[SpeedilyDamage]

I just... what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.

I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept. You are not the only opinion in this world, and the media and critics are incentivized to create drama.

Doom Eternal came out in 2020, and LoL is one of the most popular games of all time. SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues that had cropped up over the past decade...

Gaming has never been more diverse and well funded. It's wild to me that you see the huge selection you've got available to you and could possibly believe we're in anything but the best gaming era of all time right now.

[cogman10]

> I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept.

Ok, very simple example, are slot machines fun?

I think anyone can objectively look at a slot machine and say "no, that's really not fun". Yet, people spend their entire retirements on slot machines. People DIE pumping quarters into a slot machine. People wear diapers to slot machines. Slot machines are HIGHLY profitable for casinos (which is why they have them).

Fun and profit are not the same thing. Some games, such as Diablo Immortal, have realized that addicting is more profitable than fun. The entire game industry has learned that if you randomize rewards (loot boxes) you can trigger addiction without having a fun game.

> You are not the only opinion in this world

I'd look into the mirror before giving this advice. I realize that some people find gambling fun. Whatever floats your boat. But I also realize that there is such a thing as gambling addiction and it is highly profitable.

[setr]

The proper resolution to this is the realization that fun != good. Fun is a property of context, and anything can be made fun with the right context. Multiplayer is the greatest cheatcode to generating fun -- with friends, poking a bloating corpse and playing the ol' hoop n' stick is fun.

Fun cannot be discussed, or argued, because you cannot properly share that context with others, and you cannot deny the reality of their context.

But good is a property of the game itself -- it's essentially the answer to the question "how well does the game achieve the goals it chases, and how well does it choose its goals?". This is still somehow subjective, but dramatically less so -- we can actually discuss it in a manner that's sensible. To a degree, the discussion has to factor in that we have different beliefs of what those goals are, and whether those are good goals to have, but this is true of any judgement.

And when talking about whether a movie, book, game, etc is any good, no one gives a shit whether you had "fun" playing it, because that tells us nothing about whether its good. It just tells us "your" experience -- your specific relationship to the work -- more about you than it... but we're not talking about you.

[cogman10]

This is all well and good, and I agree, fun can be different things to different people. So can good.

But that wasn't the comment I was responding to. The comment I responded to made the positive assertion "Things are fun because they are profitable"

> what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.

If you want to change the argument to "fun is unknowable" I can get behind that statement. However, I think the slot machine example is a really good one to prove that fun and profit are not the same thing. Even if you want to argue that the slot machines can be fun, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that addicts to slots are all having a blast.

What's changed in the gaming industry is more focus on profit and less on fun. The gaming industry has learned is what B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago [1], how to get repeat behaviors out of someone with randomize rewards.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201311/us...

[SpeedilyDamage]

I think you're barking up the wrong tree here, friend. You seem to be missing my point, which is that "fun" is subjective and there simply is no definition of "fun" that applies to everyone.

Your whole "slot machine" example is predicated on my response being, "Well no, slot machines aren't fun." However, I do think slot machines are loads of fun! Not for me, but for the millions of people who sit there, spend very tiny sums of money (think like $5 for literally 12 hours of chill entertainment), and get to feel good about themselves while they do it.

[MichaelZuo]

Who gets to define 'fun'?

[cogman10]

Anything can be fun to anyone, fair enough.

That said, I reject a definition of fun that involves how profitable something is because of the slot machine example.

If fun is anything, it's not getting a diaper rash while going broke.

[MichaelZuo]

What if fun is not 'anything'?

i.e. if it were just electrical impulses going back and forth?

[cogman10]

Then it isn't anything. What's your point?

[MichaelZuo]

Then there's nothing to reject in the first place.

[whatshisface]

People vote with their dollars against their own best interest all the time - typical examples include narcotics (don't take that comparison for more than I meant it to be, it's just an example of how people buy "fun stuff" that they objectively should not) and in-app purchases in cheesy mobile games. Profit motive can only guide profit seeking companies to serve people's happiness to the extent that people can exert self control, and that doesn't work very well.

[p3rls]

You are confusing happiness with something else. The problem of language dominates these conversations, and by not being careful you risk being refuted by Plato's Socrates 2500 years ago in the Meno among other things.

[whatshisface]

You could substitute almost any definition of happiness in my comment and the argument would still work.

[HWR_14]

I don't remember anything Plato said refuting what the GP said.

[ferrumfist]

> SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues

I feel like tossing in a patch from SC2 as an indicator that it's actively being supported is a little misleading. SC2 had the opportunity to compete with LoL and Dota2 for viewership but Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes with the first expansion that alienated players and sent them to LoL, Dota2, or CSGO.

Their game design philosophy and slow patch rhythm sabotaged the momentum that the pro scene had been building (warp gate tech, infinite value units like Brood Lords and Swarm Hosts, frontloading all Terran power into Stim units, etc). They also catered the ladder experience solely for competitive players, they didn't introduce many (if any) casual-friendly modes until far too late.

[sylens]

They also broke SC2 into three $60 boxes products, segmenting the multiplayer each time, right at the dawn of the free to play MOBA era on PC. My entire SC2 friend group ditched Heart of the Swarm for League of Legends and never looked back.

Wings of Liberty was a great time, though.

[quartesixte]

That triple expansion pack model tanked SC2.

But also, just not being able to play cooperatively with friends was the final death knell. SC was designed for an era where you played alone and then you played against others who played alone because there weren’t a lot of anyone playing SC or anything really.

LoL unlocked an entire demographic of kids who wanted to play with friends. A great explosion in online VC tech helped foster this and the rest is history. Gaming is now a social activity and all the top sellers right now effectively leverage this.

[shrimp_emoji]

It's kind of unsubstantiatable, but I think capitalism is fundamentally a poor fit for "high quality art".

The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.

You can argue that the super hero movies of today and the remakes are "better" than older movies on the best objective metric we have (how much revenue they generate), and that we're in "the best era of film of all time" right now, but... I don't know who truly believes that, subjectively. :p It feels wild to believe that. I certainly don't, and I don't for gaming either.

Funny story: I got Doom Eternal about a year after it came out. I needed to make an account, even though I only play singleplayer. When first opening it, I got bombarded by pop-ups from a dozen DLC and update cycles, like a little history of its updates thus far. I cringed at the social media-like network integration stuff in the main menu. I play for a few days. On like the fourth day, when opening the game, this pop-up appears in-game, but it's empty. It's like some network notice, but it's broken. The pop-up is blank. There's no way to get past it. Nothing helps. The game essentially bricked itself via its own botnet bloatware (a thing an older game would never do). Apparently, it happens to console and PC users alike, and there was no solution around it. It's as if it accidentally ripped you, the user, off, in that a digital product just stopped working. (Let's not even mention the plight of future gamers trying to simulate the always-online DRM so they can play it in an emulator. Hey--at least Bethesda removed the kernel-level anticheat following backlash, allowing the game to run on Linux again!) Luckily, even though I was past the usual playtime limit, Steam gave me a full refund. :D

Also, Diablo Immortal is probably more profitable than all the previous Diablo games put together, and I'll leave it to you to decide if that's a case where profitability or even popularity maps with whatever we truly mean by "quality".

[leetcrew]

> The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.

I agree, a lot of parallels can be drawn between modern AAA games and superhero movies. the quest to reach the largest market has resulted in products without much in the way of nuance or new ideas. this is kinda what you have to do if you're going to spend $250mm on a game or movie. even achieving wide appeal within a single large country isn't enough to reliably make that back; you have to make something appealing (or at least inoffensive) to most of the world.

at the same time, I think you are missing just how much the gaming market has expanded since 10-20 years ago. while very successful for their time, games like halflife are very niche by today's standards. there's no like-for-like comparison between cod:mw2 and a game from the early/mid 2000s.

if you expect AAA games in 2023 to scratch the same itch as they did back then, you will surely be disappointed. they aren't designed for the same audience. but by and large, more money is available to fund development for all sorts of games today. concepts that would have been a janky mod for some other games ~20 years ago are full-fledged titles of their own now. ymmv of course, but I find that when I lose the expectation for modern AAA-level graphics, there are tons of great new games available in recent years.

[joveian]

I agree, I've played a bunch of games recently due to being disabled and in the 90s and there have been many really excellent games in the past decade. While I'm sure there were some at the time, I can't remember playing any that had a particularly "artistic" feel to them in the 90s, while I've played a number recently. Games like RiME, 8doors, Hollow Knight, Little Bug, Wolfstride, Rakuen, 140, The Witness, most of Amanita's games, The Longest Road on Earth (arguably more a music video than game, but still), The Talos Principle, Haven, Arise, and Golf Club Wasteland all have a strong artistic feel to me and I enjoyed them (up through some of Amanita's are some of my favorites), and a bunch more have just a bit less distinctly artistic feel IMO (like Guacamelee, Beatbuddy, A Short Hike, or Calico, also some of my favorites). Of course, different people have different ideas what makes a game "artistic" and enjoy different types of games.

GOG still exists to avoid most single player DRM issues (some games have limited single player content that requires an internet connection) and with a better refund policy, although unfortunately they don't have good Linux support. I have an entirely offline game system and rarely have any kind of issue due to that (Zachtronics games are some of the worst since you can't see how well you did on a level without an internet connection, unless they changed that since I last tried one a few years ago). GOG has about 4500 games at this point (catalog shows a few hundred more with "hide DLC and extras" but some are miscategorized DLC), not nearly as many as Steam but still quite a few (unfortunately, some developers don't keep the GOG version up to date).