The slashdot headline was Academic Games Are No Fun, which links to an article describing some researchers' experience attempting to develop a game called Arden.
One of the slashdot commenters had the same thought I did:
"A MMORPG needs puzzles and monsters? What about Second Life and Club Penguin? And why is it so hard to add them? $250,000 is quite a lot if you think in terms of 'how much you'd have to pay five geeks to set up a vitrual [sic] world in a month'."
My first thought went to the Will Wright oeuvre, actually. This actually gets at a *definitional problem with the notion of a GAME* which I hope to think through in the spring's class... but I've got grading to do first. Huizinga has written some helpful stuff on it, but the *fun* thing actually throws a bit of a monkey wrench into his theories.
I'm unfamiliar with Club Penguin, but whether Second Life counts as a game is, I think, grist for the class's mill. I don't doubt that it's a virtual world, but I don't think it's right to claim that all virtual worlds are games. In fact, one of the things people started doing almost immediately in Second Life was implement games inside the virtual world.
As to Will Wright: I don't think people would play SimCity if they didn't find it fun.
Those of us who really enjoyed doing LOGO Writer in elementary school ended up being programmers.
I'm unfamiliar with Club Penguin too, but I can only assume it's a penguin-clubbing simulator, and what could be more fun than that?
The definition of *fun* here is slipping, as you turn to Wil Wright and your own experience with LOGO Writer, into the entirely arbitrary/subjective. It certainly would necessarily include virtual worlds; if I could stick a feather in my cap -- and enjoy it -- than that would be fun too.
I suppose it's no surprise that the notion of fun can *not* have an objective definition: and so a game's "fun-factor" cannot be a measure of whether or not it's a game -- it cannot even be measured.
In other words, the criticism of ARDEN which takes the form of "but it doesn't include puzzles and monsters" is pretty much nil; any criticism of ARDEN as insufficiently *fun* is simply a matter of entirely subjective opinion.
But this does *not* ring true to me -- so I think the definition of the word *fun* itself may be the problem...
Perhaps you object to a rather simplistic conflation of "Puzzles and Monsters" with fun, and I agree. Nonetheless, socially constructed or not, I don't think the sense of "fun" here need be formal enough to merit being problematic. Of course the question of personal enjoyment is subjective. But if people don't enjoy something, isn't it reasonable to shorten a more Theoretically correct statement about subjective realities and slippery, non-objective terminology into "it turned out the game wasn't fun" a fair shorthand? As a game designer who wants people to use his game, it hardly matters whether there's a universal, objective definition of fun, it matters that people aren't having it when playing his game.
That being said, the more carefully I read your comments on the definition of fun, the less they make sense to me. Your statements about what can and cannot be defined or measured seem unmotivated, or at least based on folk wisdom ("nothing is objective", "people can disagree, so there's no one right answer, etc"). I doubt any concept worth discussing will lack the ambiguities that make them problematic here. I agree that the nature of fun is a worthwhile discussion to have with respect to games, but haven't the questions of the form "What is X? What makes Y be X is a matter of purely subjective opinion, and therefore cannot have an objective definition, so we can't use X as a meaningful criterion for Z, can we?" been covered? Maybe in the '80s?
I think the two conversations we're having on two separate journals are melting together a bit.
But for this one, I'm building Turing's proverbial bridge next semester, and need to employ some strategic idealism and move on to a practical question:
Well, practical-ish:
Can a game's "fun level" be measured? If so, how? If not, how can we judge a game's gaminess based on its capaciy for fun?
And doesn't the statement "Well it was fun for me, maybe not for you" make measuring fun difficult? Or are we working with majority vote? The majority of whom?
Fifty years down the line, ideas of fun change a great deal -- lots of what was "fun" to folks in 1950 is hardly fun to me -- if Second Life is "fun" now, but the majority sways a different direction later on, does it become less a game, or not a game? What is it, then?
5 comments:
One of the slashdot commenters had the same thought I did:
"A MMORPG needs puzzles and monsters? What about Second Life and Club Penguin? And why is it so hard to add them? $250,000 is quite a lot if you think in terms of 'how much you'd have to pay five geeks to set up a vitrual [sic] world in a month'."
My first thought went to the Will Wright oeuvre, actually. This actually gets at a *definitional problem with the notion of a GAME* which I hope to think through in the spring's class... but I've got grading to do first. Huizinga has written some helpful stuff on it, but the *fun* thing actually throws a bit of a monkey wrench into his theories.
I'm unfamiliar with Club Penguin, but whether Second Life counts as a game is, I think, grist for the class's mill. I don't doubt that it's a virtual world, but I don't think it's right to claim that all virtual worlds are games. In fact, one of the things people started doing almost immediately in Second Life was implement games inside the virtual world.
As to Will Wright: I don't think people would play SimCity if they didn't find it fun.
Those of us who really enjoyed doing LOGO Writer in elementary school ended up being programmers.
I'm unfamiliar with Club Penguin too, but I can only assume it's a penguin-clubbing simulator, and what could be more fun than that?
The definition of *fun* here is slipping, as you turn to Wil Wright and your own experience with LOGO Writer, into the entirely arbitrary/subjective. It certainly would necessarily include virtual worlds; if I could stick a feather in my cap -- and enjoy it -- than that would be fun too.
I suppose it's no surprise that the notion of fun can *not* have an objective definition: and so a game's "fun-factor" cannot be a measure of whether or not it's a game -- it cannot even be measured.
In other words, the criticism of ARDEN which takes the form of "but it doesn't include puzzles and monsters" is pretty much nil; any criticism of ARDEN as insufficiently *fun* is simply a matter of entirely subjective opinion.
But this does *not* ring true to me -- so I think the definition of the word *fun* itself may be the problem...
Perhaps you object to a rather simplistic conflation of "Puzzles and Monsters" with fun, and I agree. Nonetheless, socially constructed or not, I don't think the sense of "fun" here need be formal enough to merit being problematic. Of course the question of personal enjoyment is subjective. But if people don't enjoy something, isn't it reasonable to shorten a more Theoretically correct statement about subjective realities and slippery, non-objective terminology into "it turned out the game wasn't fun" a fair shorthand? As a game designer who wants people to use his game, it hardly matters whether there's a universal, objective definition of fun, it matters that people aren't having it when playing his game.
That being said, the more carefully I read your comments on the definition of fun, the less they make sense to me. Your statements about what can and cannot be defined or measured seem unmotivated, or at least based on folk wisdom ("nothing is objective", "people can disagree, so there's no one right answer, etc"). I doubt any concept worth discussing will lack the ambiguities that make them problematic here. I agree that the nature of fun is a worthwhile discussion to have with respect to games, but haven't the questions of the form "What is X? What makes Y be X is a matter of purely subjective opinion, and therefore cannot have an objective definition, so we can't use X as a meaningful criterion for Z, can we?" been covered? Maybe in the '80s?
I think the two conversations we're having on two separate journals are melting together a bit.
But for this one, I'm building Turing's proverbial bridge next semester, and need to employ some strategic idealism and move on to a practical question:
Well, practical-ish:
Can a game's "fun level" be measured? If so, how? If not, how can we judge a game's gaminess based on its capaciy for fun?
And doesn't the statement "Well it was fun for me, maybe not for you" make measuring fun difficult? Or are we working with majority vote? The majority of whom?
Fifty years down the line, ideas of fun change a great deal -- lots of what was "fun" to folks in 1950 is hardly fun to me -- if Second Life is "fun" now, but the majority sways a different direction later on, does it become less a game, or not a game? What is it, then?
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