“It’s just not fun.”

[CW: discussion/mention of sexual assault, r*pe, suicide, violent images, drug abuse, pedophilia]

The refrain most used when people want to criticize the quality of a videogame is to state, “It’s just not fun.” Due to the interactivity of games we require the game to constantly reward us for our participation. This line of thinking, that I must be rewarded for every decision made, is what led to achievements, microtransactions, battle passes, and the live service sand trap we have been stuck in for the last decade. A game must be fun is the first commandment by which videogame magazines, their successors the videogame websites and forums, and their successors, the videogame streamers, evangelize daily. Without fun a game is automatically a failure. Is this belief not restricting?1 Isn’t this prescription limiting what we are able to communicate through videogames? Similar to the flow state, one which many players would describe as the harbinger to fun, it keeps everything stagnant.

I think most residing within the Superculture Discord would agree with this. But how can we convince the non-#Games-Crit heads? How would you go about convincing Jeff Gerstmann that whether or not a game is fun is not the definitive evaluation? Jeff has been doing this most of his life, since he was 16. He is well set in his ways and is probably the biggest representative that you could argue with. The answer is that you cannot. Someone set in their ways and in their beliefs is not going to change due to one argument. The fundamental question behind this is what changes a person? That question is not just about the way people think about videogames, it is wide-reaching: the way people think about themselves, about other people, about society, about government, about morals, ethics, and so on.

What changes a person? That is a question I have asked myself a lot because I changed. Comparing my current self to my high school self, there is a significant difference in what I believe, what I think, and my ideas about how to best live life. The answer is it takes a lot of time and a continual exposure to people talking about things in a way that you don't agree with. This is not useful for certain fundamental topics that are settled and no longer deserving of hearing an opposing argument, but being exposed to a different opinion on media. This causes a lot of friction. I remember listening to a podcast and to someone spout an opinion that I disagreed with, it caused friction. It caused me to not want to listen to that person any longer and write them off. It is good to be exposed to that, and consistently, because it puts the idea in your brain for you to start seriously considering the validity of their argument.

This process makes it nigh impossible to bring about a change in the broader culture. With this question about how you can convince someone that games don't have to be fun to be good, the entire existence of videogame coverage from magazines to forums to websites to YouTube to Twitch is dominated by that belief. To go about trying to change that would take time and require making converts out of these influential platforms and people. To bring them either onto your side or to raise up people who already believe that. It would have to be coordinated by so many different people that it is not going to happen organically. Especially because everyone has their own little groups and cross-pollination between those bubbles is very rare.

Of course the age-old comparison that we just cannot seem to separate ourselves from are movies. Not every movie can be described as a fun, entertaining watch but that doesn't mean that that movie was not good. We are much more accepting of movies that have difficult subjects and represent them in serious ways that you would not describe as fun. Movies are not games. Games require your input. It's a conversation between you and the game, the developer, sort of the push and pull of what you can do, what you can't do, discovering that seeing through what the developer is trying to communicate. You push a button, something happens on screen, and if that is not rewarding you lose the entirety of the audience. Nobody wants to pick up a controller and play Schindler's List. People don't want to play games that are not constantly rewarding them.

This is another related problem, which is that games have reinforced this expectation that they will be rewarding the player constantly. The player requires a consistent Dopamine release in order to consider the game worthwhile. If I'm going to be making decisions, like moral decisions, there has to be a consequence for that one way or the other or else it is not worth it. Why even have this if there's not going to be a tangible outcome? If we're going to complete a quest, there needs to be experience or money rewarded for it. You can't just do it for its own sake, you cannot have things existing for flavor or as a flourish or as something that is valuable simply because it looks cool. This is a reinforced behavior that has existed for a very long time, that has manifested most recently in battle passes, in the live service treadmill of logging in daily, completing daily challenges, weekly challenges, in order to accrue different types of monetary rewards to be used to unlock things that will make you want to continue to invest your time and money into this game. You need to be consistently playing in order to be consistently rewarded. RPG mechanics have invaded everything. It has been that way for quite some time now to where the numbers-go-up genre is the foundation for every game.

That behavior has kept us from being able to do things within games that other mediums are. Another idea I've had is: where is the I Spit on Your Grave of games? Where is the really just nasty, controversial, mean-spirited works within games? It doesn't exist. Due to this informal law that we have created you are not going to get those works, people would reject it outright. And I’m not even saying movies that portray troubling aspects of life and culture are all good, but at least they are being created! A complete lack of engagement hampers the medium from becoming what it wants to be, from being taken as serious art.

Games constantly, desperately, for their entire existence, have wanted to be taken as seriously as movies are. They are not going to if there are no games that engage with or portray mature and taboo subjects because it would not be fun. I can think of movies such as Happiness, Elle, Antichrist, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Nightingale, Green Room, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and I’m sure you can name many more. You're never going to get the game equivalent of them, because that would not be a fun game to play. That is what keeps the medium from being anything other than a treadmill of content to entice players to come back, and more importantly, to consistently spend money.

Games seem to inherently preclude certain topics, emotions, subjects from being a part of the medium. Just looking over the vast field of film that exists and comparing it to the works of videogames, there is a significant lack. Provocative images and emotions are lacking. This is not a call for, “we should be killing more babies.” What I'm saying is that we want this medium to be taken seriously by people outside of its own bubble. A refusal to engage with troubling images and scenes is part of why it's not. You don't really see rape in games. You don't really see child death in games. You don't really see drug abuse, infidelity, incest, pedophilia, or images that disgust with their violence and filth.

You have certain games that do approach this. You have Max Payne, as Ed Smith recently wrote,

And that game is better for it. The scene itself is not fun. Playing Max Payne, the bullet time, diving, and shooting is fun. Despite containing things that you would not describe as fun. Soma, as described by Grace Benfell, deals with suicide in a much more mature way than a majority of games do. Rape is depicted or referenced in only 30 notable games based on a Wikipedia list. Again, I would like to stress, this call for acts such as this in games is not that they are easy or desirable or enjoyable, it is exactly because they are the opposite of that which makes it so important that they are included within the medium. I want to see the medium progress and this is an area that is significantly lacking. We are choosing not to engage with provocative subject matter such as these because we know that their inclusion will dampen the fun factor which has for so long dictated the value, the quality, the validity of a videogame.

Sex is actually something that games have tried to get at, though they always look like two 3D models stiffly banging together like two barbies in your hand. So much so that there is a game, how do you Do It?, that is exactly that. It has about as much depth as your Mass Effects and your Witchers and other games that do depict sex. There's no real romance or sensuality in games. Romance in games is having to just press the dialogue option that's obviously the flirt with this person option until they go, “I love you,” and then you get a sex scene as your reward. Sometimes it's worse because you're purchasing their relationship. A majority of romance and sensuality in games is juvenile.

Games now more than ever are much more a mode of shifting money from you to a company than they are a work of art. I remember reading Panofsky’s essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” last summer and the quote I most often think of is,

if commercial art be defined as all art not primarily produced in order to gratify the creative urge of its maker but primarily intended to meet the requirements of a patron or a buying public, it must be said that noncommercial art is the exception rather than the rule, and a fairly recent and not always felicitous exception at that.

You know how every generation thinks they're the best generation and the current generation coming up is bad? There is this constant cycle of, “things are worse now than they ever have been.” Every generation believes that. I don't think that necessarily means it's not true, but it does make me question that thought. Right now I feel like games as a work of art are happening at a miniscule rate in comparison to games as a way to enrich executives. And so I sit and question this. If you only look at the large, expensive games, then I would say yes. Of course, we know those aren't the only ones that exist. There are plenty of people working that do not have a million dollar ad spend and are not going to have the same cultural share as a Fortnite. But they do exist. There is an entire storefront in itch.io that platforms these works that are very much non-commercial works.

And that is why it is important to stop and to think about those sorts of feelings, those sorts of tendencies, and to really examine them and to question them. I think that is a good thing. Just like I think it is a good thing that we should stop and examine and question that games maybe don't have to be fun entertainment in order to be a quality work, despite the differences in how games work compared to every other medium. We should think and question some of the informal laws we have created and perpetuated more.