Can someone tell me what fun is?

This post is not about video games.

For over half of my life, probably once a day, I’ve watched another person play video games on the internet. This seems to be a common experience but not one that people often talk about. I remember the discourse around let’s plays casually morphing from “they’re essentially cheating, play the game yourself” to “why would I play a game if I can just watch it instead”.

I think we all know why these types of videos were so appealing. They coincided with an audience that was very aware of video games through magazines and people they knew, while that audience did not necessarily have the money for hardware or the games themselves. My family has never owned a television and subsequently I’ve never been able to play console games (aside from that one time I had a Swedish friend sign me up for playstation’s games streaming service, because playstation still hates Estonia).

So for our generation, this activity became pretty routine. And as time passed, the focus shifted away from the games themselves and onto the people playing the games. The gameplay is just there to be observed, the video itself is about the people who are playing the game. And so it goes, the next generation started watching northernlion when he had already perfected his craft, their entertainment is forever devoid of the context for why it was popular in the first place, because besides being popular these days, it’s also fundamentally good entertainment.

The main thing I’ve noticed from watching other people play games, is that there’s a very specific definition for what’s a fun way to play a game. It has two very important components.

1. The player does something unexpected in the game, with the knowledge that it does not necessarily progress them towards any given end goal.

2. The player knows that the game will respond in an unpredictable way, often with the possibility of an unexpected outcome that has cascading effects.

This has never been the way I play games, nor is this something I would find fun under any circumstance. It actually mostly just reads as a recipe for introducing excessive anxiety and tension into something that should be relaxing. And this isn’t to say that tension by itself can’t be fun, I like when a game makes me feel like I’m always just one mistake away from death, as long as it’s accompanied by the feeling that I am still in control over the situation as a whole.

But that isn’t fun.

For most people, that’s a boring way to play a video game, in fact.