TRY TO DO THAT

What Is "Fun" Anyway?

What is it that motivates you to play a game? There’s the catch-all term, ‘fun’, which I love and loathe in equal measure.



I love it because it binds all of us who indulge in interactive entertainment together: One Nation Under A Game. But I loathe it for much the same reason; the word ‘fun’ is so overly broad that it often fails to capture the specific experience that I’m looking for, the precise itch I want scratched. Am I looking to kill time? Challenge myself? Compete against someone else? Pretend to be something I’m not? Lose myself in another world? All of the above?



The simple answer, of course, is that it depends. The more complicated answer is that, as of late, I’ve found it difficult to motivate myself to complete story-based games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Increasingly, I don’t want to remember what I was doing when I last played. I don’t want to recall which button does what. I don’t want to remember how much I have previously accomplished. I don’t want to return to a particular emotional state that corresponds to where I left off in the narrative or mission structure. Once I do all of those things, I’m good to go. But given my increasingly busy life, the time and effort that it takes to properly resume my place in the game-story feels too much like, well, work.