Getting beyond fun

"It's just not fun."

This is an unfortunate refrain from the majority of game reviewers. A game's worth comes down to one thing: how fun is this game? Now, obviously, this definition has become complicated in recent years. It's not enough for a game to be fun. Fun is expected. Fun is the bare minimum. A game has to append amazingly lifelike, realistic graphics, or outlandishly stylized graphics (though even these are sometimes not enough); it has to have at least ten hours of gameplay, or five if the advertisers pay enough; but most of all, it has to reinforce the tropes of a certain genre while pushing said genre "forward" in probably some completely superficial way. There are of course exceptions to this (as there is anytime someone generalizes as broadly as I just did), but the way that we're approaching games is all wrong.

This isn't an article where I'm going to trash the concept of fun. Fun needs to exist in every artistic medium. Where would we be without The Beatles or Pixar? Fun and entertainment don't need to be exclusively separated from pushing an artistic medium forward. If a game or a movie can do both, great. The Mario series is one of my favourites because of this, and it's a series that focuses almost exclusively on fun. But few people would argue that, say, Lars von Trier's Antichrist is within a hundred miles of "fun." And of course, that doesn't make it less artistically valid.

The idea that a gamer might be put at a disadvantage somehow, or might at any time not feel completely great while playing a game (even if it's a horrifying game, the mechanics of the game world still reinforce the player), or in far too many cases, feel like a God, is sacrosanct in the gaming community. Heaven forbid that a game doesn't give the player exactly what they want! Imagine, real consequences for a gamer's actions!

As Stephen Keating puts it, gamers want to be challenged. Or at least some of them. But I know that I want to be challenged by a game. Challenged not only to traverse a game's many pitfalls and deaths, but challenged to get beyond the notion of death in games, to get beyond the trappings of what we call games at all. To some degree, we've already tapped out the utmost of what we can do with games in the current mould. We've delivered fun; it's time to deliver more.

The main problem is the culture surrounding games right now. That idea of fun has become so entrenched that, like some sort of hive mind, a game is shunned when it's not fun. Trying to talk to gamers about Killer7, for instance, is nearly impossible. Even though it was somewhat of a hit for Suda 51, almost no one (at least in comparison to the millions-selling games today) played it; and if they did play it, it polarized gamers so much because it was stridently un-fun. And the lack of fun is apparently the worst thing that a developer can do to a gamer. I think that it goes without saying that this culture is far too often egged on by the Z-grade journalists of many of the internet gaming websites.

But let us not lay too much blame at the feet of the gamer, for it's the developers who we ultimately have to blame. To some degree, this is all Shigeru Miyamoto's fault. The template for Mario's success – seamless controls that make the player feel great, death as a fail state, and fun as the overriding motif – has been attempted by very nearly every game designer, regardless of what their games actually call for. It's obviously something that works for Mario and Zelda, and it did save the gaming industry, but we're past that era, and not every developer should want or need to make their games fun. Especially with the breadth of ideas and topics left unexplored by gaming developers.

Why challenge gamers when you might end up with another commercial dud like Killer7 (part of the shift in philosophy at Capcom that recently lead to the leaving of Keiji Inafune – not that he did much to push that company forward either)? Development houses hold onto their money tighter than a vice, it would seem. Much like the culture of Hollywood, major book publishers and record labels, someone like Activision (an easy target… OK, let's say THQ) isn't going to pony up the funds to make something that doesn't already have a built-in audience. The culture of risktaking in the gaming industry is completely gone, and publishers are more than happy to keep tapping into the same audiences ("casual" or "hardcore") that they have for three decades now.

People want fun, publishers want to give it to them. It's an endless feedback cycle.

I think it goes without saying that this article is not in defense of developers who make shitty games. Those are always, without a doubt, games that try to be fun and fail spectacularly. That's obviously an even worse thing than making a game that's merely fun – getting beyond the borderline incompetence of the gaming development industry is going to be quite the hurdle itself.

Part of the problem, too, is the incestuous relationship that the gaming development community has with itself. Long gone are the days when Warren Spector (with a background in film studies) or Shigesato Itoi (among other things, an actor and an author) could have control of the kinds of budgets to make impacting changes on the gaming landscape. Game designers are computer programmers first and foremost, and the language that they're working in is a sickly hybrid of antiquated gameplay from the PS1 days and embarrassingly self-conscious "film" language, taken only from easily identifiable sources.

Maybe games need an outside perspective, one not so intent on entertaining the player. If they can manage to make something fun that pushes the medium forward, I'm all for that – but fun can't be seen as the only experience worth having. Otherwise we're staying on a sinking ship and failing to realize that it's not too late to plug the holes.