DO ME A FAVOR AND READ THE ENTIRE POST BEFORE REPLYING!
A couple years ago, Yahtzee Croshaw released a video while he was still with The Escapist on whether or not video games needed to be fun. You can check it out below if you want:
That wasn't a question I ever would have thought needed to be asked. What point does a GAME have if not to be FUN? But what he said really made me rethink my opinion.
His take on the subject is that video games have become too diverse to be summed up by a single word like "fun." Games are now capable of evoking all kinds of emotions, and not all of them are ones that you would generally consider to be positive feelings. He uses
Scorn as an example.
Scorn is disgusting, disturbing, depressing, and frustrating. He absolutely didn't have
fun while playing it, but it was still a good game because those were the exact emotions that the developers intended to make him feel. Just like you wouldn't say
Schindler's List is a bad movie just because it's not a comedy, games like
Scorn and
Silent Hill are still good games even though the emotions they make you feel are generally considered to be negative ones. And this isn't just limited to scary or depressing games. The kind of "fun" you have while solving a puzzle game like
Return of the Obra Dinn is so different from the kind of "fun" you'd have hacking people limb from limb in
God of War that it almost doesn't make sense to use the same word to describe them both.
All things considered, he thinks that "engaging" is a better word to judge video games by with. A game might not be "fun" in the traditional sense, but it can still be worth playing as long as it engages you in the way it's developers intended.
What do you guys think?
I figured this would happen. People are just react to the thread title and not responding to what I wrote in the post itself.
First, Let's be a bit critical about the question because it feels like you brought it on yourself.
The title should have been framed differently, as should the contents. If you 'figured it would happen' this way, you already had half the motive to change it.
For the title, I would have probably framed it as more than a binary answer. The first tip in psychology is to ask an open question that forces more than a yes/no reply. In this case, for 'do games have to be fun,' you might say, "What makes a game worth playing beyond fun?" Now, any answers feel required to explain what they mean.
Let's break apart a bit from the first post because it seems a bit skewed to me.
"Games are too diverse to be summed up in a single word." First, the fact that they are all called games immediately disproves that statement, even as a joke. Second, what's the point of genres, tags, and all the categories we keep making to intentionally help divide up a large category? Are they suddenly no longer relevant? In what way have they suddenly been made obsolete? The argument being provided is already industry standard. I don't see the point.
Third, people seem to treat media in general as separate ideas.
We didn't have an issue with Books or Movies. Yet we have choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA), rulebooks for D&D and other things.
We have 3.5/4D films and any number of 'variants' for movies. Arguably, these are conceptually different from the standard idea of the medium. Still, things evolve to encompass because language is about making sure you are understood more than conveying relevant information. Otherwise, the 'silent films' of decades ago would be completely different because of the sound and later all the smell-o-vision stuff and whatever is so categorically different.
The question to the third point is why games need more than genres now, setting them apart from other industries with similar conventions, understanding, rules and conduct. This question could easily be applied to films/movies by the fact that not all of them are 'fun'; you mention Schindler's List, but especially some documentary ones, and any number of reasons people theoretically shouldn't 'enjoy' horror or other varied genres in a more general inaccurate sense of the term.
Sure, they might be different types of the same kind of emotion, but at that point, you are arguing subjectivity from the audience's perspective. Even adults and kids who watch the same movie have different experiences. To quantify precisely what emotions each demographic would be afflicted by, we would have to create an extremely burdensome task and case study for every film and movie, every game and book, with some hundreds of people in different combinations of demographics, to comprehensively list the type of 'engagement/enjoyment/fun' they might get from it.
Finally, what seems to be your main point about the definition of words.
Engagement often refers to a long-term effect. If a game is 'engaging,' I can play it for 12 hours straight.
Shorter games often rely on replayability or strong emotional impact to maintain engagement. While some short games achieve broad engagement without replayability, this perspective doesn't sell a product to people.
Engagement has no bearing on someone's qualitative experience. As people brought up, Gacha games are 'engaging' and not because they are positive in all respects. Some forms of engagement rely on psychological manipulation rather than enjoyment, such as gacha mechanics and FOMO-driven systems. There is no requirement for enjoyment when a game is engaging, and there is no reason a person needs to feel positively at all about engaging games. Even if many games can do both, it was never a requirement.
Engagement is usually used for mechanically heavy or story-rich games because of the general bias, regardless of how compelling and engaging arcade fighting games can be in short-form content. The perception of the word and its definition would need to be shifted culturally to a large degree to not favour specific types of games. Now, we have distinctions like 'engagement' vs. 'deep engagement' or even 'gacha engagement,' which just reintroduces the purpose of game genres. This is why redefining 'fun' with these terms wouldn't be constructive.
On the other hand, 'fun' is a more social term that conveys positive emotions, especially in reviews and discussions. When people promote or market a game, they intentionally prime their audience by framing it in a good light. 'Fun' is preferred because it highlights enjoyment, while 'engagement' is more neutral or harmful in some contexts.
It is about positive emotions, especially in hindsight. When redefining words or choosing the best term for a discussion, we must consider how the audience understands them. Based on Grice's Maxims for cooperation, our words should align with what the audience expects rather than what we believe to be the most accurate definition.