Should (video)games be fun?
Yes, this old chestnut again. I’ve written about this before because much like, “can games be art?” it’s a question that won’t just ever die. And it can’t die because everyone’s talking in cross purposes. The people who say that videogames need not be fun are talking in the broadest possible sense in terms of what a videogame is. The people who say that they should be fun are talking in narrower terms. And so those people are never going to agree and the argument will go round, and round, and round, and round because at no point does anyone ever acknowledge that the sides are talking about two different things.
A game – let’s not even go into specifically videogames – is, by definition, supposed to be fun, entertaining, competitive on some level. That’s what the word “game” means. If little Jimmy invites little Timmy to play a game and little Timmy’s suggestion is “homework”, Jimmy would be quite rightly a bit miffed. Homework isn’t a game. Who can complete their homework quickest and grade highest is a game by that added element of competition.
In the grand scheme of all that we currently have under the broad stupid label of a videogame we have everything from shoot-people-in-the-face games to artsy pieces of interactive poetry. That’s all wonderful stuff, often appealing to different people. But it’s utterly misleading to call some of this stuff a game in any sense of what that word means in the same way as if I wanted to start calling a burger and fries “cake” – we have, instead, the broader label “food” to contain both these things. The more artsy experimental stuff can be great but for the love of God can we not come up with a word which more accurately describes what it is? Or, if not, switch the umbrella term “videogame” out for a more appropriately generic umbrella term which doesn’t have, built in, the implication of fun / competitive elements?
Because if we don’t, we’re going to be stuck in this flupping cycle forever.
edit: In fact, we used to routinely use a broad term for this stuff. Back at the very dawn of CD-ROM, it was not at all uncommon to find something labelled “multimedia”[1]. As an umbrella term, it’s pretty good – it tells you nothing about the content, whether or not – or to what extent – it is interactive. Purely that it’s a creation involving many media. When I popped my Peter Gabriel multimedia CD in my computer I was not confused that there was no “game” – it was a CD of art, music, pieces of writing. I say we should bring this term, or one like it, back. And then within multimedia, we can have interactive fiction, experimental art, sound&videoscapes and, yes, videogames. What is, after all, so flupping essential about labelling something which clearly contains none of the fundamental properties of a game, as a game? It makes no sense to me, what-so-ever.
[1] Yes, I’m aware that this term never actually went away generally. But in the context of (what we broadly and, in my opinion, erroneously refer to as) game development, it kind of did. I don’t know why exactly – if you call yourself a multimedia artist, you’re in good company.