Should ALL video games be "fun?"

Fun being the personal and subjective thing it is, I absolutely have to disagree with you. Having fun playing a horror game makes the game a failure? What in the fuck? It's the exhilaration that fear causes that essentially leads to an enjoyable time with a horror game to begin with. It leads to the game being fun, or enjoyable if that's how you'd want to put it,which goes hand-in-hand with the concept of fun anyway. It's a controlled and safe experience and that's why it's exciting. Feeling tense and unsettled knowing full well that you aren't in any real danger (but FEELING like you are) is a huge benefit to the horror genre, whether it be movies or games. It's a simulation that creates all of these feelings you'd otherwise be unsafe experiencing. Listen, I can understand where you're coming from, but what exactly would you consider enjoyable horror? Nothing? If the fear wasn't 'fun', people wouldn't get addicted to the genre and seek out more ways to experience it. Which leads to me my next thought...

Yes, I think games need to be 'fun'. Again, being that this a subjective concept I think the broadest way I could describe it would be through contentment. If you're not content playing a game, then it's a true waste of time. Whether that contentment comes in the form of acquiring better loot in something like Diablo, shooting dudes in the face in Call of Duty, exploring an abandoned house in Gone Home, fighting with your morals in Papers, Please or squirming through the P.T. demo, if you're not content with the experience you just had, then why bother? I'm all for diversifying and playing different types of games that could be deemed 'not fun', but just because I'm not laughing or smiling at a game doesn't mean I'm not having fun with it.

Nope. Video games don't have to be exclusively to entertain, A creator can create for their own reasons, or intend to do something other than simply entertain their audience.

Video games don't have to be fun, if that isn't their intended purpose. If a video game isn't supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be something else and provoke an appropriate response. If a video game aims to be fun and isn't, then it has failed. If a video game aims to be depressing and is, then it has succeeded. If it doesn't aim to be anything, then it sucks.

I can think of numerous games that I think aren't fun, yet I still highly regard them. Brothers is depressing, P.T. is scary as shit, and Proteus is just for chillaxin', brah!, to name a few examples.

I don't think we actually disagree, we're just using two different meanings of the word fun. The definition of fun is "enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure," so in my mind if a horror game is providing amusement or lighthearted pleasure it has unequivocally failed as a horror experience. I never once said games shouldn't be enjoyable, don't take this to mean I'm advocating for a miserable experience in the name of art, my point is simply that games can be enjoyable for reasons other than basic amusement. Everything you mentioned in final paragraph I agree with except for the use of the word fun. Fun is not a catch all term for enjoyment, and I believe the original point of the OP's question was whether games can be enjoyed without being fun in the way I defined it above.

In fact, the words I would certainly use in place of fun are ones you used as well, contentment and enjoyment, as well as engagement. The Last of Us is often depressing, intense, and bleak, and I don't recall ever having "fun" at any point in the campaign (again, I'm using the word fun in the sense that I believe the original question of this thread intended it: gleeful lighthearted pleasure). Despite not being a fun experience, it was an immensely enjoyable one because it is incredibly engaging and succeeds at creating exhilarating and tense combat encounters accompanied with resonant emotional storytelling. None of that is fun in the dictionary definition of the word, but it is extremely enjoyable.

What all this rambling was meant to express was that yes, I completely agree with you that a game needs to be enjoyable in some way be a worthwhile experience, but I strongly believe the concept of shallow, gleeful fun is not the only means to derive enjoyment from a video game.

No, but it is unlikely I'll buy them if their not. Just like I don't tend to enjoy depressing movies. But movies with dark themes can still be enjoyable without being depressing as can games with tense and challenging gameplay, which I would still call fun.

No. They should strive to engage the player, or at least accomplish their goals. If not, hopefully there's a happy accident in there to latch onto.

Seems like the consensus is near-unanimous on this one. A more interesting question might be "Should all video games be worthwhile to the player?" to argue the notion that games have to have some worth in the first place.

Either way, perhaps a game doesn't have to be anything, as long as it fulfills the goals of the people who made it (creatively, financially, or otherwise)

Well it depends on the genre. A game like starcraft cant be "fun" unless you win easily or you screw around. Its the nature of the genre. Engaging yes. Imo every game should be engaging without dumbing it down ofc. For example i find the sims games rather stupid and boring because they are practically a simulator of real life. On the other hand what i might like, can be boring for another one. So long story short yes they should be "fun" and engaging but this also depends a lot on the genre.

I have no mouth and I must scream is one of my favorite games, AM is the best evil AI in video games and one of the great villains, but I don't know if I'd call the game fun.

All video games should be GOOD though.

@ll_exile_ll: Fair enough man. Seems our views on the topic are far more similar than I originally thought. Also, my apologies if anything in my first paragraph came off as being rude.

"Fun" not really. Every book doesn't have to be happy nor does every movie has to leave you fulfilled. What a good game should always do is leave you feeling interested and satisfied. There are few things to do in games that is really hard. One is invoking the feeling of boredom or frustration without driving away the players. This can be a key to a story, you can be forced to feel helpless, bored or any other of negative feelings, project this onto a good game and then you feel the game is bad because you feel bad. This isn't the way people should review/rate/feel about games. People need to step back for a moment, ask themselves. Does the game want me to feel this way and is it doing a good job at it? If the answer is yes then you have a great story in your game that is mixing well with the gameplay. Again the dangerous thing is that people usually see negative feelings as a bad thing in a game.

So a game that is immersive and engaging are the key things to look for in a great game. Not fun, fear, joy or happiness.