The Game Is Fun

“The game, is fun. The game, is a battle. If the game is not fun, why bother?” These are the words Reggie said around E3 2017, and in an era where bad time wasting movie games were starting to kick off Reggie singlehandedly handwaved the entire movement with that quote and the moviegames crowd has never came up with a proper response to it since. Now on the verge of bad triple A trash bombing left and right from forgetting the core fundamentals of ‘fun’, we have to ask ourselves why he was so right and what it tells us about games.

The reason I bring this up is because many people think ‘fun’ is a buzzword, not important. It limits the artistic capabilities of games. Is every movie, book, art piece, poetry meant to be fun? Why is there the need for videogames to be fun?

Consider, for a moment, a film. A great film like The Wizard of Oz has been shown time and time again, first on the silver screen and now a common sight on people’s televisions. Its closing on on a century of notability and relevance.

And every time you watch it, Dorothy goes to the land of Oz. She accidentally kills a witch and gets her little red shoes. She meets her companions, meets the witch, pours water on her of all things, uncovers the secret of the wizard, goes home… I could fall asleep watching the film and it’d still meet this end. I could not even watch it at all, and without my involvement Dorothy would still be doing what she’s done since 1939.

The video game equivalent of The Wizard of Oz as far as lasting relevancy goes would have to be Super Mario Bros on the NES. To this day it remains relevant and playable which is a surprising rarity among NES titles which were often heavily limited by the hardware.

Pray tell, in its close to 40 years of relevance, what has the intrepid main character Mario done in Super Mario Bros? Simple, you might say, he went through a bunch of worlds to meet a bunch of mushroom people before eventually coming across Princess Peach herself and saving her from the evil wizard Bowser.

But none of this is necessarily the case. How often does that really happen?

More often than not Mario will get through two stages before throwing his hat in the ring and saying “I’ll get to it another day.” Perhaps he just takes the warp zones and skips helping any of the toads altogether. Maybe he ate dirt on the first goomba, and his brother Luigi carried the entire day from then on. His entire journey could be one of various pitfalls, difficulties, or it could be his story of racing against the clock, trying to save the princess as fast as he possibly can with his carefully optimized route.

Mario is not a static character who is always one way. The majority of his personality, ability, dedication, bravery, and all other character traits are primarily decided by the player behind the controller. Mario is nobody without a player. He simply stands there and gets killed by the first goomba. Inversely, Mario has made entire stories outside of any vision the developers could’ve possibly imagined.

This is core to the storytelling in a game. The developer, as much as they might wish to be, is not the main driving force behind the telling of the story like they wish. Instead, it is the player and is always the player. The developer can direct scenes, attempt to create scenarios that inspire emotions, but the player is the one actively writing the story.

Even the most impeccably written games are nothing without a player’s input. Deus Ex is null and void without my actions, and my actions directly determine what kind of man J.C. Denton really is.

So an important part of making a game is convincing the player to take action. People will only take action if the action is enjoyable. The game is fun. The game, is a battle. If the game is not fun, why bother?

This may SEEM obvious to some people, but there are often those who slip right into the belief that self-flagellation is the direction video games need to go in. That fun is poison. That you shouldn’t even USE the word ‘fun’. TLoU2 comes to mind, a game that ironically tried its hardest to have fun gameplay and is too easy to make fun of so we’ll just ignore it, but there are many games that turn around and try to wrestle control over the narrative from the player.

Walking simulators are very notable to me because they are very boring to play and are based around wrestling as much control away from the player as possible. The term ‘walking simulator’ was originally coined to mock this genre specifically because of this trait. In walking simulators, you can only press movement keys to move the camera around, and occasionally utilize objects to preform mediocre interactions.

Gone Home was one such terrible walking simulator. You walked around a house with a mysterious atmosphere to discover that your entire family is fine and your sister went off to have the most generic gay romance possible. The main character is very static as a result. There’s very little I can do to change who she is, other than look at certain parts of the house first, cheese the game by getting the last key early, or just not play the game.

Gone Home was praised as a work of art when it first came out, but it was anything but. In fact, it was a massive step back for the artistic merit of videogames. Its narrative and style were very much lost in the miasma of what should’ve been, rather than what could’ve been. It saw narratives as a linear function done by a writer and perhaps director, rather than as a dynamic variable where the player can do as much as he or she desires.

The game, as a result, was not fun. If the game isn’t fun, why bother?

Many art games fail to realize this, the element that there is a player there with his or her own thoughts, feelings, and that the player isn’t always going to agree with the developer. In fact, more often than not the two will be at incredible odds. The smart developer realizes this and implements more strategy into the game, developing rules, mechanics, and restrictions that give the player challenge, room to think, and the ability to express themselves and who they are.

Art games consider the videogame part to be like, so lame, and jerk themselves off over their amazing narratives which if put into any other medium would be considered pulp material at best.

There’s many game players that tend to self-flagellate. They do this because they are desperate to prove to the corpse of Roger Ebert that video games are, in fact, art. But what makes games art, if anything, is going against the traditions that film and novels have set as boundaries for them, to very much reinvent the idea of what a narrative can be.

Video games are as much of a new paradigm as the radio was to the written word, as much as the television was to the radio, and as much as the internet was to the television. In fact, I’d consider the internet and games to be something very similar in the new emotions they can provide.

Radio allowed a straightfoward message to be spread much easier. Television allowed that message to be subverted, to ’tell’ you what the radio might but ‘show’ you something different, such as a politicians speech playing on top of footage of horrific crimes he perpetuated.

Games, and the internet, create a new layer on top of this: the viewer, or player in this case, is free to subvert any message the writer may have intended. I’ve already mentioned this with Mario, but it’s true in any game. Glitches can be abused, self-made challenges can be proposed. What is meant to be a challenge can be overcome simply through amazing ability. What is meant to be a narrative can be skipped through if not ignored entirely.

This will always be a reality with games. I alone arbitrate what will happen, no matter what path the game was designed to put me down. But I may follow that path if I feel it aligns with my own goals. And everyone’s goals are at their core to seek enjoyment, in the many forms that enjoyment may come in.

The game is fun. If it’s not fun, why bother? If you don’t bother, the game is never played. If the game is never played, why bother making it? So make the game fun, let your player make his or her own decisions, own story, own reality with your title. The missing element people see in the art of games is not what you do, but what your player does as well, and the mix of these two is what creates your narrative.

This is why this quote is so important, and why it remained so notable to so many people. Fun is as fundamental to the language of videogames as cinematography is to cinema, or prose is to literature. That a player is made to be willing to take the action, that they can take many actions to create new and unexpected narratives, that they are free to define who they are within the game’s world, that is the art of games.

The game is fun. The game is a challenge. If it’s not fun, why bother?

Edit: There’s also another quote from Gabe Newell that games are enjoyable from the idea of reinforcement instead of realism, ‘realism’ being the direction that moviegames try their hardest to go in.

I regret giving Gabe the benefit of… anything, really, because all of Valve’s games for about a decade+ have been less of a fun experience than his example of going to the grocery store to buy food, but his quote is very much true.

The idea that people can actually feel that they’re in the world, and be reinforced this way through fun is what connects the player to your story.