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by setr
1284 days ago
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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. |
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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...