Critiquing Fun

Last week, freelance writer Jonathan "@radicalbytes" McIntosh caused a minor furor on Twitter when he suggested that games reviewers should stop focusing on video games being "fun". His point was is that it creates a certain expectation for games that the Indie market especially has been trying to break away from: the idea that every game has to be a rollercoaster of excitement and adrenaline that de-emphasizes quiet character moments and drama present in almost every other media art form. That it lessens games as a medium to reduce them to how much fun they are. Here are the pertinent tweets in question, though I recommend reading the whole chain linked to above:

Naturally, a few bad eggs (literally in some cases, given the default avatars of burner accounts on Twitter) took umbrage to this notion, but I've been batting that concept around in my head for days and how much I happen to vehemently yet contradictorily both agree and disagree with the sentiment being expressed. While I'm loath to concur with whoever it is behind the Play-Asia Twitter account that picks fights with "SJWs" for being sensitive about sexual objectification between commercials for anime boob mousepads, I sort of wonder if they have a point when they criticize the point McIntosh is making as losing sight of what games are about. For the sake of getting the devil's advocate side of the debate out of the way, let's start with how I disagree with McIntosh's standpoint.

Disagree

We had a whole period where games tried to be movies. Didn't end well. Or start well. Middle was kinda crappy too.

The core issue with critiquing games, and this has been present since games criticism first existed along with games themselves, is figuring out how to critique something as intrinsic and as personal to the user as the amount of "fun" one might have with a video game, and why they're having it. I feel like, because this is such a difficult message to convey, a lot of critics would be happier if video games stopped aiming for such a visceral and rudimentary emotion as fun and tried to be more like other media in attempting to convey more serious messages through managing the audience's emotional state through techniques both tried and true and wholly original. Media critics are far more prepared to discuss media that does this, with most of their academic background spent studying years of examples and research into how, say, movies, music, television, paintings, poetry and prose reach their respective audiences. Discussion of themes, characterization, mise-en-scene, gaze, diegesis, in media res, parables, allegories, etc. etc. - these are all topics that were taught to me and many others when I was in game design school [an aside here: This course was one of many that didn't really understand where game design was at in a professional context or as a scholarly discipline, so it offered an elementary media studies and comp sci package that I've been unable to get much use out of] and I feel many game critics would prefer they could attach more of their acquired knowledge of critiquing other media to the video game format, but in order for that to happen video games must first reshape themselves to more closely resemble the type of media that have already been dissected and deconstructed by academia so many times before.

Video games, and the broader interactive medium as a whole however you wish to define it, is an exciting venue for emerging critics largely because so much of that ground is new and untested, and its household name critical and academic heroes have yet to emerge. Most of this critical nascency is due to the fact that we've yet to properly codify how to critique games beyond simple product reviews or a list of the game's features and aspects that we determine as beneficial or detrimental to the experience. We need a better way to define how and why a game is fun, beyond calling something fun and leaving it at that before moving onto the graphics, or something equally easy to grasp in a critical context. Text reviews are losing out to video reviews precisely because we're bereft in how to explain precisely and plainly how something is fun without just demonstrating ourselves having fun while playing it. It might be next to impossible to do this effectively - it's not something I have a surfeit of answers for, personally - but that's the challenge that lies ahead of games criticism. Otherwise, we might as well be reviewing games like they were movies or paintings or books, focusing on their narratives and characterization and visual appeal, and downplaying the most valuable and distinctive aspect of them in the process.

Agree

Now we move onto how I might agree with McIntosh. We've discovered relatively recently that while a game can offer a sense of fun like no other artistic medium on Earth (mileage may vary), it has an innate and largely untapped power over other emotional states too. Take this for example: when someone talks about how a game is challenging, they're usually referring to the player needing a prohibitively high level of skill or reflexes (or patience, sometimes) to see that game to its conclusion. FromSoftware's deliberately paced Souls series, Indie throwback platformers like Super Meat Boy aiming for the good old days of "Nintendo Hard" masochism, and many roguelikes that carry the harsh penalty of perma-death are frequently bandied around as examples of challenging gameplay. However, what has emerged recently is a different sort of challenging; the sort where you might pause or even abandon a game because it proved too difficult to continue, and not because you lacked a requisite level of ability. Rather, I'm discussing horror games and life simulators that intend to instill a different sort of emotional state, almost to a suffocating extent.

I'd like to see a movie try to feature such a threatening and unnerving Peter Stormare role. Oh right.

Horror games have come into their own as the technology around them has improved to the degree whereby the level of realism makes the player's sense of fear palpable. It's a shame, then, that the cutting edge technology of the AAA industry has chosen to move away from survival horror just as it was getting promising, passing the baton to smaller studios who recognize the growing potential the genre exhibits, now more so than ever with VR in our living rooms. Of course, this is yet another subjective quantity: there are those who, due to the inescapable level of artifice surrounding horror movies and games, are immune to the spooks and chills of the medium. Others, though, are so terrified to continue that they'll potentially set them aside before the story is over. In addition, there's something about shifting from the passive viewing experience of a horror movie to the active playing one in a video game that seems to amplify the terror exponentially: the movie viewer can sit with their hands over their eyes until the scares have passed, but the player has to both facilitate a tense moment and often then have to react in time to avoid an early game over. You can't take your eyes off the screen for a moment when playing Until Dawn, for example, lest you miss a QTE prompt and curse yet another photogenic teenager to an unfortunate fate. That also means you don't have the luxury of momentarily blocking out the horror unfolding in front of you, at least in most cases.

I realize the second The Banner Saga game is out now, I just... I'm... I'm not up to it. Not yet.

Likewise, games have discovered that they can cause a player such high levels of emotional pain that they might refuse to continue simply because they've reached their limit. In this case, I look to games like Cart Life, Papers Please, The Banner Saga and Telltale's The Walking Dead games. The oppressive level of pessimism in those would make them a hard watch at the best of times, but the player is made an agent in the suffering of these characters with intermittent decisions in how they should continue, knowing that either answer will no doubt have its dire consequences further down the line. Allowing home lives to fall apart as you focus on necessary work, letting your supplies run low and your family unit starve because you were too honorable to consider stealing from others, being allowed to save only one of two likeable companions while the other dies horribly; these decisions can feel a bit cheap, hitting the player where it hurts in a deliberately manipulative fashion, but when done right the affects of both having the decision and witnessing the outcome - either immediate or delayed - can be devastating. Real drama doesn't necessarily have to involve a bunch of "choose your own adventure" binaries, but those games have taken the first steps on a path that might one day prove video games as the most emotionally-impacting medium there is.

With all the above in mind, I can absolutely see why a games critic like McIntosh would tire of seeing and reviewing the same visceral joyful experiences and blockbuster explosion-fests over and over in slightly different wrapping material. Though those games are definitely worth keeping around for the amount of happiness they bring, and the amount of innovation and ingenuity that still remains in finding new ways to bring that same elated emotional response to players, I can appreciate the sentiment that more studios, especially bigger ones with more resources and manpower, ought to take bigger risks with games that attempt to instill novel, and potentially not positive, feelings and experiences and cut down on the amount of safe bets built purely to entertain.

Of course, maybe the real problem is that every time a game tries to go for something more dramatic, we end up with games like Phantasmagoria 2, Hatred and whatever David Cage is farting out this year. A certain increased amount of emotional maturity from games writers overall needs to exist in tandem, perhaps.