Do Video Games Have to be Fun? - "We don't use the word 'fun'"

[PlasticOwls]

I admit I am being closed minded when I say this: unlike movies, books, or pieces of art, I think video games are meant to be 'fun', or, at the very least, emotionally satisfying.

Movies and books can afford to have open ended endings and feelings of shock and unhappiness because it's a passive experience.

At the risk of sounding entitled, a gamer is trusting a video game with his time, actively interacting with an experience, even losing himself to a game's protagonist to fully immerse himself to the world the developers created.

As games are slowly evolving into more cinematic experiences, the standards and expectations of video games are changing too. Im open to discussion about the question.

 

[Megaroad 2012]

yes

 

[Forgetful Kiwi]

Fun as in giving you a happy feelgood feeling, probably not.
Fun as in being entertaining I believe they should be tho.
If you are not entertained while playing the game then there is no point.

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

They have to be rewarding. They have to leave you feeling like £50 was worth it. Games have the power to tell stories in ways that non interactive media cannot and therefore they have an obligation to tell an engaging story at the very least. Some can have no story and simply fun, some can be all story, but if you aren't entertained then why are you bothering.

 

[Papa Adolfo's Take'n'Bake]

They can be fun or otherwise, but if they take themselves too seriously I sure as hell ain't playing those that are not fun. If you want to get into the nitty gritty of it, Video Games will always be a whimsical platform simply for the fact that they are intrinsically a form of interactive escapism. Taking video games much more seriously than remembering that is as cringy as LARP'ing and purveys similar lolcow status.

 

[sasazuka]

Video games don't have to be fun but the ones I buy do (unless they're simulators in which case there's usually a lot of tedium in between the exciting bits, the exciting bits being mostly things like takeoff and landing).

 

[Sperghetti]

I'd agree with that. It's a bit like asking "Do movies and television have to be entertaining?" What different people find entertaining will vary, but ultimately, nobody's going to waste time sitting around watching something that doesn't capture their interest. Same with games: Nobody's wants to waste time playing something that they don't find fun or engaging on some level.

I'm a firm believer that certain kinds of media are better (or worse) for telling certain kinds of stories. If the gameplay isn't going to be entertaining for your audience, then it probably shouldn't be a game.

 

[d12]

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

Take "video" out of the question; do games have to be fun? I enjoy the hell out of chess, despite being so-so at it. It makes my head hurt at times, it causes despair when I miss the obvious while getting bogged down by minutiae and I often wonder why I bother. All that said, I'd call it great fun. Whether other people would find that experience enjoyable is another thing entirely.

When it comes to video games I've got to say that the story is almost always a peripheral element at best. I've given up on lots of games that have unskippable cutscenes because I find it an imposition to be forced to take part in a narrative when I'm just trying to play. I guess the simple idea that "I'm the protagonist because it's me" is good enough for me.

Anyways, blah blah blah yes. They have to be fun.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I admit I am being closed minded

At the risk of sounding entitled

You don't have to preface your posts with these statements and for fuck sakes, don't say "entitled" like the rest of the SJWs do.

Movies and books can afford to have open ended endings and feelings of shock and unhappiness because it's a passive experience.

Video Games can do the same thing. Ask any Final Fantasy fan, they will tell you how much they cried into their pillows over Aerith's death. Ask any Kingdom Hearts fan that baw'd their eyes out and then screamed at their tvs once they found out Sora got Thanos'd at the end of the third game.

A gamer is trusting a video game with his time, actively interacting with an experience, even losing himself to a game's protagonist to fully immerse himself to the world the developers created.

It's called a "hobby" for a reason. You take the bad with the good, but as long as you enjoy doing it regardless, that's what matters. If a game is good, then fine, but if it's bad, you can learn from what made it bad and know what to look out for in the future. Take it from someone that grew up in an ocean filled with 8bit/16bit platformers, some of them being utter dog shit.

As games are slowly evolving into more cinematic experiences, the standards and expectations of video games are changing too.

"Cinematic Experiences" have only gotten more of a thing with video games because the "gamers" that play those are the same kind of gamers that need their hand held for something like CupHead. You can have cutscenes in your video game that can tell a story, in fact it's been done in better ways in the past during the PSOne era. But when you decide to make your game nothing but QTEs during cutscenes, then you're better off making an actual movie.

Game developers now-a-days cater to the lowest common denominator and shit on the people that actually give a shit about video games, which is why "walking simulators" are a thing.

 

[BrokenWokenBespoken]

AAA gaming must be fun at all cost. Even at the expense of creativity and innovation

indie Games are free to be engaging and depressing as hell. If you want an example try the TiTP franchise.

 

[Titos]

No but they need to be entertaining at the very least. Though I do prefer they be fun on top of being entertaining.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Yes, but fun is a big umbrella of many terms. When they say games doesn't have to be fun they are always implicitly referring to a couple of games that should be held to a different standard, they're never talking about Matt Hazard: Eat Lead. I would actually be interested in their opinion if they took games like that under their wing as well.

 

[Dick Justice]

People forget, but many years ago RPS used to be good, and when it was good it was really good. And one of the things it wrote when it was good was this retrospective on Pathologic that EVERY VIDEOGAME ENTHUSIAST SHOULD READ. One of the many brilliant things it articulates on is the untapped potential for videogames to explore negative emotions.

I think "fun" is asking the wrong question because "fun" is an imprecise term that means many things to many people. Is A Clockwork Orange "fun"? Is The Shining "fun"? Is The Departed "fun"? None of them closely align the typical vaudevillian pleasure we associate with "fun", but most will call at least one of them "fun" and pretty much everyone will admit they're entertaining. This same ambiguity is just as present and far more pressing in videogames. Should every game be fun? No, but every game should be entertaining, rewarding, edifying, or some combination of the three to my mind. But many would claim that my previous sentence is synonymous with "fun".

A good game leaves you feeling in some way richer for having experienced it, and if that's how you define "fun" then yes, sure all games have to be fun. But I think this laser-focus on the vague word "fun" is causing us to miss or outright reject lots of really cool and entertaining possibilities like Pathologic which we could be experiencing if we simply framed the question differently.

 

[NIGGER ASS PEE POOPY RAPE]

evolving into more cinematic experiences

you mean devolving

 

[Slimy Time]

At least rewarding. If I'm dropping 50-60 on a game, I better find entertainment and rewards from it. Whether it's finally beating that motherfucker Owl (Father) after fifty thousand tries, doing Uber deliveries in the wasteland in a timely manner, trying to beat my high score, or anything else, there must be this cycle of play game = get emotional/dopamine reward. This is the difference between a video game and a movie. With a movie, I expect to be entertained, whether it's a fun film or serious one, it needs to engage and entertain me. With a game, there is this cycle of doing whatever the game wants you to which leads to a satisfied feeling. If the game is meant to be a story/narrative driven game, then the story has to engage and entertain in addition to the gameplay dopamine cycle.

This is why (from the story and gameplay seen) TLOU2 is a fucking mess. It is a story driven game that is a depressing mess and actively disengages you in 2 hours by killing off the prior protagonist by some new chick that you are meant to feel sorry for, and the gameplay actively works to disengage that dopamine kick. Dogs die whimpering and squealing, human NPCs call out the names of their comrades and try to make you feel bad for killing an ordinary enemy. Don't have fun killing enemies, killing is bad and Neil Druckmann has programmed all these thing in to remind you that killing people is bad and you should feel bad. It is a fucking failure of a game.

 

[Chilson]

On a Mechanics level, yes. This war of mine is often brought up as an example of how this is not the case, which just shows that these people have not played it. Underneath the grim vainer and tragedy is a pretty fun game on a mechanics level. The story is just there to elevate the mechanics experience, not to replace it.

 

[Sir Wesley Tailpipe]

The thing about asking this question is that there is no universal definition of fun.

Some people find the Souls games fun, some don’t.

Some people find Mario games fun, some don’t.

Another complication is the people who just have to make themselves play whatever is popular at the moment to be part of the crowd. A lot of them aren’t having fun because they will play what they are told to by their peers.

If you’re playing a game and it isn’t fun, stop. Just put it down and do something you enjoy instead.

 

[Ascendancy0]

Games should be more than just a movie with a walking simulator. You can have a "deep" story that has gameplay that advances the story and keeps the player interested in said story.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

No they dont HAVE to be

But AAA games probably should. Depressing shit is better for indie games that can be made cheap and sold cheap.

Making a game specifically NOT fun when you're spending hundreds of millions on development and charging 60+ dollars a pop is madness.

Imagine if the first Avengers was depressing as shit and boring on top of it? What a disaster that would be.