Are games art? What matters more: story or gameplay? Should games be called ‘games’, or is that term too limiting? There are certain game-related debates, such as the aforementioned, that will likely rage on until the end of time. Another one, which arose during last December’s The Gaming Club, Slate’s annual look back at the year in interactive entertainment, was this: are games supposed to be fun? (Full disclosure: I was a participant in The Gaming Club in 2007 and 2008.) Late in the four assembled critics’ exchange of emails, New York Times chief game critic Seth Schiesel wrote the following:
All of you seem to spend so much energy defending, justifying and explaining games as a serious intellectual pursuit that perhaps you have lost sight of the fact that games are supposed to be fun. That it’s OK for media and even art to be entertaining. I believe that games will truly arrive only when their practitioners and patrons get their chips off their shoulders.
To which Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, replied: You’re dead wrong that ‘fun’ is the point of videogames. No, I say. It’s not. That’s a fallacy that grows out of this unfortunate etymological ensnarement the medium is stuck with. Games, for me, are supposed to be interesting or engaging, and can arrive there in any number of ways. But fun? Who cares about fun?
Bissell went on to explain that what he means by ‘fun’ is “mere escapism”, and that even “escapism doesn’t have to be dumb”. From where I sit, Bissell was entirely correct to call out Schiesel’s assertion that games shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Where I disagreed was with him throwing out the term ‘fun’ in the process.
One of the challenges in talking seriously about games is that the critical and technical language surrounding the medium is often lacking. And even when it’s not lacking – when enterprising people have put in the hard work to create the vocabulary that would help us discuss games in a more rigorous manner – these new words and descriptions end up on the margins of the conversation, employed by a minority while the masses remain blissfully unaware.
For instance, fellow consultant (and game designer) Nicole Lazzaro has since the early ’00s articulated her theory that there are four types of fun: Hard Fun (challenge and triumph over adversity); Easy Fun (curiosity), Serious Fun (relaxation and excitement) and People Fun (social amusement). Having witnessed personally and professionally how readily developers can slip into focusing on a single type of fun and forsaking the others, it’s easy to see that Call Of Duty: Black Ops falls into at least three of Lazzaro’s four categories: Hard Fun (the gunplay), Easy Fun (sorting out the plot’s mysteries) and People Fun (online multiplayer). In other words, so much for Bissell’s assertion that Black Ops isn’t fun.
Similarly, journalist Mitch Krpata attempted to parse different types of players in a series of blog posts titled A New Taxonomy of Gamers. I’ve referenced this collection of posts before, but it’s worth mentioning here again because of the way it explores the different motives people bring to the table when they play: skill gamers (those who play for mastery) vs tourists (those who play to see new sights); completists (those who compete against the game) vs perfectionists (those who compete against other people); wholesale players (those for whom their money is more valuable than their time) vs premium players (those for whom their time is more valuable than their money). Again, when considering Black Ops through these lenses, it’s clear that it has a bit of something for everyone.
In fairness to Bissell, it is not the critic’s responsibility to make the case for the nature of enjoyment that anyone may derive from any given game besides his own. Schiesel is fond of quoting Robert Warshaw’s maxim by way of Roger Ebert, “A man goes to the movies. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man”, and it certainly applies here. But my objection to the idea that fun doesn’t matter when it comes to videogames is that bound up in the concept of fun is that games are based on mechanics and rules. To deny this is to flatten out what makes this medium special.
Just because the word ‘fun’ is associated with frivolity and silliness in other contexts is no reason to abandon it when it comes to videogames. Far better, in my opinion, is to build on the work of Lazzaro, Krpata and others to extend our language around different types of fun. I can certainly attest to the need for this kind of vocabulary in my current profession of consultant. But even critics can benefit from a more common language. For more precise ways in which to assess how individual games succeed or fail. To go beyond vague assertions of taste and pet peeves, and deeper into what makes a particular game tick. Seen in this light, ‘fun’ is not an excuse to avoid holding games to a higher standard. It’s the essence of this medium, and the sooner we parse it for its infinite varieties, the better.
N'Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com, or read and follow all N'Gai's columns on his topic page.