Format: XBLA
Developer: NinjaBee/Mike Borland

What is fun? That’s a hard one to answer, isn’t it? Come to think of it, the where and when of fun can be pretty tricky to pin down too. Where is fun hiding? When will it choose to work its magic? Other than, 'not at a Lindisfarne concert', it’s surprisingly hard to predict.

Sometimes, fun lurks inside a single instant: popping unpredictably into existence in Burnout, say, as you take a corner at an unlikely angle just as a bus flips through the air overhead, burying itself in a convenient palm tree. On other occasions, fun’s been there quietly for the last half hour, but you only truly realise that when it goes away, after you close the lid on Advance Wars, or step back from the sofa, swearing you’re never going to fire up Pacifism mode ever again. "That," you might think to yourself, easing a little life back into your dead legs, flexing your hands to test for the spread of long-term tendon damage, "that was fun." Fun’s weird, then, isn’t it? It’s unpredictable and flighty. In fact, if you’ll forgive me, I’d say it was the Higgs boson of entertainment.

I’ve been thinking about the slightly depressing business of fun-hunting this week while stuck indoors with the flu. (Spun out on Lemsip, I’ve also been thinking about whether or not I could have contracted Multi-Drug-Resistant TB without knowing it, and pondering what terrible thing that nice Jay Mohr ever did to deserve the Sisyphean torture of a regular 'also starring' spot on Ghost Whisperer.) Somewhere in amongst the sneezing and coughing and Living TV binges, I decided to explore some of the dustier corners of XBLA, where I not only found a free game – unlikely enough by itself – but one that seems to shed a little light on the subject of what modern games sometimes do when fun doesn’t show up at all.

To be clear up-front, Dash Of Destruction is not particularly entertaining. It's hardly an abomination, but its controls are vague, its art is cheap, and its careless muddle of dinosaurs, road rage, and corn chip branding never really come together to create anything as interesting as its individual components might promise.

An advergame built to shift Doritos, Dash Of Destruction’s the brainchild of Mike Borland, the winner of 2008’s Unlock Xbox competition. His design for a game in which a chip delivery truck and a handful of T-Rex race around a city locked in an eternal struggle is loud and colourful, but there’s very little reason for anyone to play through it unless you’re intimately related to one of the developers, or perhaps some strange kind of Doritos completist.

That said, the chances are surprisingly good that you will get to the end of Dash Of Destruction, should you ever give it a whirl, and the game’s own loading screen text is pretty explicit about why that is. For every three minutes or so of its half hour lifespan, Dash of Destruction will reward you with a generous shower of Gamerscore points, Microsoft’s brilliantly meaningless reward-porn that has powered games as unforgivably arid as Avatar: The Last Airbender and TMNT into living rooms around the world.

Dash Of Destruction makes up for its shortcomings with a bribe, then, but given the peculiar currency in which it’s delivered in, it’s a beguiling one. The game’s very openness about the true nature of its pleasures means it’s quite hard to blast through the game without considering the knotty problem of player motive. I’ve written about Achievements and Gamerscore before when discussing the bizarre, yet brilliant, social science experiment Booyah Society. And come to think of it, almost everybody I know who writes about games has been moved to touch on the subject at some point. It’s not what you’d call a trending topic any more – in fact, the whole thing’s a bit 2004, really - but it clearly continues to bother some of us.

Not because it’s a cynical idea, or even simply because it sheds light on how empty our compulsions can be from time to time. Achievements trouble me (only mildly, mind: I still manage to find time to fret about climate chaos and negative equity as well) because they work so well. They keep a certain kind of person plugging away at games that don’t really deserve anybody’s attention. In the right hands, Microsoft’s metagame can provide a signpost pointing to hidden entertainments, but for much of the time it simply seems like something of a mockery, sticking you to the sofa when you should really be out flying a kite or learning the banjo, and ensuring, with every chirpy unlock sound, that the elusive fun we’ve all been looking for only slides even further into the shadows.