s tales come to mind, as do most “Christian” stories and movies). It would be even easier to talk about those very few stories that value the message overall, but somehow manage to be entertaining, like Animal Farm and, uhm, I’m sure there’s one other.

In the video game realm, I am particularly fond of the Mass Effect series. It’s clearly a story-driven, yet gameplay-aware series which a lot of people find to be fun. Yet there are some clear messages embedded throughout the games, as well. Now those messages might not be anything especially new to most thoughtful 'Dopers, but they also have not yet been explored much in the video game medium. Questions regarding racism (or rather, speciesism), sexuality, and liberty are addressed in the games. Also present are issues regarding allying with morally ambiguous agencies, and, most importantly, taking a step back from one’s righteous quest to reconsider whether an enemy “race” or group could be better viewed as an ally (i.e. the Geth, the Batarians, or any of the Council Races).

And Mass Effect barely scratches the surface regarding all of these questions. And there are certainly more questions to be addressed. I can imagine a great variety of video games that draw from a huge variety of human experiences and imagination that would also be immensely entertaining and popular, and which also happen to bring an enlightened awareness to the consumer about any number of important perspectives.

6

Far from me to continue fellating Spec Ops’s gun barrel, so let’s talk about something else. Missile Command.

This is simply wrong. Nobody who wants to see games for their particular cause wants to see the entire medium shift that way. They don’t want an end to the AAA industry and all that entails. They just want to see the scope of games widen, so that when people think of games, they think of more than toys for children. They think of more than the AAA industry. It’s like if the only books out there were Dan Brown-esque romps and high fantasy adventures, and people wanted something more from literature. The idea is that you don’t just look at it and see this one facet, you see everything it has to offer.

The issue there was not that it was a PSA. It was that the people behind them were just piss-poor at making games and put the incredibly preachy message above any quality constraints. The fact that Atlas Shrugged is a stupid waste of time does not devalue Animal Farm.

7

I think my skepticism comes from the fact that I haven’t played a game yet that felt like a rewarding experience without having at least somewhat entertaining/fun game play. Games I played where I ended it and thought “That was a solid story” such as Bioshock Infinite, the Metro games or even good ole Spec Ops also provided me with game play that I enjoyed. Even a game whose story fails, such as Watch Dogs, can still be redeemed by a fun time raising bollards to smash cars. Those games don’t need to be perfect “games” either. Bioshock Infinite was far from a great shooter but it was a competent enough shooter to not get in its own way.

Conversely, there might have been a great story in Remember Me but I had no interest in finding it. Clunky combat mechanics, terrible boss fights, linear hand-holding (to the point of glowing paths), etc made the game unplayable for me. I even turned the difficulty down to Easy to blow through just to see the story and still couldn’t be bothered to finish. The lack of “fun” stepped all over whatever message it was trying to make. Likewise, I’ve never heard anyone who hated Spec Op’s mechanics ultimately praise the game. Their reaction is usually “Blah blah story wrapped in trite and shitty cover shooter mechanics”.

Player agency came up before as a component where games can excel as story devices over other media. I think that can be true but it’s harder than it looks. As previously discussed, I didn’t feel impacted as a player by my choices in Spec Ops because, as a player, I HAD no choices except to do what the game demanded to advance the plot or turn it off. Likewise, when the big moment came in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, it was more irritating as blatant emotional manipulation to me than heartrending. My “agency” didn’t matter – the game just said the equivalent of “Rocks fall, everyone dies” no matter how you approached the previous fight. On the other hand, when you had to make various personal dynamic decisions in Dragon Age Origins, it felt more meaningful because these were ‘people’ that you had gone through the optional effort of building up relationships with. If one expressed disappointment in you or left you, you knew that you could have done things differently.

In my own experience, if “fun” isn’t topping the list, it had better be a close number two or the game just isn’t going to feel worth playing. Of course, I also have a huge game backlog – if a game can’t hook me fairly quickly, I have too many other titles to move on to than to waste time waiting for a bad game to make itself worthwhile.

8

I don’t think anyone is holding up Remember Me as an example of a game that anyone should be emulating anyway.

Honestly though, it sounds like you’re not looking very deeply at this kind of thing. The first games that come to mind when someone starts talking about games that aren’t “just for fun” is less <Insert Random FPS AAA Title Here> and more stuff like Papers, Please and Cart Life.

There are lots of games that people play even when they’re NOT FUN - any game in which people are “grinding” fits very nicely into this category. Fun is already not the be-all-end-all here. Yes, a game needs to not be actively aggravating to play …actually, they don’t, necessarily, see QWOP so lets amend that to “most games need to avoid being actively aggravating to play”, but that’s pretty much it. How many times have you played through a game whose story you REALLY WANTED to get to the end of, even though the mechanics were …ehh? I know I’ve done it. And even if you haven’t, and never would, there are people out there who will. It’s like saying “I only go see big dumb summer blockbusters, so obvious special effects and witty one liners should be the most important thing in ALL MOVIES.” Which I think we can all agree is ridiculous.

Games do not ‘need’ to be fun. It certainly doesn’t need to be the #1 priority. I would argue that it only needs to be a priority insofar as it serves the game’s other objectives. And the whole GamerGate “backlash” is basically a bunch of chestthumping manchildren lashing out in a futile effort to ‘protect’ something that’s not even being threatened. Honestly it’s a disgrace, and it makes me really sad that it took them throwing around death threats to get people here to pause and talk seriously about games.

9

So talk about it seriously without going off about Gamergate and “chestthumping manchildren”. That was sort of the whole idea of the thread.

I haven’t played Papers, Please yet. I own it though so maybe I’ll play an hour or so tonight for purposes of this thread. From reading others impressions, it seems split between people who took a perverse pleasure in the bureaucracy of it (i.e. “fun”) and those who said “This is a stupid way to spend my time – terrible game”.

As I said, I rarely take the time to play through a game that isn’t hitting its points for me to some extent. I think comparisons to movies are flawed from the start since games require a significantly greater investment from the participant and, frankly, movies so far have proven superior for giving a worthwhile “non-fun” experience.

10

I remembered that we once had a thread on Papers, Please and while only a few people gave overall impressions on the game, it didn’t seem unusual for people to enjoy themselves while playing it.

That’s not a solid 100% in the “fun” column but having fun while playing the game seems reasonable enough.

11

It kept my attention for a few hours. The story makes the inherently unfun gameplay incredibly engaging, and the same story actually would not have worked with more engaging gameplay - the gameplay would have taken away from the experience. Sooner or later, though, I got bored. I realized that I had seen most of what the story had to offer, and the gameplay really was grating. It’s like taking a dire, depressing film with no happy end in sight and stretching it too long. It overstays its welcome somewhat. This isn’t an issue with storywriting in games in general, but rather of this game specifically and the way it’s written.

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Honestly, no it doesn’t. Many of these explicitly talk about how it’s NOT fun.

Fun is not the same as engaging, challenging, tense, or exciting. Nor is someone saying “I liked it” the same as their saying “It was fun.” I think that is the fundamental flaw in your argument.

Edit: As for the comments about length, I bet a lot of people would have bitched that the game was ‘too short’ if it had trimmed itself down more. This is a whole 'nother ball of wax in video game criticism.

Edit again: While comparison to movies in terms of CONTENT are bad, it’s absurd to assert that games are somehow unique in the entire world of art in that they can somehow only have ‘popular’ art. It’s like saying “No, you can have experimental music, arthouse movies, ‘real literature’ but GODDAMNIT GAMES HAVE TO BE FUNNN@@@@@@@!!!”

13

2/5 explictly say that it’s fun. 2/5 say they “liked” it. Which you can insist doesn’t mean that it’s fun but it sounds pretty close to me. But let’s just pretend that only saying the word “fun” counts – two-out-of-five still puts it in the “reasonable to find it fun” camp. Only oft wears hats comes close to saying that it’s explicitly not fun (and one tongue-in-cheek comment I left out saying it’s hard and so he ‘hates’ it).

Edit: that was out of the Papers, Please threads. Budget Player Cadet also said the game play was explicitly unfun.

I’m not trying to say that. I am pointing out examples where I think it’s failed and why I think it’s failed. If you have counter examples or points to make without flying into a fit and name calling or using excessive punctuation, I’d be interested in hearing it.

14

So like I said: “I liked it” doesn’t mean it “it was fun.” 60% of people derived some sort of ‘non-fun’ enjoyment from it. And this is one single solitary game.

So why does “fun” need to be our #1, A1 priority all the time? It’s not in other media (Nor is even “entertainment” necessarily a priority). Why is it any different for games?

What about Proteus? What about Cart Life? What about Anna Anthropy’s various stuff? What about Dear Esther? Today I Die? Hell, what about Cow Clicker?

Or are we going to play the “those are ‘interactive experiences’, not games” card here? Do only games you can get on Steam count?

You’ve given a subjective opinion with no examples on this topic:

I don’t really see that I can offer a ‘counterexample’ to your “I think movies provide more worthwhile ‘non-fun’ experiences”.

15

“Fun” is a slippery word. Generally when we say something is “fun” we mean that it’s light and amusing. It holds our attention in an engrossing way, but it does not stir us deeply or leave a long-lasting impression upon us. We wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone describe Disneyland as “fun”. But we would be surprised to hear someone describe Twelve Years a Slave or 1984 as “fun”. Engaging with these works can certainly be interesting, but not in the light, amusing way that we usually associate with “fun”.

Now, you can certainly extend the definition of “fun” so it encompasses “interesting”. By that standard, yes, Twelve Years a Slave is a fun movie. But doing so elides an important distinction between different sorts of artistic works. And it makes hash of the point that is trying to be made in the quote in the OP. Finding “alternatives to ‘fun’” does not mean “Let’s make boring therapy/educational/political games!” It means “Let’s make interesting experiences that are neither light nor amusing!”

16

That’s putting words in their mouths. If someone said they liked it without explicitly saying “despite it not being fun” then you’re leaping to a conclusion to say that it wasn’t fun for them. If my response to a roller coaster is “I liked that”, you can’t just run with that as “He said he derived non-fun enjoyment from it”.

20% of people explicitly said it was fun, 20% explicitly said it wasn’t fun and 20% said they liked it.

As I pointed out in the OP, the definition of “fun” there seems broader than others are taking it for. Alien: Isolation isn’t light or amusing. It is tense. By some definitions in this thread, it wouldn’t qualify as “fun”. But I don’t think the article writer was saying to embrace Alien: Isolation over Saints Row the Third when he said to stop making “fun” a top priority. Jump-scare horror games and survival sims seem closer related to “fun” games than they are to Dear Ester or To The Moon.

17

Perhaps better put, if we are to take such a strict literal definition of fun then we should agree that the quote in the OP has no point at all since a ton of successful games exist that do not meet the strict definition. There is no point to advocate for “fun” not being a top priority since it already isn’t a top priority even in some recent AAA major releases. The condition he wanted is already met.

Edit: I don’t think this is the case at all since even he calls “fun” a “fuzzy definition”.

18

Meticulously trying to parse exactly what is meant by “fun” leads nowhere.

The primary thing that stands in the way of games being deeper and more meaningful is the widespread reliance on “the gamist stance” as a way of judging the worth of moves within their play spaces. The gamist stance comes from RPG design theory and it refers to a valuation strategy where the worth of any move is determined by how it advances the player toward a specific arbitrary goal. So in baseball anything that helps you score runs is a good move.

The gamist stance is problematic in RPGs because there are lots of interesting things to do in these games that don’t have anything to do with winning. A player with a gamist agenda may have uncomfortable clashes with other players that are more interested in narrativist or simulationist play. Using these other valuation strategies, a “good” move in an RPG might involve sacrificing yourself for your friends, or picking a fight you know you’ll lose because it’s in character.

Why this matters is that gamist play tends to be very self-contained. The only thing that matters from the gamist stance is whether or not an action advances you toward an arbitrary victory condition. Wider-ranging interpretive consideration are set aside. So, for example, in GTA running down a prostitute for money is a good gamist move because getting more money helps you progress in the game. The fact that it’s a bad simulationist move for some players (“my character wouldn’t do that!”) is ignored by the default assumption of the gamist stance.

So one thing that I think needs to happen in order for games to become more deep and interesting is a move away from goals and winning. Instead of saying to players “here’s an arbitrary thing to accomplish, work to accomplish this arbitrary thing” we should say “here’s a space with a variety of things you can do. We’re not going to giving you any specific goals. Do what you want.” It’s about building less-directed play spaces that instead encourage players to think more about what they want and why they’re doing what they’re doing.

19

Like Sim City, the Sims, Minecraft, DayZ and Kerbal Space Program?

20

Yeah, I was going to say that there’s a number of successful “free play” style games out there. Speaking of RPGs, it seems like most of them these days are going to the open world, free play style. “Here, you can bake bread. It’s pretty useless and won’t kill a goblin or progress the plot at all but apparently you guys want the option to bake bread so…” Look at all the Skyrim players who’ve put 400+ hours into the game and say they’ve never finished the main plot.

On the other hand, if you wanted a game with a message, it would seem helpful to have it be directed. No one is going to experience the redemption of the human soul if they’re in their hut baking bread all day.