Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more.
What is fun? I’m very much struggling with this question after extended sessions on No Man’s Sky. About twenty hours in, I simply stopped shooting at the 38th giant gold formation I’d started strip mining and just downed tools.
It was my epiphany moment, that moment of clarity when your brain just says, “I’m doing the thing so I can do the thing more later.” In this case, I was collecting gold so I could sell the gold so I could buy a bigger ship to collect more gold. And that was it. My connection to the game just shut down.
I felt like I’d spent twenty hours piss-arsing around a few star systems for no reason. Well, in that case, I thought, time to go off and do something more fun. It’s nearly two weeks until Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, so what do I turn to?
I know! Diablo 3. I love Diablo 3! I’ve put in well over 600 hours across multiple versions on Xbox 360, PC, Xbox One and PS4, getting all the achievements and trophies in all the console versions. I love the game’s simplicity at face value, and depth if want to mess around with character builds.
That being said, I finished the game a while ago and have spent the last 200 hours playing Adventure Mode trying to get all the best gear for my characters, leveling up gems to make them incrementally better and gaining paragon points to infinitesmally improve my guys. The reason behind this? So I can play the game on harder difficulties to get marginally better gear. Oh, wait…
I’m doing the thing so I can do the thing more later.
So that leads me to the question – what is fun? Perhaps more relevantly – am I having fun? Am I enjoying myself? The answer to all three questions is, “I don’t know.” It’s strange to think that I don’t know if I’m enjoying what I’m doing. It made me apply the the question, “is this fun?” to other games I’ve put a lot of time into.
Now, I don’t mean to necessarily apply this to narrative heavy games, although “narrative heavy” is very much a relative term in gaming. Most games, even with the most rudimentary story give me some sort of enjoyment. Like, let’s say… Hunted: The Demon’s Forge – a decent enough game teetering on mediocre with some fun co-op, but the most generic of generic stories. I had a great time playing it in co-op, but I also played it through on my own in order to learn the story. So I don’t mean that. Even the slightest bit of investment can be enough for me.
Another motivation for me is the acquisition of Achievements or Trophies. They are something I find highly enjoyable and have seen me play some games I would never have touched otherwise. I can easily see that this isn’t fun. Not by a damn sight. I have driven myself to horrendous fits of frustration just for that cheerful little plink that leaves you with a feeling of stark relief rather than a sense of fun.
There are also games with decent mechanics, like Metal Gear Solid 5. An absolute disaster of a narrative, but phenomenal gameplay. Narrative, compulsion and satisfying mechanics are things that you can easily qualify as fun and will keep me playing. The games I’m wondering about are the games I find myself playing for extended periods. The time eaters.
Borderlands springs to mind, another game I put 300 hours into, and think back on fondly. Yet, when I really think about it, what I remember the most was the horrendous grind. I put even more time into Borderlands 2 despite really, really disliking it. I played around 600 hours, continuing the game well after getting all the achievements. I kept at Borderlands 2 until I had every character at maximum level, and it felt like a grind, made all the worse by the grating characters in the game. I don’t know why I did it. However, even I dropped the Pre-Sequel the second I got all the achievements after about 50 hours.
Inversely, there have been games where I’ve felt a bit sad when I earned all the achievements, like Sacred 2. I really enjoyed the game, yet when I didn’t have the pull of achievements, my interest petered out. So, maybe fun for me is a sense of progress, of getting a little reward for what I’m doing, like a trained dog.
Is that fun? I don’t know. I really don’t.
When it comes down to it, the difference between a game like No Man’s Sky and Diablo 3 is that the designers at Blizzard are so well versed in capturing the right sights, sounds and sensations for their games that as far you can tell, you are having fun, even when all you are doing is doing the thing so you can do the thing more later. It’s an amazing, masterful illusion, one that ultimately blinds you to the grind.
The genius is – I don’t care. It has me. I can never imagine getting bored of Diablo 3. I often fantasise about another expansion pack, or DLC characters that I would throw money at like the fat fool I am. Even worse, I’m actively planning on getting a quieter Playstation 3 so I can play through both versions on that as well, without the 747 taking off sound of my old phat deafening me.
So, that would seem to be my question answered. Depressingly it seems that, for me at least, “fun” is being a trained consumer.
Oh, well.
Wull Scott 