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When did Fun become a dirty word?
Posted Oct 03, 2011 by Vertices News
When did Fun become a dirty word? Did I miss a memo? Pretty much everywhere I look these days, I see blog posts and comments and forums full of people railing at each other, and the MMO genre; telling people off for wanting things to be “fun”, for wanting to “enjoy themselves”, for not enjoying things that are “too difficult” and not least of all, “using sneering quote marks” too much. I must confess bewilderment at this point. I thought fun was the whole point of the exercise, no?
It’s a subjective thing and different for everyone, but I find it hard to believe that there are folks out there, real live human beings with internet access and everything, who seem to be opposed to the concept of fun itself, heaping scorn on it as if it were a merely minor distraction from the serious business at hand. Careless fun costs lives! Lately the objections seem to arise from the same usual topics.
Firstly, the eternal Difficulty Debate, which is actually very easy to solve. Game designers should offer more user selectable difficulty modes (Lotro Skirmish settings and Tiers, Guild Wars Hard Mode, WoW Heroic/Normal Instances? DDO Dungeon Door Menus, Etc), and then players should stop giving a damn how much easier a time of it other people might be having and focus on playing the game that they enjoy.
Banging on about The Good Old days, talking about rampant unwanted always-on PvP in UO, or 2000 hour level progressions in EQ is amusing, but unhelpful. Those days are unlikely to return any time soon, but there are niche games today that still uphold those ideals; EVE, Darkfall, Wurm Online, EQ Progression Servers, Anarchy Online, A Tale in the Desert. Go play those. The only reason one could find to object to end game content being also available in a user-selectable face-roll option, is that you hate other people and don’t want them to enjoy themselves. Afterall, if you are never going to pick the face-roll option yourself, why should it matter that it is there at all? Someone got the same pixel loot as you with far less effort? I thought the effort was its own reward, surely? Whatever happened to Quiet Satisfaction?
This does cut both ways though, and people should also stop bitching about the inaccessibility of end-game raid content they’ll never see, because odds are, if you aren’t there doing it already, you’re probably not going to enjoy it if you do actually get there. Hell, to hear of it, most of the people who are already doing it now aren’t enjoying it either. I’m not even sure is about enjoyment at that stage anyway, more obsession. The only reason one could find to demand the reengineering of a part of the game you aren’t using anyway, is that you hate the people currently using it and want them to have less fun. See above re: focusing on the bits of the game you do enjoy.
If its not that, it’s F2P is Killing Gaming. What with DCUO throwing in the Subscription towel, it’s pretty much just WoW and SWTOR left now and I doubt those will be long. Again, an easily solved problem; almost all the western MMO conversions of recent years offer a VIP pricing option which is basically just the normal subscription. Go sign up for that if regulated monthly payments are important to you.
I’ve always thought that a F2P ala carte menu is in fact a laser-like scalpel of consumer power. With a monthly sub game, you have one single point of binary feedback. You either Like Entire Game or Don’t Like Entire Game, and you vote with the entire subscription; yes, no. Free to play is far more discriminatory. Yes, unscrupulous manufacturers of Skinner Boxes can erect pay walls everywhere in them, but here’s the thing, we don’t have to pay. If these games add something stupid to the cash shop, we can boycott or ignore it. They soon get the message and don’t try that nonsense again. Only giving them money for bits of the game you like, is also sending a message. It’s all very Darwinian and free market, I’m sure. Mind you, if everyone else is sending the wrong kind of message, then its probably time to seek out a more on-message niche to go play in.
It does all require us to exercise a certain willpower though, and to inform each other. Instead of cranking out yet another tired old misanthropic rant about how crap all other players are, about how the casuals are ruining everything and about how no one likes eating broken glass anymore, and how that this is a bad thing for the industry, why not redirect some of that withering criticism at individual cash shop items. Let’s have some analytical scorn I can use! Casual Stroll to Mordor do a good job at this with their recommendations bit for Lotro’s store, reviewing individual deals and such; I want to see more people dissecting the cash shops in other games! There’s probably a real blogging niche to be filled there for the dedicated, enterprising, unjaded, multi-game would-be blogologist. This is a dawning age of consumer review of features, not just reviews of whole games, because the feature is the new smallest unit of game purchase. They way I see it, Free to Play is a great thing for us, the players, but we have to organise, and have to learn to use it to our advantage, and not theirs.
I’ve never heard of a F2P MMO changing to a monthly sub model, so I guess the F2P world is here to stay. Instead of bitching about a lost golden age all the time, let’s use some of that famed adaptability that we hate the casuals so much for not possessing, and make the F2P age work for us. Only buy the stuff you want to. Make the buggers work hard for their MicroPoints! Also, stop giving a damn if Johnny Random wants to buy his way to the end of the game. He’ll be satiated soon enough and in the mean time he’s subsidising your free character-building broken-glass crawl. Everyone wins! Unless of course, you simply hate Johnny Random and want him to have less fun than you, in which case, rant! Rail! Be cross on the internet! I enjoy watching people be cross on the internet – it’s a lot like screaming at a tornado; its exhilarating and cathartic, but no one can hear you over the sound of their own screaming, and ultimately you just end up with a face full of high speed airborne cattle.
Because it is the internet, and therefore I am right and you are wrong, I thought I’d list some of my own thoughts on fun. Fun facts! Please imagine it’s a funky Storybricks diagram if that helps you relax!
- I like fun things, and dislike things which are not fun.
- Only I know if I am having fun or not.
- If I am asking myself if I am having fun, I am not having fun.
- If I have lost a game, and did not have fun doing so, it is probably not a good game. It might not even be a game.
- If someone else has to have less fun so I can have more fun, I have less fun.
- If someone else that I like has fun, I have fun.
- If someone else that I like is not having fun, I have less fun.Sometimes people are fun.
- If something is too easy, I have less fun.
- If something is too difficult, I have less fun.
- Only I know what too easy and too difficult are.
- Doing a fun thing lots of times makes it less fun.
- Doing a thing that isn’t fun for the first time makes it more fun.
- If I have to do a lot of things that are not fun, to have fun at some later date, the net result is usually a deficit of fun over the total financial quarter.
- Fun cannot be stored.
- If a thing is described as character building, it is generally as an apology for it not being fun.
- I try to avoid things that are not fun, especially in my spare time.
- People sometimes pay me when I do things that are not fun.
- I sometimes pay people so that I can do things that are fun.
Your own observations may vary, which I think is probably the core of the problem. In a way it’s quite distressing, to see so many people so apparently miserable because of things going on in and to a hobby which should always primarily be about having fun. Perhaps the ranting is a fun kind of metagame in itself, a perfectly reasonable reaction to not having fun doing the actual thing that was supposed to be fun in the first place. Or something!
I’ll finish this glib undirected counter-rant with the advice I give all my friends when facing gaming angst, injustice, uncertainty and burnout – If it isn’t fun, stop playing! Plenty of other games out there, and to be honest, if week after week, all you are posting is the myriad ways in which Game X is rubbish, one does have to wonder why you still play Game X at all. Go try Game Y for a bit!
I shall indeed be trying to follow my own advice, and if my Cohost’s ongoing breakdown is any guide, do look out for lots more future posts here that are nothing to do with computer games at all!