Fun? Fun?!

For a guy who writes about video games, I don't particularly like the medium that much. Sure I gush about the occasional blockbuster, but sometimes I just can't stand the damn things. They're too narrow, too dull, too much alike.

Game makers have the ability to create entire worlds, populated by whatever creatures they can imagine, governed by whatever rules they want. But time and again we get an improbably proportioned hot chick in bikini battle armor blowing shit up. It's as if we're given the gift of the written word, but all we write is Mr. Men books.

Even within those narrow themes, there's a disappointing lack of diversity in the game experiences. How many World War II shooters are there out there? Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Brothers in Arms, Battlefield 1942, and that's not counting the dozens of substandard knock-offs. Yet, to my knowledge, not a single one of them deals with the Holocaust. No raids of concentration camps, no unearthing the horrors of Auschwitz, no pictures of emaciated survivors who'd lived through hell on Earth.

And why not? Because the game is supposed to be fun, and while storming the beach at Normandy and seeing your fellow soldiers cut down all around you somehow translates to giddy joy, nobody thinks it would be “fun” to liberate a concentration camp.

I'm tired of fun. Movies don't have to be fun. Books don't have to be fun. Music doesn't have to be fun. What makes games so much different? City of God wasn't fun. Blood on the Tracks wasn't fun. They might have been bleak, thought-provoking, depressing, possibly inspiring, and almost unquestionably great, but certainly not “fun.” The difference is that while other media routinely challenge people's preconceptions, opinions, and beliefs, games are content enough to challenge their reflexes.

Games are also the only medium I can think of that actually tries to keep paying customers from experiencing the whole thing. While the occasional film seems dead set on forcing audiences to walk out of the theater (McHale's Navy comes to mind), and Chicken Soup books are likely to induce a diabetic coma after the first 20 pages, no medium is as doggedly sadistic with what it forces its audience to endure in order to see the work as a whole. Limited health, lives, ammunition, gas, stamina, and continues must be balanced against hoards of enemies that come back to life every time you turn around and enemy strongholds designed by architects more concerned with arranging gauntlets of bottomless pits and flamethrowers than OSHA standards and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I get why they do this. The games are supposed to be challenging, because if they weren't, they wouldn't be fun. Some company has to have the balls to leave the notion of fun by the wayside and make a game capable of playing with more complex emotions than just controller-throwing frustration. If game makers can actually break through this rut, it won't matter if they're fairly short experiences or not terribly challenging.

There are signs of this happening already, but they are few and far between. Sony's Shadow of the Colossus for the PlayStation 2 casts players as a “hero” on a quest to resurrect his beloved. To do so, he needs to find the Colossi, a handful of towering beasts that mostly just mind their own business as the player tracks them down and kills them one at a time. The game is still fun, but it is also designed to induce pangs of remorse in the player for every majestic, mystical creature slaughtered for the hero's selfish desires.

I don't know when or how these types of new experiences are going to supplant the norm. But ultimately people will grow tired of the current model of gaming, and without some significant evolution, it will fall by the wayside, a neglected, mostly forgotten pocket of nerd-dom alongside stagnant relics like pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering cards.