The "It's Just Fun" Principle

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time for the SNES was my favorite multiplayer game during the “before liking fighting games” part of my childhood. A couple of my neighbors would come over and I would insist on picking Leonardo because he represented my desire to lead my not-as-skilled neighbors in battle against the Foot; they would either agree to this stipulation, or they would have to face me kicking them out of my house, followed immediately by me sobbing uncontrollably as I would no longer have friends.

Since there was no multitap function for the game, everyone had to switch off in rotation every time someone had lost a life. Eventually we beat the game on Normal, then Hard, and even tried tried to beat the game without continuing. Hours and hours were poured into such a simple arcade game. It was a game where you could talk trash about how much the other person sucked or lagged behind. It was a game with a linear goal, yet it successfully drew you in and got you to play it multiple times. It was game that was just stupid fun.

"This guy is a jerk!" - me, age 7
"This guy is a DICK." - me, age 23

The video game industry has evolved and grown quite a bit since Turtles in Time, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of deflating complexity in games. With growth comes more needs in what gamers want. I see the modern video gaming enthusiast as looking for most, sometimes all, of the following criteria met in order for a game to be considered “good:"

Graphics/art direction: How appealing does the game look? Does it look vivacious/realistic/unique, or is it Brown Next Gen Shooter #45 with PS1-esque blocky polygons?

Characters and Narrative: Will I get an enriched narrative and multi-dimensional characters, or will I get a Buff/Bald Space/Future Marine/Soldier/squirrel saving the ____ from an army of ____?

Longevity/Replayability: Sometimes this means a game is short, but encourages multiple playthroughs. Sometimes this means the game is fairly long (typically found in RPGs), but has many optional things to do to increase the game’s length. Sometimes the game is only 2 hours long with no multiplayer and no redeeming replayability but you already paid $60 for it and you feel like a piece of sh!t for that Gamestop employee convincing you to partake in such a terrible investment (you horrible person). More on single-player length can be found here.

Optimization: Did the game go through Quality Assurance with the utmost care, resulting in minimal bugs and performance issues, or is it Sonic the Hedgehog 2006?

Sound/Music: Does the game feature a riveting soundtrack, with musical pieces that blend well with the scenes/situations you come across, or was it done by some community college stoner that the producers paid $50 bucks to do on Garage Band? Bonus if they paid the Crazy Bus guy to do it.

Multiplayer Component: Is the multiplayer component well implemented? Or was it poorly tacked on because someone exec told the lead developers of a turned-based RPG that the game “totally needs online co-op, dudes”?

Value: Do all of the factors above (and below) merge together to get a worthy package in relation to its price, or wow damn I just paid $199 for Action 52.

Other factors: Does it live up to the franchise? Is the difficulty fair? Does the gameplay remain “fresh” or is it repetitive? Will it let me order pizza in-game? What level(s) of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs will I achieve (or neglect) by beating the game? How “anime” is the game? How artsy/intellectual is the game? (i.e. will I achieve existential enlightenment from beating it? Like, for example,"Braid?” Haven't heard of it? Well, heh, let me tell you thatjd.sgam,vdlkvjalsdkjta)

Will the game allow me to imagine "Babyz??" Perhaps at a party???

"Now, what the hell does all of this have to do with the title of the article, Jason? What kind of unorganized, incoherent-” Well, lets go back to Turtles in Time. When you were a kid, you didn't care about any of the above nitpicks. All you cared about was whether or not a game was fun to play with either by yourself or with other people (and maybe graphics). As your little gamer nerd-self grew up, these factors mentioned above started to take over, and a lot of people start to rate games based on criteria such as this and miss the fun. I've been a victim of this, and I've criticized many a game for a deficiency or absence of many of these aspects, and the concept of “fun” gets shoveled away with shoddy scores in these attributes.

The industry is aware of this sentiment, and have definitely been making games with the sole intention of making them as “fun” as possible. For example – Left 4 Dead is a game where you and three other buds kill zombies over and over in order to survive segments of a campaign. On the surface, it's a blast to blast zombies, the character personalities are memorable, and it has an arcadey feel that's good for those initial co-op good times with your bros or your girlfriend(s) or your grandparents or whoever you like to shoot stuff with.

However, in my eyes, the game falls flat in terms of it being “good” as described by the criteria above. Lets not lie to ourselves – it's a Source engine mod that cost $50-$60 dollars on launch. It's a game in which a big company such as Valve could tack on 4 maps (with promised free DLC, i.e. only one new map), with no other goal in the game other than going from checkpoint A to checkpoint B and sell it to your FPS-craving ass for full premium. There's virtually no storyline, and the whole campaign can be beaten with your friends (depending on how good they are) on Hard in under 3 hours. Repeating the campaigns with my roommates got stale, and I felt like I've already seen and done everything the game has to offer besides the Versus mode (which is cool in itself but I would have rather seen it more fleshed out). On top of that, Valve controversially released Left 4 Dead 2 a year later as a standalone game (once again, $50-$60) rather than promised DLC, and it was, for all intents and purposes, the same thing but with wacky weapons and 3 more zombie types. Oh, and daytime stages too, I guess. Yippee.

How do you make a fun-ass game even more fun??? Chainsaws!!! Ahahahahaha!!!!!!

Remember, this is all viewed under whether or not it fits the validity of a what makes a “good” game. You can argue that it's supposed to be arcadey and that “it's just fun, dude,” and then the stark realization that my article finally came full circle thematically will manifest itself in your brain and will finally make you and I content with this entire blog post.

We shouldn't simply denounce the “it's just fun” argument. Nor am I advocating a game should only be "good." I just think that the industry has partitioned these two aspects of gaming as separate but not equal, and that the true gems out there are a good combination of what one thinks a game is both good AND fun. Remember, this dichotomy is completely subjective, and whatever I think is fun and good could be an exercise in boredom/frustration to another (for example: me enjoying 2D style fighting games).

But what if a “good” game isn't fun? What's the point in playing a well put-together game if you aren't having fun with it, right? I've honestly read and/or talked to people who have played “good” games like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves or Super Mario Galaxy 2 and seriously cannot have fun with them. It's just not their thing. And that's okay, because the concepts of “good” and “fun” in video games look simple but are very perplexing and there's nothing we can do about it.


Video games. Definitely much less stressful when I mashed the "Y" button as an anthropomorphic turtle.