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What are your views on "Fun"?
I was asked this question by a friend recently, and got into a small discussion about it. However i felt that this question stumped me on some levels. Fun is such a subjective thing that i find it hard to define it.
My main shtick about fun is, is it directly relate to challenge? In most games, achieving an objective or challenge is one of the main reasons for it to be fun. This challenge could be found in other players or the game itself. But my questiion is whether simple challenge can sustain a game?
Rock Paper Scissors for example. Is there really a challenge in that game, or is the fun derived from the randomness, the unknown, and then the reveal? Or can i argue that the challenge in trying to figure out what the other player will throw out be the main area of fun?
Also, is a game like Mass Effect, more objectively "Fun" than playing say..Hide and Seek? Sure Mass Effect prolongs the "fun" through devices like RPG elements, Shooting elements etc, which are mixes of challenge and randomness, but I dont think it is more "Fun" inherently than Hide and Seek. Again this is very subjective, and this question may be irrelevant.
My main shtick about fun is, is it directly relate to challenge? In most games, achieving an objective or challenge is one of the main reasons for it to be fun. This challenge could be found in other players or the game itself. But my questiion is whether simple challenge can sustain a game?
Rock Paper Scissors for example. Is there really a challenge in that game, or is the fun derived from the randomness, the unknown, and then the reveal? Or can i argue that the challenge in trying to figure out what the other player will throw out be the main area of fun?
Also, is a game like Mass Effect, more objectively "Fun" than playing say..Hide and Seek? Sure Mass Effect prolongs the "fun" through devices like RPG elements, Shooting elements etc, which are mixes of challenge and randomness, but I dont think it is more "Fun" inherently than Hide and Seek. Again this is very subjective, and this question may be irrelevant.
Comments
This one, however, is easy. "Fun" is defined by what causes a dopamine response in my brain..
Obviously its a hyperbolic example, but drugs, fast food, and crap video games are all scientifically engineered to cause pleasure, and all have negative side effects. Yet, some people continue to defend shit games like Farmville, WoW, JRPGs, etc. Playing these games is really no different than pressing a button on your head that releases dopamine into your brain.
People often make comparisons between movies and video games. That's because a lot of people who couldn't make it in film made games instead. Also, a lot of people seem to prefer the type of video game which is actually a movie with a crappy insignificant game attached to it. A main sticking point seems to be that movies are much better at bringing about a wide range of emotions in the viewer, and games are not as good at this.
The reason is that it takes nothing to watch a movie other than eyeballs. The movie does all the work, and your body just responds. The movie plays your emotions like a fiddle, and as long as there is nothing severely emotionally broken about you, it will work most of the time.
A game actually requires you to do something. If you can't actually achieve something in yourself, then it's just not going to happen. Most people do not have skills. They literally can not perform the tasks required to get such an emotional reward from a game. Even if they could achieve those feats with practice and effort, they do not have the willpower and determination to do so.
Thus, they only like games which are easy and fun. Mindless crap that is guaranteed to payoff in dopamine with no effort or skill. Thus, most games only attempt to create the emotion of fun, and no others. Players also lower expectations for games. All they want is fun, and don't demand more. If they receive fun from a game, then they judge that game to be good.
Let's take the simple example of being sad over the death of a character. In a movie, we know exactly how to make you care about a character. There is over 100 years of research in this area. In a game, you actually have to care about that character. You can't just be made to care about them that easily unless it's one of those games that's mostly FMV. You can't get to know the character because they aren't a real person. The only way to make you care about them is to make you complete difficult trials in the service of that character. You hardly ever see Princess Zelda, but you care about her because of all the hard work you put into saving her. If that work was easy, you wouldn't care about her. The fun you receive at the end isn't just cheap fun and dopamine, it's a stronger sense of satisfaction that YOU did it. Ever notice how when you beat a game with a FAQ, you don't really feel anything at the end?
You might prefer TF2 to Counter-Strike because in Counter-Strike you just die instantly and can't do anything. But isn't that great! A video game is giving you a feeling other than fun. It's a feeling of frustration and inadequacy. If you actually work hard and get a kill, you will feel a huge sense of accomplishment. And what if you pull off something amazing like some team-saving headshots? What if you actually win gun game? Then you'll be higher than Willie Nelson's tour bus.
And that's why I get mad when people say things like "all that matters is the game is fun," "it's fun, therefore good," or "I had fun, so it's all good." I say if a game is merely fun, then it's shit.
That said, games are a little less complex of a situation than life in general. When it comes to video games, it is, in my opinion, as thus - Play what the fuck you like, if you enjoy it, that's fair enough, if you don't, fuck it off. I play very little counterstrike these days, not because(despite what Scott may suggest) because I'm incompetent, but simply because I find it fucking boring as watching paint dry. I got my fill of clicking heads in counterstrike when I was thirteen and fourteen, I don't need to still be doing the same goddamn thing a decade later when I'm rapidly approaching twenty-five. Why play the same song a million times over, when there is a whole world of songs to play? Sure, you're good at playing one song, but it doesn't make you a musician, nor does it make you an expert on the topic of music.
But that said, hey, some people really get off on watching paint dry, and might even argue watching paint dry is objectively(aka, in their opinion, at least in these discussions) better than other forms of entertainment within the genre or medium, but it doesn't mean you're forced to enjoy watching paint dry - you can still enjoy playing whatever the fuck else you like.
So of course, we come to the other side of the coin - Sure, just because you enjoy it doesn't mean it's good. But just because someone else says it's bad, doesn't mean you are banned from enjoying it, or you're a bad person for liking it, or you should be ashamed of liking it, or that you should like it any less. Fuck it! Just enjoy what you enjoy, and let someone else worry about if it's superior or inferior to whatever bullshit they like. It's not worth the calories to get worked up about it.
Eh, But that's just what I think. If you were asking for my two cents, you'd probably feel guilty if you didn't give me back a cent and a half worth of change.
Whatever activity that gives you that awesome feeling when you do it. Fuck it, it's fun.
It also varies person to person based on the experience, so you're not going to necessarily be able to gain much ground with your friend in this discussion. I also find it interesting how persuing fun specifically or thinking about why you find an activity fun at a particular moment in time often ruins the fun of it (at least some of the time, for me personally). That's an amazing little trick.
I literally deal with this all the time as a GM for table-top games. If, at any point, my players could see what's going on in my head (not even the secret information, just the surface level thoughts) it would probably ruin the entire experience for them. And that goes recursive too...
Well-designed games are very good at triggering emotional responses. There's a distinct satisfaction when you win, a feeling very similar to when you pull off a feat of athletic skill. When you sink that freethrow, make that headshot in CS, or get the most victory points, chances are you will feel a similar response. There is also the feeling of regret and defeat when you fail. Competitive activities are very good at manipulating human emotions, but usually rather than an empathetic response (save the occasional "good game man" to your defeated opponents) it is a simple self-gratified feeling. I find sports amazingly fun, and I find German board games have more in common emotionally with soccer than with Final Fantasy, except that the gymnastics are mental as opposed to physical.
I think the difference is not so much the amount of emotion generated, but 1. the kind of emotion and 2. the responsibility for the emotion. I think many people do not like to be responsible for their enjoyment of something. It is difficult to fail at enjoying a well-made film. If you dislike it, there is nothing you could have done differently, and the onus to entertain the audience rests with the creators. Conversely, some people like to take on that responsibility themselves, and their failure or success determines their enjoyment. I do think the empathetic response to a protagonist of a fictional narrative is dulled the more responsibility the viewer has, because it is replaced by the feeling of being the protagonist. You never feel guilt for something that happened in a movie, but if your friend died and you could have saved them in a game, you feel terribly.
I do miss doing narrative stuff. I like manipulating audience emotions in the film way.
We're the pretentiousness police. Will everyone in the room without a psychology degree -- or has been published on the topic -- please leave the thread.
You'll never take me alive, Coppers!
Hey Scott, headshots in CS are fun and challenging, but you know what is even more fun and challenging? Head shots in REAL LIFE. I submit that if you want to play Counter-Strike you should instead actually join a terrorist organization or counter-terrorist unit. It's much the same, but much harder. You have to spend a lot more time to get good, and the penalties for failure are so much higher! Isn't that fun!
Scott needs to seriously stop making value judgments about people based on their preferences.
[] Untold
[X] Toldeneye
There's nothing wrong with games designed for different modes of activity, they just cater to different people. TF2 shouldn't be derided as a baby game; if I spend all day working on (and being paid for) the engineering of novel algae to sequester CO2, I have been in a flow state all day, and that has the tendency to leave one exhausted (though I will admit that I tend to play flow-seeking games). If someone's relaxing using a game that is relatively less challenging, it's not because they like bad games, but rather because they're not playing for flow.
I... have some reading to do.
We're supposed to judge people based on the content of their character. Abilities, will power, and ambition, are all part of someone's character. They are perfectly fair things to judge someone by. The only problem is that said same people do not like to hear the truth. If you do suck, and I tell you that you suck, you're going to be upset.
I think the real problem is that I rarely actually lay down judgement on actual people, but only on things. Consumable items of entertainment. People get upset though, because I laid the smack down on a thing they like, and they don't like that. They think that if the thing they like is crap, and they enjoy it, then they are crap. They think rightly. Therefore, they will defend the things they enjoy and come up with excuses like "anything is ok as long as it feels good" or "I liked it, therefore it's OK" to hid the truth, which is that they suck.
Think about people who watch reality shows. You look down on them. You know you do. It's a form of entertainment that is especially constructed to entertain those of lower intellect. It's no secret that television intentionally produces the dumbest content possible that will get viewers because advertisers will pay more for that. Ads work really well on dumb people and not so well on smart people.
If I'm sitting here playing Eclipse and you are playing Yahtzee, you can bet your ass I'm looking at you the way I look at people who eat at McDonald's and care about American Idol. What's more, I'm right for doing so. You won't type it into a forum, but you know in your heart that your attempts to defend shit non-games like Farmville or whatever are mere expressions of your own denial so that you don't have to admit to yourself that you suck.
Instead you should be like me. Admit you suck! I have never won a game of Counter-Stsrike gungame in my life. I am getting owned at Dominion online. I've been sucking even worse at NS lately. Can't even shoot skulks. The difference is that I don't give in and switch to some other low skill, low brow, cheap thrill, shallow entertainment. I'll stick with it until the day I die.
The idea that someone sucks based on the media they consume or whether their recreational activities provide flow is fucking bullshit, and I think you know it. The activities a person does that make them worthy of respect and admiration are entirely separate from the list of games in their Steam account, and that you have the gall to claim that seeking challenges in video games makes you anywhere near actual heroes-- --makes you look almost laughable. Yeah, I played Saints Row The Third. Yeah, I had a good time doing it. It was relaxing. I've also been moved to tears learning about the calcium wave signals that perfectly coordinate the simultaneous contraction of cardiac muscle cells, and felt near-euphoric joy performing complex organic syntheses in the chem lab and sketching diagrams of sustainable power plant designs for a house in Wisconsin. I'm no stranger to flow, but after two weeks of brain-burning, hyperfocused study, sometimes you can't do it anymore. So I played Saints Row The Third instead of Super Meat Boy for a few nights. My gamepad was starting to give me Nintendo Hand anyway. I honestly don't know why that choice means that I suck, considering everything else I've done this year.
And as far as being like you... you're ~3 years older than me, but you actually remind me quite a bit of myself when I was ~15 in a lot of ways. Maybe I've been beaten down, maybe I've mellowed out, maybe I've matured, I'm probably jaded... but I feel very differently about these sorts of topics now. Not that I don't think little-kid me wasn't awesome (he totally was), but I'm in a different place now.
Example: Cannibal Corpse sucks. Oh god do they suck. And yet, I derive visceral enjoyment from their display of unapologetic suck. They own suck, and I am made to feel more comfortable in my own suck because of their wanton embrace of their own suck.
I also enjoy the Goat Rodeo Sessions, which is a collaborative string project featuring Yo-Yo Ma and others. It's a neo-classical-bluegrass quartet that makes astounding music. They decidedly do not suck, and their extreme lack of suck creates an engaging and entertaining challenge for my brain: dissecting the music, figuring out the structure and the composition of the piece, and so forth.
Perhaps Scott's argument should be phrased differently: it's not necessarily bad to derive enjoyment from things that suck, but you need to own up to the fact that they suck and why it is that you derive enjoyment from that suck. That sound about right?
Thus, a person truly sucks when they are incapable or unwilling to own up to their own suck. If you own up to your suck, you suck less, but you still suck.
EDIT: But basically, to pile onto what WuB said, you can't exist in a constant state of flow. You have physical brain limitations that prevent this. You will progressively function at a lower level as you keep your brain fully engaged, until your brain is physically incapable of engaging at that level.
That is the innate suck of all humans. Have fun sucking, meatbags.