Where Did The Fun Go?

Where did the fun go? Over the past few years games have become more and more dependent on real world situations, social commentary, and political correctness to drive their narratives along. The days of the simplistic story and overall fun gaming seem to be slowly coming to an end, with little resistance from us, the gamers. The select few games at the top echelon in gaming are becoming more and more like simulations and less and less like the games that started the industry. “Games as art” has become the battle cry for almost every company out there trying to reach the top. While I have no issue with that comparison, what concessions are we allowing companies to make their art? Sacrificing fun for art, in a hobby that was built for fun, is truly sad and somewhat asinine.

Back in 1985 when I received the NES and Super Mario Bros. as a birthday gift, after much begging and pleading, I knew from pressing Start that I was a gamer from that day forward. The story, as everyone knows, revolved around a kidnapped princess. However, without reading the manual you didn't know that until the end of world 1-4 when the major crux of the story was, "I'm sorry Mario but the Princess is in another castle". No matter how hard you try the sheer fun of running, jumping, and shooting fire from god knows where never felt forced or serious at all. It literally was just fun in its simplest form. Even before the NES the Atari, Commodore 64, and even Tennis for Two were all just "fun". No social commentary. No "art" comparisons. Just fun.

Fast-forward to present day. The biggest franchises in gaming are arguably Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War and many others of the same type. All of which amount to "war simulations". The stories try and try to take themselves seriously to convey the argument of "Videogames should be considered art" as best they can, but at what cost? I tried playing through Call of Duty 4 and found myself getting more and more depressed by the story that was playing out. The "shocking twist" that happens to one of the main characters did more to make me not want to continue than anything else in the game. If I want to see death, images of war, and the horrors of history or present day, I would turn on the history channel or the nightly news. Yet a game that resorts to dick and fart jokes or making off color jokes about things such as abortion are literally shit on by critics and most players alike for being juvenile/crude. The people that find these diversions from reality fun and funny are more often than not ostracized or called out for not wanting to have everything in gaming be so damned serious. A good story does not have to have some social or moral commentary to be meaningful or fun. Hell, some of the best games don’t even have a story.

This is not to say that the games mentioned can’t be fun but I have yet, in a single-player environment, found anything remotely fun about them. Multiplayer can be a plus in quite a few of these games. Whether it be rolling through the story in co-op and saving your buddy’s ass from certain death or just making up your own game types in open world environments, this can be the saving grace for some games. Take GTA IV, it is/was a critical darling. Yet, the overall story just got monotonous and wasn’t very fun. However, get a group of friends together (drunk or otherwise) and get set for some truly fun times. Non-scripted, no story, everything as YOU make it. Boiled down to its simplest form, it is fun.

Yes, I understand the word "fun" is all a matter of opinion and everyone has their own views on what the word means. However, any gamer my age can agree that pouring hours and hours in to Super Mario Bros. was a hell of a lot more fun than seeing a group of innocent people being gunned down with machine guns, mass graves being covered up, or an atomic bomb going off in the middle of a populated city. If "games as art" have to sacrifice the fun to gain critical acclaim or we have to be serious constantly throughout our pixelated adventures, this old timey gamer may need to find a new hobby.

The views expressed here are not Gamercide's, nor are they endorsed by the site. They are the views of the author and the author alone.