|
Fun doesn’t mean anything, and people have fun regardless of whether a game or feature is good. My goto example is multiplayer is basically a hack on fun — anything is fun if you’re with your friends; from well-defined sports to poking a bloating corpse. But going further, fun is not found in any particular feature; it’s an outcome of the total system. A game can be described as fun, or a sequence of events, but you can’t say that a helicopter spawn in an FPS is fun, or not, without further diving into all of the surrounding context. And you dig deep enough and you realize that it’s not the helicopter specifically that you’re looking for — it’s the action-space it enables, or the potential counter-play (or lack thereof), or the satisfaction in steering, or that it’s simply the act of being rewarded for skilled play, or whatever. Fun is at best a description that the game and its mechanisms didn’t impede the mechanisms you enjoyed operating. It’s also why you have an internet argument where someone says “this game is not good, for reasons x,y,z”, and the response is simply “but I enjoyed it”, and it blows up into a nonsensical mess — the two are talking about totally different things; fun is only marginally correlated with good |