What Even is Fun?

Dig in for another rambling post...

Fun is inherently entirely subjective and indescribable which makes my job incredibly hard. Game design has very little science. There are very few hard and fast rules that can be applied in a given situation. You have to feel it out, poke and prod the scenario or mechanic you're working on and apply the knowledge you've gained from consuming the various sources of knowledge that input into your life and hope for the best.

One of the main items of discussion between designers is the subject of fun. This can be an overt discussion where we talk about the definition of fun or it can be shuffling the location of two staircases in a level to provide the 'fairest' firing lines between opposing combatants. The most minor thing is a discussion on fun. Which buttons can the player use to exit the pause menu is a great example of a low level decision that has nothing to do with how awesome we can make a head explode but has a dramatic impact on the fun of using a menu.

So one would presume that us designers have a definition for this whole fun thing, right?

Well we don't. This is part of the larger discussion about how we don't have any kind of usable vocabulary for discussing games but for now we'll deal with the concept of fun. Or more precisely the concept of fun and negative emotions.

To a lot of people fun is simply a case of how fast their car goes, how many bullets it takes to down a guy or how long the coloured fungus makes you invincible for. The theory behind this fun is expertly written about by Raph Koster in his book A Theory of Fun. The main thrust of the book is that fun comes from exploring a rules system, learning that rules system and then mastering it.

I think about how I enjoy media a lot. What kind of fun am I experiencing that leads to my enjoyment?

This leads to the question as to why we only really have games that are simple fun and we don't have games that promote negative experiences. Randy Smith recently wrote in Edge about how we don't make games that are like Requiem for a Dream. Publishers and a lot of developers often don't see the value in the fun of the catharsis of a negative experience or they don't care enough to tackle the issues raised in doing such a project. Famously David Jaffe was once working on a game that explored the horrors of war but it was cancelled because it wasn't fun. We have no way of knowing why it wasn't fun and I imagine that finding out would be fascinating.

We have a games industry where fun is measured in 30 second increments rather than over the entire period of playing the game. This means that we can't design games that are cathartic experiences that deal with anything other thanvisceral joy. We can't explore anything other than the type of fun that Mario so well defines.

We watch horror movies because we enjoy working through negative emotions. We read books about horrific experiences because we enjoy working through negative emotions. We play games to get simple minded rewards. Notice the discrepancy?

All too often a negative experience in a game in down to shitty controls or cheating AI and not down to exploring emotions. We keep talking about advancing games as art and one of the ways we can do this is opening up the range of emotions that we have in games and realising that the exploration of these emotions is fun.

Fun isn't just mastering head shots, fun is exploring our emotions and learning about ourselves in the process. Even if something is hard work or gives off negative stimuli, it can still be fun. I want to see games that are experiences rather than expanded demos. I cried three separate times during Metal Gear Solid 4. We have achieved games that makes us cry. Now we need to make games that go beyond that. Chainsawing dudes in half is completely satisfying but perhaps we can have a game where the fun is derived from working through the guilt and disgust that cutting someone in half could bring.