The game I think of is Scorn, which met with a rather mixed critical reception from general audiences largely because it’s not fun. The combat is awkward and sticky and mostly not worth it, the environments are confusing to navigate and everything’s really gross. It’s like being stuck in a giant dried-out butchered horse carcass. Thing is though, I get the strong impression that that’s absolutely the intended experience. It’s a horror game, it’s trying to invoke sensations of dread, disgust, discomfort and lots of other words that start with D. How better to make us afraid than by making our methods of fighting back kinda shitty? Basically every survival horror game does that to one degree or another.

This is why I don’t like using words like “fun,” especially as a universal metric for video games. Scorn isn’t “fun” but it does succeed in what it’s trying to do. I.e., gross me the fuck out. I keep saying the whole point of consuming entertainment media is to induce emotions in yourself to explore the furthest regions of experience, at the risk of sounding like a fucking cenobite. And it can be just as viscerally rewarding to experience fear, sadness and anger as well as joy. So I don’t say “fun,” I say “engagement.” I do feel like a game has to “engage”, emotionally, if it wants a positive review from me, at least.

But then we get to the second case study that comes up in the question of “do games have to be engaging”: our old friend, the live service game. Because I noticed in the response to my recent video about gear grinding in triple-A games and how it cannot possibly be there to enhance the experience, there were a lot of commenters saying “Oh shut up you big miseryguts, I like playing live service grindathons and deliberately seek them out, what do you think of that, you big games as art snob. Ooh, you’ll go to bat for Scorn ‘cos it engages people in nonstandard ways that you think are valid but when Gotham Knights engages people in its own way, ooh, no, that’s the wrong way, that is. Double standard much?”

Well I never said there’s anything wrong with enjoying a grindathon game. You know what? I enjoy them as well. Playing a mindless repetitive task to keep my lizard brain occupied while my higher brain listens to podcasts and video essays about long forgotten 90’s DOS games and the people who love them is one my favourite ways to unwind. But I wouldn’t say that I was engaged by the games, in this case. It’s the precise opposite, really, I’m using the game to deliberately DISengage my brain. Does that make it less valid? That’s another semantic disaster area. What do we mean by valid? And it doesn’t matter, anyway. What matters is if a service is being provided that people want, and evidently that’s very much the case. Millions of people buy and play grindathon triple-A games, validity be damned.

I suppose my worry is that there’s been a breakdown in our mutual definitions. I define video games as a means by which we can have wonderful new experiences that stimulate our hearts and minds, much like every other form of artistic expression. But it seems a lot of people have a conflicting definition of video games as just a thing you do with your hands when you’re bored. Like Popping Bubble Wrap. Or tapping a pen on the edge of a desk. And I worry that that definition has been getting excessive focus and emphasis in the mainstream sector, to the point that a lot of people have been led to believe that it’s all they should expect.

I think of people who say they like live service grindathons and want to play them all the time the way I’d think of someone who eats a bowl of Raisin Bran for every meal of every day, saying hey, I’m getting enough of the basic nutrients required to stop my body from ceasing to function, what does it matter? Obviously it’s none of my business, sure, and if you are genuinely happy with that then, that’s almost admirable, but I really think it would absolutely rock your world if you’d just give, say, Coco Pops a chance.

Indulge me as I go on a little tangent for a while because when we talk about whether or not games have to be fun or engaging it’s worth taking time to go over the many different ways in which a game can engage us. And for that, let’s have a refresher on one of my older game design theories: the three C’s. Basically, there is a whole legion of methods by which games get the player invested in what’s going on and all of them can fit under one of the following three headings: Context, Challenge, and Catharsis.

Context refers to storytelling. If you’re playing a game because you want to know what happens at the end, or learn more about the setting or find out what’s going to happen to characters you like and/or relate to, then we have a game that’s strong on context. Very firmly the territory of your classic adventure games, RPGs and visual novels. But it’s not just about having a story. Every game has context to a certain extent. Space Invaders doesn’t have a story but it does havw context because the things you shoot look like little alien gribblies. If they looked like adorable lambs and mewed plaintively as you shot them it’d probably have been a different experience.

The second leg, Challenge, hopefully shouldn’t need too much explaining, it’s what video games are all about. But it’s worth noting that while the other two legs offer direct satisfaction of some kind, challenge is about creating satisfaction with yourself, with having the skills or the intelligence to conquer a task or puzzle. It’s also about the satisfaction of putting the work in to gather resources or build yourself up from a lowly position in order to eventually triumph over adversity, so you can have the soft challenge of an RPG where you have to level up and gather equipment to make your damage numbers high enough to take on the big boss at the end, or the hard challenge of a Dark Souls or a one on one fighting game where having the best stuff is less important than developing your actual thumb dexterity, reflexes and muscle memory.

Lastly, we have Catharsis. The least helpfully named leg because the other legs both offer catharsis of some kind, strictly speaking. What I mean here is everything that creates pure satisfaction on a visceral, sensory, moment-to-moment level, without offering challenge or needing context. This, friends, is the realm of popping bubble wrap. It’s not very challenging to blow off a villager’s head in Resident Evil 4 in a shower of chunks, and context doesn’t add a whole lot to it either but it’s undeniably cathartic. See also swinging through the city in Spider-Man. Or the level up effect from World of Warcraft. Sure, it’s a challenge to get to that point, ostensibly, but the knowledge and effect of having grown stronger is utterly secondary to the sheer visceral joy of hearing that delightful sound and seeing that bloom of light.

Don’t worry, I’m getting to a point. The thing about the three C’s is that any of the three can carry the experience and create something that will be remembered as an open quotes “good game.” Disco Elysium would be just one example of a game whose very strong showing in the Context side of things more than makes up for deficiency in the other two legs. You can have any mixture that you like, and every now and again a tragically rare game appears that scores highly in all three at the same time. That’d be something like a Dark Souls or a Resident Evil 4.

And the reason why I brought all this up is because I was trying to think of where a triple A gear grinder or ghost train ride from the current era sits upon the three leg theory, and it appears to be a case of all catharsis all the time. Grinding up the biggest numbers in endless copy pasted combat doesn’t have much context going on and the constant predetermined action set pieces of the ghost train ride are more about empty spectacle than challenge. It feels like mainstrem gaming has spent the last decade perfecting the method to refine catharsis down to its most optimal formula, until it can get you hooked with just the promise of a number going up. And as I say, it’s fine to enjoy that. It’s specifically designed to be enjoyed on the immediate lizard brain level.

But it’s still only one of the three legs. And it’s like what I said about diversity – your mind is like a gene pool, without a range of experiences it goes stagnant and inbred. And there’s something about this relentless refining of just one aspect of game enjoyment that feels very exploitative and callous. It’s like, gaming is a lovely garden full of all kinds of flowers that appeal to lots of people in different ways, and the big money industry just marched in, uprooted all the poppies, refined them into heroin and started dealing it to people at the entrance gate, before they can get in to enjoy the rest of the garden. Yes, it’s none of my business if someone else gets hooked on smack, nor can one really blame the dealers if the free market keeps demanding more smack, but don’t tell me not to complain about all the used needles in the koi pond.