http://www.esca...com/issue/65/17

I found myself rather shocked while reading the latest issue of The Escapist. In it, an article written by Warren Spector (Deus Ex fame) asks, Should Games Be Fun?

Now, this dropped my jaw. Spector is a bit of an industry guru, really, and should know the answer to this question is a wholehearted "Yes." If a game isn't fun, you don't play it. Or at least, I don't play games that aren't fun, I don't know anyone else who plays games they don't find to be fun, and I have never heard of anyone else playing a game they did not find fun.

Can you imagine that?

"I hate this game."
*Cue eight-hour playing session*
"Christ, I fucking hate this game!"

Spector mourns the fact that the word 'fun' itself locks us into a childish mentality, that it has other connotations than 'enjoyment'. I think perhaps the link is occurring solely in his head. Because whenever I can, I have fun. Don't you? Don't you do things you enjoy? Or do you play on games that bore you? I know I have fun whenever I can, which is probably more often than when I was a child, because now I am an adult, I can have fun whenever the fuck I want. If I want to get up at three in the morning and set fire to stuff, I can. If I want to play on Advance Wars for twenty hours straight, I can. What's wrong with having fun?

Spector seems to think that games are not, by and large, mature. And he's right. Most games are quite immature, if anything. Most of them are designed to appeal to teenage boys, despite the fact that a growing percentage of the audience are old fucks, like me. With the grave beckoning at age twenty-four, I can't be fucking about with games that are not fun.

Spector also seems to think the games being fun and mature are mutually exclusive. Not mature in the sense of tits and guns, but mature in the sense of themes, of thought-provoking subject matter, of challenging our preconceived notions about anything apart from what a .357 Magnum round does to a human skull. But...don't all those fall under the category of fun? Or are they quite separate, or are they in fact, contradictory?

I know the 'educational' games I played in school were not fun. They were shit. They might have still qualified as games, but they were not, in any way, fun, and so I only played them when I was made to. They failed to instruct or educate me...because they weren't fun. There was absolutely no enjoyment to be had , in any way, shape or form, besides finding out how fast I could press the 'off' button, and that wasn't even part of the games.

Does a game have to be fun to be commercially successful? In my experience, no. It helps, certainly, but numerous crap games have sold a ton thanks to sizable ad campaigns, good reviews, tie-in licenses and hype in general. But there are plenty of fun games that have failed commercially, too. So fun is no guarantee of financial success.

Comparing games to other mediums (films, books, music) is not really valid as far as I am concerned, as games are at their basic level, interactive. Most other mediums are not, and the way we enjoy them (passively, versus actively) is too different to the way we enjoy games. Works in other mediums that are interactive are very unusual, the exception rather than the rule.

So why constantly compare games to other mediums in areas where games cannot possibly compete? Why criticise an industry which is maximum-profit-oriented for not making games for a (admittedly large) minority of its audience? Doing so automatically limits the profits to be made (if we stick to the notion that no one else apart from us old bastards will buy a 'highbrow' game). Even if we generously admit that, okay, even some younger, less mature gamers will buy it, the risk is still there, and the industry is renowned for taking less and less risks. Perhaps we should be applying pressure to that stupidity, and encouraging those conservative fuckers to make some fun games, to take some risks, rather than trying to reduce the amount of fun games being made?

As gamers, we should know that 'challenging', 'thought-provoking', 'frightening', 'compelling' and all those other superlatives are synonomous with 'fun', not mutually exclusive. Perhaps we do, and it's the industry that doesn't?

Unfortunately the industry seems to think football is fun, though from memory running my arse around a pitch for ninety minutes was far from it.

Watching it is also somewhat akin to watching paint dry for the 89.5 minutes where no goals are being scored, so how are computer games of it supposed to shout fun to gamers?

Aren't the Asgard supposedly technologically superior?

I had a discussion with a mate about this, and we share a similar opinion of games, and fun, but disagree over the exact meaning of the word 'fun'. So it's more an issue of semantics than disagreeing about what games should and should not be.

Sorry, Warren.