What Makes Video Games Fun?

A lot of "hardcore gamers" (regardless of whether they identify themselves as such) will tell you that the video game industry is in sad shape. It's not just because of the past decade's unfortunate shift toward increasingly more intrusive digital rights management, or the recent trend of releasing "extra" downloadable content on day one to encourage thoughtless and irresponsible pre-orders, or the deliberate efforts to use both DRM and DLC to destroy the used game market. Rather, it's because they think that too many of the games being released today are crap.

And they're not just talking about shovelware that nobody buys. This is popular crap. So what's up with all the hate? Well, it should be no surprise that the games which tend to attract the most violently negative attention are always the popular ones. After all, if you want to complain about a genre, a feature, a console, or a developer, you pick a popular game as an example, and then you claim that the chosen game means the downfall of gaming as we know it. This has been happening for a long time. But in the past few years, I've been reluctant to shrug it off as the usual fanboyism, hipsterism, and attention-seeking antics of a vocal minority. It's more likely indicative of something else.

As I see it, this backlash is due to recent changes in the industry which aren't entirely imaginary. The industry is, in fact, changing, and not just in response to the emergence of nearly ubiquitous high-speed internet service, which facilitates digital distribution and piracy alike. Video games have changed also because of their growing audience. Thanks to cell phones, social networking sites, and a few other things which should never have games on them, games have crossed farther into the mainstream than ever before. Meanwhile, those who played video games back when it was an obscure hobby reserved only for children and computer geeks have grown up, and some of them are still playing. It's only understandable that some of these old-schoolers would be a bit shocked by the current state of things.

So, what is the current state of things?

It's complicated, and there are a lot of little topics I'd like to bring up — e.g., how girls went from "eww, you play video games, you're such a nerd" to "hey, I can be a gamer too" and "tee hee, I'm such a nerd" — but most of these things are too far off-topic and will have to wait for some other week. Simply put, if I can allow myself to get to the point, casual games and social networking have taken over. It's not hard to see that this is an expected (and perhaps necessary) consequence of video games getting a slice of that mainstream pie.

Games directed at casual players get a lot of hate, particularly from the more "hardcore" gamers, many of whom grew up when video games were considerably less forgiving than the ones made today. For these players, the whole point of a game is to provide a challenge. Winning should be a struggle; that's what makes it so satisfying. This is why they fail to understand the casual audience. More importantly, this is why they're angered not only by strictly casual games but also by the perceived "casualization" of modern games as a whole.

Are the majority of today's video games a lot easier than the ones of my childhood? You bet. But is this really a terrible thing? Not necessarily. Difficult games still exist, and we should keep in mind that a lot of older games were only hard because of their lack of a save feature. (Wouldn't a lot of modern games be damn near impossible to beat if saving weren't an option?) Other old games were stupidly hard because of poor design, and still others were intentionally made difficult because they were short and would have been beaten too quickly if they weren't frustratingly hard to finish. (Truly master Super Mario Bros. and you can beat it in less than five minutes; without using warp zones, it can still be done in less than half an hour.) Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, playtime can be extended in ways that don't involve dying repeatedly, and games can be entertaining for reasons other than sheer difficulty.

So now we get to ask an interesting question. What actually makes video games fun? Some say it's the challenge, while others will say it's the story/characters/immersion (for single-player games) or the social experience (for multiplayer games). Still others, I suspect, would say they just like to blow things up. In reality, for most people, it's a combination of all of the above.

How much, in particular, should difficulty matter? From the developer's point of view, a game should be difficult enough to entertain the experienced players — to let them know that winning takes effort so that winning feels good — but easy enough to avoid alienating the casual players who might not even bother to finish a game if it frustrates them at all. Personally, I think most developers have done a pretty good job of accomplishing this. Say what you will about the harm caused by pandering to the casual audience, but most games worth playing have multiple difficulty levels, the easiest of which is usually tame enough for "casuals" and the hardest of which is usually a challenge for anyone who never played the game before. Nobody should be disappointed unless a developer makes a serious miscalculation.

This is why I was surprised to see such a negative reaction to this article on Kotaku a little more than a week ago, in which Luke Plunkett gives a fairly reasonable rebuttal to Assassin's Creed III lead designer Alex Hutchinson's (rather preposterous) claim that "easy mode often ruins games." (It's kind of funny because Assassin's Creed, a game with only one difficulty, isn't that hard, and the same is true of all the sequels I've played.) I'm not a big fan of Kotaku, nor am I a fan of Luke Plunkett, but I have to agree with him here. At least, I agree with his headline. A game can't be ruined by a difficulty setting.

I'm willing to say that the "easy mode" of a game can often be the worst version of that game, as Hutchinson claims, but the inclusion of an easy mode surely doesn't spoil the whole game unless it's the only mode available. Don't like easy mode? Play on hard. If the harder settings are still too easy, or if they do nothing but make the game more tedious, you've picked a bad game. If the harder settings are locked until the easier ones are completed, you better hope the easier settings are hard enough to keep you entertained for a single playthrough; otherwise, you've picked a bad game. Bad game design happens, but if you're blaming it solely on the inclusion of an "easy" mode, you're probably overlooking a deeper problem.

Still, I won't say I agree with Plunkett completely, since he has entirely different reasons for disagreeing with Hutchinson's argument. Specifically, he makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't care about difficulty at all, and that he plays story-driven games only for the story. He probably wouldn't mind if a game like Assassin's Creed III consisted of no interaction besides "press X to continue." And if you're like this, you probably should ask yourself why you're playing games at all, rather than watching movies or reading books. If, on the other hand, you can appreciate the unique things that games have to offer, instead of just complaining that everything is too hard, then your idea of "fun" is just as valid as that of the hardcore gamer dude who plays everything on the hardest setting and skips all the cutscenes.

So where do I stand?

Let's just say I was more than a little annoyed by the fact that it's literally impossible to lose in the 2008 version of Prince of Persia. I won't go so far as to say that the protagonist of a game needs to be able to die, and "losing" is hardly a setback in any game with a save option (assuming you use it often enough), but being automatically revived after every fall in PoP 2008 seemed like a step down from the rewind system in The Sands of Time, which actually required some minimal skill and had limits. If there's no consequence for falling off a cliff, the sense of danger and suspense is gone and the game becomes only tedious where it might otherwise have been exciting.

On the other hand, you know I'm a sucker for story-driven games, and the need for a genuine challenge can be subverted by decision-making and role-playing elements. Since Choose Your Own Adventure books were terrible and there's no equivalent in the movie world, I think it's pretty safe to say that the existing technology used for video games is the ideal medium for straight-up interactive fiction. I see no reason not to take advantage of this. The problem is that what might be described most accurately as interactive fiction, and not as a traditional video game, will nevertheless remain stuck under the category of video games. This tends to generate all the wrong expectations. Story-driven titles are often criticized for having too much "story" and not enough "game" (even if the developer's primary objective, admittedly, was to tell a story).

Regardless of how far a developer decides to take the storytelling aspect of a product, and regardless of what you call it, the fact is that difficulty (and, indeed, gameplay itself) often matters less when story matters more, and if you're looking for a serious challenge, you should probably stay away from plot-driven games, even ones like Assassin's Creed. They make it difficult enough that any given mission might take two or three attempts, but they know they're not serving the hardcore crowd exclusively. Sometimes, though, I think the hardcore crowd still hasn't caught on.