Beyond Fun - Why Games Need to Be More than Fun - Extra Credits

The word fun is a noun meaning light-hearted pleasure or amusement or an adjective meaning entertaining or enjoyable. For 25 years now, we've been held back by the idea that games are only about fun. 25 years of constraining the medium to this tiny spectrum of experience, thinking about games only in terms of a single emotion. It's time we stopped doing that. Not because we want the fun games to go away, but because we want to see other kinds of games, too. No other medium out there limits itself to delivering on fun exclusively, and they're better for that. What if the only movies coming out were dumb summer blockbusters and the only books were Dan Brown novels? Wouldn't that suck? I mean, summer blockbusters can be awesome, but think of how many other great films we'd miss out on. Limiting all of cinema to a single genre would just get stale and boring after a while, which brings me back to games. Why do we fiercely cling to this self-damning constraint of only creating fun? It's because of fear, on both the industry and consumer level. We're afraid about

what might happen if we step out from behind the old shield of saying we're only about making fun. If we stop dismissing ourselves as a children's pastime and acknowledge that, like any medium, we can engage in a plethora of ways, what does that mean? Does it mean we have to be responsible? Does it mean we'll have to push ourselves rather than just cranking out the same kinds of games we already know how to make over and over? Probably. But like I said, it's time. It's time we expanded our horizons and embraced the myriad other ways that games can enthrall us. It's time we change the way we talk about games and start to ask not what makes a game fun, but what makes a game engaging. It's time we do this because it lets us make more types of games. It lets us make better games, and the fun games are only going to get more fun as a result. But most of all, it's time we do this for ourselves, because whether we acknowledge it or not, it's happening. When you play Silent Hill, you're not experiencing light-hearted pleasure. When you play through a tragic visual novel, you're not necessarily finding it enjoyable or amusing, but you're definitely engaged, and that, far more than fun, is what we as human beings want from our entertainment. As a player, you may not see it, but there's a continual industry conversation about finding the fun in every title, even

where it may not be appropriate, and it's handicapping games constantly. Imagine if the crew behind Schindler's List got together, looked at a rough cut of the movie, and said, "Uh, we need to find the fun in this thing." Imagine if Steinbeck finished Grapes of Wrath, and then the editor sat him down for a meeting and said, "Look, John, it's great. I'm just not sure it's fun enough." It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happens with games all the time. Just look at Silent Hill. Homecoming was an attempt to bring much more fun to the series, and look what happened. In fact, I'd say that the more recent Grasshopper Manufacture games have suffered now that they're trying to make their special brand of crazy more fun in a traditional sense. I'm sure Suda 51 fans will agree with me. His insanity was pretty engaging to begin with. This terminology problem not only prevents us from creating whole genres of games, but it also confuses discussion of existing game design. Everything we create right now has to somehow fit into the fun category, so we get all of these game reviewers and designers trying to rationalize why horror is fun, or attempting to explain why adding Ayn Rand's to BioShock somehow made it more fun, rather than just letting these things be something else. It's like when those 17th century

alchemists developed the phlogiston theory in an attempt to explain how fire worked, and then they made all sorts of erroneous assumptions based off of that false premise, because they just couldn't see past the box of hypotheses they'd already made. Game design keeps running into walls and filling itself with crazy twisting logic just because we can't let go of our dependency on fun. People often ask that age-old question, "When will a game make you cry?" while others of us remember the times games already did make us shed a tear. Well, whenever it happens, unless those are tears of joy, when a game makes you cry, it won't be because you're having fun. You'll be engaged, sure. You'll be engaged as hell, but that won't be because you're having fun. And you know, even the things we think of as fun are better because they aren't entirely about fun. Star Wars, The Matrix, Rings, they're all better for being able to tap into things that aren't purely fun. Final Fantasy 10, System Shock, Planescape, even games like The Sims and Civilization are better for moments that aren't simply about light-hearted pleasure. All fun all the time is a lot like all candy all the time. No matter how good it tastes at first, by the 20th Snickers bar, you're just sick of it. A little savory

makes the sweet even better. So, let's stop focusing exclusively on fun and start examining what makes something engaging because that includes fun. Fun's one of the most engaging things out there, but it's not all there is. And let's talk about the ways that games are actually engaging us with deep personal drama, with terrifying sights, with romantic sentiment, or with an adrenaline high like diving out of a speeding plane. But, let's not confuse our terminology or limit the medium any longer just because we're afraid of the challenge. There will always be games about having fun, but if we're going to truly get the most out of this medium, or even if we want to just get the most fun out of it, we got to get over this fear. It's time to move beyond the fun and take this thing to the next level. Thanks for watching. We'll see you guys next week.