My problem with Fun

Hello everyone!

Thanks to anyone who read my previous blog and commented on it. I really appreciate it and hope you will read this one too.

For the second blog, I had a bunch of ideas. First, I wanted to write about AC:Odyssey and how much I love that game and how it changed what I thought about AC games for me and became a close second favorite game of mine right after Witcher 3. But stupid work and other obligations kept me from writing it until RDR2 came out. For anyone who has been living under a rock and for some reason found their way to Giant Bomb and just rant into this blog and are now lost: RDR2 is Red Dead Redemption 2, possibly the most hyped game of all time since the last Rockstar game, GTA 5. I know not everyone is a fan of these games but I can bet you anything if you run outside of your apartment or place of work right now and ask folks on the street if they have heard of GTA or TES or AC, chances are so many will tell you they have heard of GTA. Although that I think about it, Fortnite might be the one which everyone recognizes due the floss dance. That is a sad thought!!!

But anyway, the game came out and I wanted to write about the problems it had but then I started playing it and forgot about writing that. Eventually, I came to a conclusion that I should write about some aspects of the game which have really stood out for me but I haven't seen many outlets talk about them but that idea also took a back seat to something else which has been brewing on my mind about this game and others like it and it is should games be Fun??!!!

What I mean by that is should the primary goal of games be to satisfy us and provide a fun experience? After the release of RDR2, I see a lot of people making the case for the game not as great as many say it is simply because the controls are different, it is slow, you don't get to do much at any given time, and ultimately you don't have a lot of fun with it. Having fun is completely objective. Experiences that some people might find fun would possibly be horrendous to others. But in the arguments I see level at RDR2 or Witcher 3 when it came out is not about objective thinking. It's about repudiating anything that is different in games if it does not make the game fun!! But what is fun? What games do we call fun? Let's break it down.

A game is fun when:

1. The gameplay mechanics are intuitive and controls are responsive.

Sure, mechanics are the essential part of game design. If a game does not control well or it is unresponsive, the player cannot simply engage with the systems inside the game. Game controls were redesigned and refined over and over again until they have reached a standard for different genres. Before the current control scheme in Call of Duty, shooters were just experimenting with different keyboard control schemes and were not even thinking of using the mouse for movement and when console shooters became popular, they finally found out how to make the controls intuitive. All that development was done to make sure you have a good time with the game.

Now with game mechanics. They are a different story. If you go back to adventure games of yesteryear or even shooters, you will find many systems which were popular at the time or deemed not a big deal but would be deal breakers now. Things like checkpoints, autosaves, permadeath. Sure, we sometimes praise modern games for implementing these concepts but they are not as harsh as they were back in the day. Back then, the main point of playing games was to overcome challenges and fun was derived from that sense of accomplishment. That meant, you had to figure out the quirks in game design and its mechanics as well as any difficulties in fighting enemies or solving puzzles. This brings me to the second reason we call games fun.

2. Sense of accomplishment.

This is a tricky one. As I mentioned, the original idea of playing a game was to overcome challenges. That could mean fighting a really difficult monster in DOOM, or going through a really hard level in Mario. You had to use all the skills taught you by the game, not by tutorials but implicitly by you discovering them while playing them, and try to find weak spots in a boss or memorize a level map in order to get through it. Sometimes it meant finding secrets on your own or from a friend or colleague. In any case, once you got through the boss or that level, it gave you a great sense of accomplishment. That has changed over the years and as game have become modernized and more reliant on story rather than gameplay. This again brings me to my last point which is the most prevalent reason we consider games to be fun and, in my opinion, the most dangerous one.

3. Sense of gratification.

Accomplishing a difficulty has some pleasure associated with it but not all the time. Sure, once you overcome an obstacle using your skills, you give yourself a pat on the back and congratulate yourself on the job well done. But more often than not, you are just relieved you don't have to face that problem anymore. That is true in games and in real life. Hence the reason I separate these two points.

What I mean by gratification in games is the feeling of satisfaction you get when play one, no matter how you get it. As I said in my previous point, old games were trying to satisfy players by making them go through difficult levels and bosses and puzzles. But nowadays that has changed drastically. Take a look at Call of Duty or Diablo or World of Warcraft or thousands of other games whose main goal is to make the player feel like a badass or a god. This is done by heaping praise upon the player by completing fairly easy tasks. Good job soldier for killing all those people, now pick up that minigun and shoot until it runs out of ammo!!! Good job wizard for casting spells so awesomely, now go kill those thousand orcs or goblins or whatever!! This is where turret sequences and quick time events came to prominence. Just spend 5 minutes behind this stationary gun and mow down hundreds of enemies or be super quick in pressing those buttons. Games like God of War made use of these concepts extensively. Games like Uncharted make the player feel like a hero without questioning how a hero could kill thousands of people. In fact, there are trophies for how many people you kill with different weapons. The reason they don't talk about it is because the primary reason for their existence is to make the player feel like a hero and make them feel good for the whole journey. Make them feel powerful!

This concept was problematic for a number of reasons, one of which being that if the main reason to play a game is to feel good, then video games are basically toys and that contrasted with what many developers tried to state with their games which was that games should be considered as art. Remember Braid, Journey, Flower??!! None of them made the player feel like a hero. In fact for Braid, it was the opposite. This signaled that games were going a different direction. Many "walking simulators" became very popular like Gone Home or Dear Esther, in which the whole objective is to uncover the story. Even the new God of War went away from how other ones were designed and tried to make it very grounded, even though you still had an awesome ax that was very satisfying to throw at Norse gods. And Uncharted 4 addressed the issue of a treasure hunter who would do whatever it took to find a relic head on and made it a focal point of the story. So, this meant games are becoming mature and growing up and with them, the audience is growing up. Or so I thought before looking at dozens or articles, videos, podcasts, discussions, and whatever else of everyone being so frustrated with how RDR2 controls and plays that they cannot enjoy it.

I should say this makes me sad.

So, RDR2 is not a perfect game. In fact, I wouldn't call it a traditional game. It is an open world game not doing anything which multiple other open-world games did in the 5 years between it and GTA5, the last game from Rockstar. Not everything is visible to you on the map. You play as an honorable bad guy rather than a hero in a mercenary's skin. Some mechanics are not introduced to you and you would have to figure them out by yourself. There is no accessible fast travel. It can be done in a very limited way after spending in game money. Guns do not shoot very fast and are not snappy. In fact, you have to struggle a little bit to line up headshots even if you have enabled automatic lock. You don't move very fast and you are very vulnerable. If you lose your horse, that is it. You have to find a new one or buy one. There are some stuff which you need to keep track of like your hygiene or state of your guns. Basically, the game is trying really hard to imply how a person would live in the US in 1899. All of what I just described are deal breakers for many people, the consumers and the media.

My first blog was about how in Rockstar games, you feel like a human and it makes it very exciting when you can actually get through a difficult mission successfully without dying so many times and makes mundane tasks such as riding bikes or yoga so meaningful because you find yourself living in the world whereas in games such as Assassin's Creed where you dominate the world. So, I love everything about RDR2. I love how I have to think before opening fire on a crowd. I love how I can plan a horse ride to the wilderness far away from my camp (which is the main hub), find a deer, hunt it, set up camp, cook a meal over the fire, sleep and then ride back to camp with the pelt or carcass of the deer. It makes me feel that I am living as the protagonist (Arthur Morgan). I love how guns work in the game. It makes me think about which type of weapon with which type of ammunation I would need for certain combat situations. I become more familiar with my guns and get to use them properly. The sense of satisfaction comes from figuring out how to live a good life as Arthur. Not how many people I can kill at any given moment or how many people in game would praise me for whatever it is that I doing. Actually, Arthur is not regarded so highly by some members of the gang and people outside. The world itself does not go easy on you either. It is a hostile world and will not stop throwing obstacles at you. Go for a hunt for a deer, find out a lonely cabin the woods, check it out only to find a bear guarding it and attacking you instantly. Dawdle a bit in a firefight and you might get shot in the head which could mean dying very fast. Of course, checkpoints and autosaves in the game stop it from being punishing but unlike many other open-world games (many Ubisoft-made ones), RDR2 is not concerned about your level of happiness moment to moment while playing the game. Unlike GTA5, there isn't an opportunity to do a lot of mayhem and get away with it successfully. Of course, you can act as dishonorably as possible, and sometimes in story missions you have to do it, but then you will get punished by having a huge amount of bounty on your head. And if you don't have enough money to pay it, unlike in AC: Odyssey, there is no other way to get rid of it. So, you'd have to risk going to towns which are now considered hot zones and might run into stubborn bounty hunters.

So, in a nutshell, the game makes you do mundane tasks without awarding you for them, and punishes you if you act like a lunatic. Ergo, I can totally see how this game is not for everybody. I believe Red Dead Online, which is the online portion of RDR2 which is yet to be released on November, could be more everybody's speed considering how popular Grand Theft Auto Online got. But as for the single player campaign, the main point of playing the game is to feel like a man in an unwelcoming world trying to survive. My problem is not with people expressing how they can't get past mechanics or controls in the game to have fun. My problem is when these arbitrarily placed measurements for fun are used to argue the game is not designed properly or that it is actually bad. My bigger problem is when members of the games media come up with this argument.

What I heard for the past couple of weeks which troubled me so much was when it was pointed out to problem finders that the game is going for a different feel, then the answer was: but it is a video game and video games have to be fun.

I wholeheartedly disagree with that statement. I disagree with it so much that I can feel it in my body. Whenever I die, the epitaph on my tombstone would say: here lies a man who disagreed that games need to be fun!! And let me tell you why if you are still reading this blog for whatever reason!

This type of argument was made against Witcher 3 as well, especially by editors of this website during game of the year. I don't know if I can call Witcher 3 fun or even RDR2 fun but it does not mean the game is bad. As we have grown and the industry has grown with us, the main purpose of games are changing. Now, it is more important to elicit an emotional response out of players rather than making them have fun. Consider the underestimated game of all time Spec Ops: The Line. Here was a game where it tried to imply to the players what it really meant to be a video game protagonist in a military shooter. It absolutely accomplished it but was again dragged down because it did not control well or was not fun. The point of the game was not to have fun so why was that used against it. Or, consider Last of Us. That game also was not about having fun. Finishing combat encounters always left a bad taste in mouth. From the way the camera worked or characters moved, it was all to imply how tiring is to kill a person and what it takes out of you. Many also called this game to be not fun but still paid attention to it because it was relatively short and at the end, you actually do end up feeling very empowered which was also intentional but I won't get into it. The point is that game did a better job of presenting itself as a functioning video game rather than something like Witcher 3. And about Witcher 3. It is my favorite game of all time not because it had satisfying combat. There were many occasions were I would just stray off somewhere else while spinning my sword, not hitting anybody. But I never minded them. The game was not broken. Controls were not unresponsive. It was just different. I had to get used to it and I got used to it because I was very intrigued by the story and was in love with the world and characters and actually it was satisfying to realize I had memorized what type of sign or portion works with type of monster and just like what I described in RDR2, it made me feel like a monster slayer in the world. So, if a core mechanics of the game does not work for everybody, does it mean it is no longer a game anymore? And what does it mean by not working when the game is functional? Does it mean the mechanics do not empower the player so much? Is that our measurement now for fun?

Witcher 3 had an impact on me which I cannot forget. I finished the game three times simply because I wanted to live in that world again. RDR2 is having the same effect. The emotions I have felt playing this game could be written down in another long ass blog down the line. And I feel very lucky since I live in an era where I can have an experience only seen in revered westerns with one game and a total blast and amazingly fun one with another such as Saints Row or Spider-Man. RDR2 does not conform to rules we have set out for video games, especially open-world ones made by Ubisoft, but it does not mean that person after person would have to go on a podcast or write article or whatever that the game is actually bad and does not deserve praise. Where are the articles talking about character work in the game? How about an analysis of how Arthur Morgan develops over time and you as the player develop with him? How about a podcast about sweet moments peppered in the game through random encounters? What if we measured a game's quality over what type of reaction it got from us not if the game made us feel good every second of every moment. In one podcast, I heard the person complaining how it took them 7 minutes to ride to camp and 7 minutes is a huge time and therefore the game needs to change. Many complaining if you run into someone with the horse, they fall down and react negatively. This all means, as gamers, we are getting accustomed to these experiences satisfying us at every turn and taking our hands and basically, treating us like children. We don't consider them to be thoughtful experiences but rather only means from which to derive pleasure. And our argument for it is the game needs to be fun. It is a very sad time for games. I thought we wished for these digital journeys to be more than just toys. To be works of art to which we could point while making this argument against someone saying otherwise.

To close this ridiculously long blog, I will just say this. We ask others to stop saying games are for kids or are for passing time. We all know games are far more than that. We can get different things from them. We can absolutely feel like a badass while playing COD or AC. Saints Row: The Third was a game which helped me lot during a period of my life struck with paralyzing depression, because it was just so fun to play. But games can also make us think like What Remains of Edith Finch or The Last of Us. Red Dead Redemption 2 is trying to tell a story and the world is a character in this story. While I acknowledge how it is not a game for certain occasions, I disagree there is anything wrong with its controls or systems other than committing the sin of being different. I believe, we need to grow up and treat these games like adults as works of art and get past the tedious, needless, and useless discussions about its controls or mechanics or whatever as long as they are not broken and unresponsive. I wish members of the games media would start having more mature arguments but it seems like a tall order considering the age in which we live where voicing dissatisfaction and takedown videos are becoming the law of the land. This game is telling a story and I believe it is a story worth telling if we let it.

Signing off

/Mehrdad

Games can make purposeful mechanical decisions and the value of these will vary depending on the person and how well these mechanics were executed. I also think that it can be true that a game is making a purposeful and successful statement in one instance, and just be bungling in the next. Red Dead 2's mechanics (from what I've heard, have not played) do a lot in giving the game a deliberate and rewarding pace, but are also just unnecessarily convoluted in some instances, such as all the gifs of people accidentally punching horses.

"consider Last of Us... From the way the camera worked or characters moved, it was all to imply how tiring is to kill a person and what it takes out of you."

I would disagree with that statement. Just the sheer amount of killing the character does negates it, the characters control better later in the game as you upgrade them and get new weapons, and there are blatant power-fantasy moments like the sniper sequence. Then again I have little patience for deliberately "poor" mechanics, so I'll nitpick them at every turn if able. Honestly, what you said could be entirely true for many people, but just doesn't resonate to me, or people with similar mindsets to me. Similarly, I will never read "The Sound and the Fury", which I recognize as a seminal piece of literature, and I also regard as literally unreadable by any sane human.

I agree with the central gist of your argument - that just because we call something a game it need not necessarily be fun in the strictest sense of the word. I suppose the term "game" has stuck around because the form comes from place where things really were just games. It's only fairly recently that the medium has matured to a point that the term seems somewhat archaic. The juxtaposition between AC: Odyssey and RDR2 is useful as ostensibly they have a lot in common: 3rd person action games, with sprawling narratives set in vast environments explored on horseback.

But AC:O is very much tuned to be a fun game - and to be clear I think it succeeds - it's a frictionless experience. Whistle for your horse and it spawns just outside of our vision. Jump off a 10-storey high statue? No worries, you're fine. Little numbers fly off every hit to let you know how much damage you've just done.

RDR2 is from a completely different philosophy. Nearly every mechanic and system in the game is there to feed in to the narrative and the sense of immersion. Having to pull trigger twice on single-action revolvers and repeating rifles is purposefully awkward. The ledger is there primarily so you can see that no-one but Arthur is contributing meaningfully to the camp, to foster a sense of weary resentment and responsibility. Having to bond with a horse to increase the radius within which it will come when called and not being able to just summon a new one if it dies could be annoying to some but wonderfully grounds us in that world and makes the bond with our horse much more real. The fact that frankly the distances between everything are about 20% too long is entirely intentional. It's scale to communicate a sense of well...scale. Of isolation. Of our own smallness compared the sheer vastness of the American wilderness.

I think the difference between the two games can be boiled down to simple fact: not once in RDR2 did I get attacked by a flock of Level 45 chickens - because that would be fucking absurd.

Fairly early on I absorbed the message Rockstar were trying to communicate and instead of playing RDR2 like it was intended to be a fun game I started reading it like it was a novel and in that way it's far more successful. For those that purely want to spend their game time being entertained (which is a totally reasonable expectation) I can understand why they might bounce of RDR2. It's an exceptionally strange and brave product that no-one but Rockstar could get away with at this sort of scale. I can't really imagine a scenario where the most anticipated and successful film of the year is painfully slow, elegiac, mournful Western, but they've earned people's trust to the point where they can pull it off. It's certainly not without faults but in it's refusal to compromise it's vision RDR2 has found a place among the very best open worlds of this generation.

I haven't finished reading your post but I need to correct something.

Having fun is completely objective. Experiences that some people might find fun would possibly be horrendous to others.

Objective is something that is repeatedly provable - the Earth is round, two plus two equals four, it's currently 38 degrees Fahrenheit where I live. All provable.

Subjective is the word you're looking for in this sentence. This term refers to things that are different for different people - RDR2 is amazing for some, not for others.

For my part, if a game doesn't feel good to play then I'm not going to play it. That would be like reading a book with horrible writing because its themes and ideas are interesting and then calling it "the best book of the year". Or a movie with a good atmosphere and story but terrible acting. You could probably find well-known examples of both of these, sure, and that's where RDR2 fits in - it's a video game with great cutscenes and dialog and atmosphere, but bad controls and gameplay. Oh, well, I'll just be over here playing something better.