Good point. I think that you shouldn’t state that games are supposed to be fun or entertaining, they are supposed to be enjoyed. And by enjoying you may think fun, but some people enjoy thought provoking stuff and things that melt their brain. I know I do. And while these games don’t make you smile, let alone laugh out loud, they can be incredibly enjoyable because of the satisfaction they give.

Glad someone agrees!

Maybe I should add that I enjoy movies that make me feel depressed if they do it in an interesting way :)

It would be fairly easy to come up with many examples of paintings and films that are considered good art but were not commercially successful or considered fun to look at.
I’d be interested to here about game examples that do this.  Were you thinking of anything in particular?

Hmm yes are there some avant garde games out there with extremely limited “fun” appeal?  Sounds like a question for Mr. Branham.

I like this article, it shows I’m not the only one that believes that entertainment has different meaning for different people. I don’t always watch movies/read books to feed the pleasure portions of my brain, but to think and learn. Just as I don’t always play games to always feed the pleasure portions of my brain. I like certain games for just dumb fun, to laugh, snicker, and blow stuff up. While another large portion of the games I enjoy because they make me think and push my analytical ability to make choices that are successful and learn from those choices.

But this whole “Games must be Fun” motto is really a misnomer.

"Everyone believes that a better game is one that sells more or that more people play.”

Then everyone should agree that Monopoly is the best game...right?

“My own definition of a game is simply an interactive activity bound by rules and with one or more goals present at any time.”

I think what this article really needs is your definition of art.  It sure sounds like you believe that art can neither be fun nor commercially successful and that idea is certainly from a bygone century.  You seem to be stuck on the idea that only Art-with-a-capital-A is real art.

“While I wouldn’t buy paintings that aren’t pleasing to my eye, I would suggest that museums do, because of the inherent artistic principles of the painting.”

Perhaps the museums can buy the Art games, too. 

Here’s a quote from Santiago Siri’s (electronic) game design blog, Games Are Are 2.0 at gamesareart.com -

“Games belong to a new dimension of creative expression. And the special thing about them is their power to deliver the joy of Play. You can think of a sculptor as someone who creates with the three dimensions of volume; or filmmakers as creators of stories through the use of space and time captured by a camera. The art of games is about sculpting Fate.

Just picture the role of a game designer whose duty is to shape chaos and provide players with capsules of uncertainty that will permit them live stories only possible in the imagination. Game making is the most outstanding form of expression in this age of creative democracy where consumers become creators and protagonists.”

I can’t help but think that this article boils down to semantics, Yehuda, in a perfectly understandable response to people who have a very narrow definition of “fun”.  Surya touched on this even while agreeing with you.  I would say that paintings/movies/games are meant to be *enjoyed*.  In some instances, you might want to substitute the word *appreciated* for enjoyed, but I’m not sure the distinction is as large as you might think.

But the point is the same.  No one watches a movie or goes to a museum or plays a game to be miserable.  You go to have enjoyment at some level.  Maybe you walk away with more knowledge or more appreciation for a particular point of view.  Maybe a plot twist or a subtle brush stroke gives you satisfaction.  No matter how it is achieved, you finish your experience feeling good about what you did.  That’s fun.

The same is true of games.  I might enjoy a game like Plem Plem for the laughs and silly fun.  I might like a brain burner like Ricochet Robots for the intellectual challenge.  I can play a cerebral game like E&T or an uproarious one like I’m the Boss and enjoy them both.  I consider all these activities to be fun.  If someone else doesn’t like one of these types of things, they shouldn’t play those games.  But it’s silly to say the games are wrong somehow, that they aren’t fun, just because you yourself don’t enjoy the sort of thing that game provides.

This works both ways, of course.  It’s just as wrong to say that LCR isn’t a game as it is of Neuland.  I wouldn’t play LCR on a bet, but I can see where other people can have a great time playing it.  It’s a game and it’s fun--just not for me.

For the most part, my take has been that a game is successful if it evokes the response that the designer wishes to convey from the intended audience.

For the most part, that means that for the most part, a game is designed to be fun. But it is designed to be fun for specific people.

By that criteria, Monopoly, is a superb game. It was designed to make people of the early part of the century to live the life of land barons. It absolutely succeeds at those goals. Problem is, the game is far less applicable to modern folks, and nothing at all to gamer geeks.

As to games that are art.

Paradice. This is a glorious resin cast game evoking ideas of harmony, and rebirth.

Reinhold Wittig promotes his games as Spielkunst. In many of his games, he clearly has other goals, from trying to make participants create very Austrailian aboriginal-looking art, to viewing the various radio stations as a giant information web to cross, to placing their perspective onto the board to make them feel like they are inside the game.

Colony clearly has the primary aim of conveying that colonial empire are abusive, dangerous, and downright evil.

Terra… I’m not sure what was in Bruno’s head. But in order for the game to work AT ALL, players have to be willing to play reasonably cooperatively, and at least partially work together to deal with crises. Bad “game” game. Good lesson.

The old Games Journal Family Pastimes article is one of my favorites, as Jim Deacove of the company goes into a lot of detail about his motivations for only creating cooperative games, and the kinds of play he wants to promote and create in his players. The reason I find his games so fascinating is because I can see how well his games convey those ideas.

Oooh. One more.

The game of Lose. This is a hand silk-screened work of wonder. It mostly works like a Monopoly clone, updated for modern times. The design is such that it is virtually impossible to actually win. Just to underscore the point of how much of a loser you are for purchasing the game, it comes with 50,000 Nicaraguan cordobas, which were apparently worth nothing much.

Of course, Frank, the *original* goal of the *original* designer of Monopoly was education.  She wanted an entertaining way of presenting the ideas behind the Henry George “Single Tax” theory.  But the game had many contributors with many different goals over the years.  Still, it’s an illustration of a game with an educational goal and how it can change over the years.

Oh yeah. Forgot about that bit.

So can we come to a consensus that Monopoly was never even supposed to be fun?

I love it when people pretend that Art is other than purely subjective and depends on the eye of the beholder.  :) (Either that or I am lucky that I can’t tell so that I can freely indulge in games, books and art that I enjoy.)

Different games certainly scratch different itches.  When our group is playing 18XX games, my wife comes through the game room and states, “Oh, you guys are playing the game where nobody smiles.” That is true, but most, if not all, of the players are enjoying the challenge of the game at any given time during the game.  So it’s a different type of fun, but I still classify it squarely in the fun column, just a different sub-column.

What?  Boardgames as art?  How about just art as art.  I pretty much agree with Larry’s viewpoint but will take that viewpoint further.

What next?

Football is not about scoring touchdowns.

Hockey is not about putting the puck in the net.

Toys are not supposed to be entertaining.  They are supposed to be what the designer intended it.

Food is a medium.

People who create interesting looking lightbulbs as a medium to create art have another purpose in mind?

Stop.

The purpose of a car is to transport people. Pure and simple.  That why people buy ‘em.  It may have ancillary goals as a result of design.  But the purpose is constant.  No one would buy an artistic, state of the art designed car that couldn’t go anywhere.

Games are supposed to be about fun.  Anything else just sounds way too self-important and it is why I think this hobby actually does struggle commercially at times.

By the way, Monopoly IS fun.  You just have to play by the designer’s intended RULES.  : ) Cheers.

Yehuda, I often agree with you on many things, but this makes absolutely no sense to me.  Games are supposed to be fun.  They aren’t art, they aren’t some vague media, they are supposed to be fun.  So if they aren’t fun, they’ve failed.  If they are fun, it’s wonderful.  Whether or not they are fun to any specific person is subjective, of course.

But for me and my house, we will judge games on one thing - is it fun?

I think that the moment we stop looking at games as “fun” is a good hint that the hobby is no longer for us.

Now before we pile on Yehuda more, let me say that games *are* art, as a product of the game designer’s craft, much as film is the product of the filmmaker’s craft. 

Games *are* a form of creative expression, however dependant upon commercial viability.  Again, much like film - if you can’t convince a studio to financially back your project, you’ll need to self-finance and publish independantly.

After all, we do demand to see the game designer’s name on the box, right?  Autorenspiele - Author Games - is what they’re called in their home country.  The designer has signed his name to his work, which says to me that this is more than an anonymous consumable - this is someone’s work, crafted with intent.

Good response, Brett.  And Ryan and Tom, at the risk of putting words into Yehuda’s mouth, I think all he’s saying is that different people can enjoy and appreciate games in different ways.  Goodness knows, you and I seem to Ryan!  That means that there’s a wide variety of games--studious ones, strategic ones, and frantic ones--that can have fans and despite their differences, all are called “fun” by the people who like them.

It may be time to update your website Yehuda, where you wrote:

“They are a lot of fun, like games should be, but they are also serious, intelligent, and often educational. They can stand against any other adult recreational activity, from television to computers to movies to newspapers to drinking beer, and can be considered at least as respectable a use of your time as any other.”

Actually I kind of agree with your website more than your column.

To those who want to know what art has to do with games, the above article was a followup to a previous one entitled Are Games Art? It describes what I think art is, and why it’s important to consider board games in its light. Scott: just because you think all art is subjective doesn’t make it so.

To those who think that I meant that entertainment comes in many types, such as brain burning or silly:

Consider a movie such as Wild Strawberries. You probably won’t crack a smile during the whole movie. You simply end the movie with questions about relationships, aging, and meaning (or, for most people, boredom). Then you don’t watch it again, or maybe once more.

What a movie conveys via images and sound, a board game should be able to convey via interactive participation. In other words, I would like to see a board game, which I would never want to play more than once or twice, that wasn’t particularly fun, but which, at the end, I had questions about relationships, aging, and meaning (for most people, it would be boredom).

Is that what you were saying? Because it doesn’t sound like we’re on the same page. It is not semantics.

How about this: Board games are NOT supposed to be replayable.

There must be more possibility in the “media of interactive goal-oriented entertainment” than mental calculation, silliness, or cleverness.

To those who don’t want their house infected with games which aren’t fun: well, uh, that was the entire point. No one would ever ask you to buy a game that wasn’t fun. Because it’s no fun.

To say that you wouldn’t buy or play such a game is only reinforcing my point: games today are only created by people who want to entertain us, and only bought by people who want to be entertained.

But there is another possible use of this genre of “game-like” activity: games that convey artistic messages. Unless they were also fun or entertaining, of course you wouldn’t buy them. That’s not their point. Just like you wouldn’t buy “The Rape of the Sabine Women” and hang it in your living room.

But you wouldn’t go tell Jacques-Louis David that copies of his painting aren’t going to sell well because people don’t want to hang it in their houses, would you? Or that it’s not a “painting”, or a “good painting”, because it doesn’t decorate well?

Paintings can be created that people enjoy, and paintings can be created that convey a message, and paintings can be created that do both. Why can’t there be games created for people to enjoy, games created that convey messages, and games that do both?

Yehuda

Let me make it even clearer:

I walk into The Art-Games Museum. It costs $10 to enter, and I get a museum guide with rules for each game, notes about the game’s creators, and how long I should expect to play each game.

I enter the deconstructionist room. There are six tables with board games, and two dexterity games against opposite walls.

I sit down to one board game with my partner. It’s called Wild Raspberries, by Kevin Bergman, 2009. I reread the rules and we play.

I find myself without enough resources. My pieces keep getting older and losing their mobility. Past loves haunt me at every turn. My only helper piece never gives me what I need. In the meantime, my opponent’s pieces took a great risk. She accumulated early benefits, but also died an early death.

We leave the game, discussing the implications of the work.

I go to the Keiner R’nizia room, a collection of his works. One game involves tossing Black citizens at a wall called “Sense”. When they fall, they land in a spiked pit called “Hatred” with areas representing different countries. Each gives me a chance to redeem my piece, but some are less likely than others.

My partner and I play and then leave. We spent about an hour in the museum, and will come back tomorrow to try two other exhibitions.

The gift shop sells traditional games and artwork, as well as copies of the games on display. The only reason I would buy one of the latter games is to use in a class or to start a discussion about the game’s meaning.

Not because I want to add it to the weekly rotation in my game group!

Is this clearer?

If the above games sound like crappy art, that’s because I’m not an artist. If they sound like boring games, that’s because I’m a crappy artist and the games aren’t meant to be taken home and played by anyone other than by people looking to buy art.

Somewhere, somehow, is a group of people who can use games as a media to create art. In some of those cases, the games may even be fun. Some of the games we have now in our collections may even be art.

But I’m not talking about different types of challenges appealing to different types of people, and for goodness sake I’m not talking about the fact that nobody wants to play these games for entertainment purposes.

I’m talking about using the game format as an art medium, a medium which, until now, has been used solely for commercial purposes.

Yehuda

I have no problem with the majority of the column...hey, to each his own.  Just leave out the “games aren’t supposed to be fun” part out and I’m good. 

: )

Peace.

Your deconstructionist conceptual games don’t seem to fit your definition of a game, unless you consider the experience to be the goal, in which case any interactive art installation can be considered a game, given some guidance on how the viewer is to interact with it.

Which leaves us with a very narrow definition of art and a very broad definition of game.

Well, I guess you can use any activity to accomplish anything, Yehuda, and many people try to do just that.  Museum exhibits have become interactive, turning what was purely education into entertainment.  Many avante-garde artists try new and daring ways of expressing things.  If you or someone else wanted to use games to express a point of view, to comment on life, or to serve purely as art, it would be possible and as valid as any other activity.  I doubt it would interest me, because it seems as if there are better ways of accomplishing that, but it wouldn’t offend me.  However, this discussion won’t change my view of what a game is, at least until someone actually does this strange thing you want to see.

Now that I actually understand what your article is saying, I have some problems with a few of your introductory statements:

“I’ve always said, yeah, games are supposed to be fun, but it’s better to use that time to build character in addition to having fun.”

Says who?  What’s wrong with just having fun and enjoying myself?  My character has been molded by lots of events since early childhood and I happen to think it’s in reasonably good shape.  But even if I admitted I could use some character building, why require that games be used to accomplish this?

“Games are not supposed to be anything. Games are a medium, like movies, books, and painting.”

Games are very different than those three other things.  The ones experiencing a game play a much, much greater role than with the other activities.  If someone wants to expand the traditional idea of a game, that’s fine.  But I think you go too far to say that games are *supposed* to include these other things.  If someone actually wanted to try this, then fine, see if he or she can get others to think experiencing this new creation is worthwhile or just be content with whatever they’ve created.  But you can’t criticize people for closemindedness if they don’t conceive of every possible use that a game could be used for, including ideas most of us have never heard expressed.

“Everyone believes that a better game is one that sells more or that more people play.”

That is just flat-out wrong.  The vast number of people reading this column don’t believe that, or they would be forced to agree that the best games out there are Monopoly, LCR, and Bunco.  I think you just took your hyperbole a bit too far, Yehuda.

Brett - My example of deconstructionist art simply proves that I don’t know what the word deconstructionist means.

You’re right that I have a very broad definition of games, and a limited definition of art. I think my definition of art is still fairly broad, but compared to today’s definition of art - which is “anything at all” - it’s a little narrower than that!

Larry - The biggest problem with my original article seems to be the wording “games are NOT supposed to be fun”. This was a reply to the statement that “games are supposed to be fun”; in context, the stress made more sense. Of course, I’m really saying that “games are not necessarily supposed to be fun”, not that games should never be fun.

All my post really boils down to is that the game format can be used in the same context as any other form of interactive art. Right now, I’ve only seen art and games purposely intersect as irony or as artistic components.

Frank’s example of Paradice is a good contender, however, and there are probably others I’ve overlooked. I didn’t give Paradice as much thought as I should have as an interactive art piece, having been distracted by it’s pretty components.

As far as your objection to my wanting even fun time to be character building time, that’s just my moral sensibility. It’s not really a discussion relevant to this one.

Your last objection to my statement “Everyone believes” is entirely correct. I meant “everyone” in the unwashed unelightened heathen sense. :-)

Yehuda

Well, I started writing a response to some of the comments as well as Yehuda’s column itself, but once I hit a thousand words, I decided to make the piece my column for next Tuesday. Hope to see y’all there in a few days…

Eric

Hmm… well, in my lifetime, I’ve seen comics evolve from something considered a very low-status, low-brow, “genre”, commercial, “craft”, aimed mostly at entertaining teenage boys, into a much broader art form that includes manga, online web-comics, and graphic novels, as well as classic “four-color” books.  Heck, one comic even won a Pulitzer.  I think many people now accept that comics can be “about something”, as well as being entertaining… Comics can now take different forms, many of which don’t appeal to some readers, but do appeal to others.  Is this a bad thing?

Can games evolve in a way similar to how comics have evolved into graphic novels?  Are they in the process of doing so?

I don’t see anything wrong with asking these sort of questions.

And, in the realm of role-playing games (a bit off-topic for this forum), many game authors are, in fact, busily stretching the medium.  A horror rpg such as “My Life with Master” (2003) may not be to many players’ taste, but it is definitely “about something”, as well as being entertaining to some players.

And, despite really trying to build replayability into my own designs, I can see where it can possibly be a distraction with “experience” games; certainly I very much enjoyed Knizia’s Lord of the Rings… once.  We played it badly at the very start and realistically had almost no chance of winning, but managed, just barely, against all odds, to pull it out.  We had no desire to play it again, but we all felt that we got our money’s worth (at $10 a player, much like a first-run movie in many places).  Is Yehuda’s $10 hypothetical game museum that different (even if you might decide to take in a very different game experience that the one he describes)?

Now, Yehuda setting up “entertaining” as being somehow in opposition to “being about” something; or implying that conveying a point of view or being instructive is incompatible with having fun or being commercially successful; that does smack a bit of taking Art (in capital letters!) a bit too seriously, in my opinion…

Tom,

Heaven forbid. I’ve tried to be careful to say that art and entertainment are orthoginal, not mutually exclusive. You can certainly be both artistic AND entertaining.

Yehuda

I have basically subdivided the games I like and own into three categories, based on what I get out of them: Stories, Puzzles, and Passtimes. Depending on which of those I expect, I can tolerate all sorts of mechanics, and the gameplay may not necessarily be “fun,” but in each case there is a degree of entertainment, escapism, and reflection.

That said, I think games can be a form of art, if you define art as “The Employment of Craft to Communicate Meaning to Others.” This is my personal definition of Art. Any craft used as a vehicle to communicate meaning, whether it is a message, a feeling, or just aesthetic pleasure, is Art. Maybe good art, maybe bad art, but art.

So sure, games can be art, if the designer is creating a game that is intended to convey a larger meaning beyond the story, puzzle or passtime the game accomplishes by itself. Whether Monopoly was intended as a commentary on capitalism or not, its clone “Class Struggle” was explicitly created by its inventor to teach Marxism to college students. It is an outrageous example of using the game format to convey specific meaning.

Typically I see two ideologies employing the game format to convey their messages: Environmentalism and Christianity. Are the games Good Art? not necessarily, but they are intended to convey a message.

That we subconsciously recognize artistic beauty or at least an aesthetic urge in some games is the whole category, “Abstracts.” As pattern-recognition-based sentients, we humans can’t help but see beauty in regular patterns, and I think a finished game of Go, Ingenius, Ta Yu, or Blokus is an example of that. Abstracts are the closest to Art because of their use of visual information that we can process on an unconscious level.

But in the end, the kinds of messages games can convey are limited, simply because of the lack of control they admit. Designers can write rules, assemble mechanics, etc., but it is the developer and publisher that has the final word on the finished product, unlike the efforts of a painter, author or composer. And because games require the collaborative creativity of opposed players, the more scripted you make a game, the less “replay value” it has, and thus the fewer times anyone will want to experience your “art,” unlike good books, plays or paintings, which many people who enjoy them continue to enjoy regularly for many years.

I think the real question is whether games can convey the kinds of meaning evoked by great art that tells sad stories and unpleasant truths. I recently picked up the game “Moai,” in which the culture of Rapa Nui destroys its environment and descends into cannibalism; that’s pretty bad, but it’s also apparently a pretty “fun” game with high negative player interaction.

But will we ever see a game that succeeds as art in the same way as say, Les Miserables? or Hamlet? or 1984? Well, I never thought I’d ever see a successful, serious game about the Cold War that
didn’t end in Nuclear Winter, and now we have Twilight Struggle sitting there in the top 10 on BGG. Is it art? You tell me. Is it fun? I sure hope so, since I just bought a copy. Will it make me ponder the philosophical intricacies of the Capitalism versus Communism debate? Probably not. But it’s not just a wargame, and it does deal with a pretty dark time in history, even though those 40 years probably bracketed the climax of American civilization. But it doesn’t feel like art, even though it might be.

Interesting discussion, thanks for making me think.

“games aren’t supposed to be fun” as in “games aren’t necessarily supposed to be fun”, not as in “games are supposed to not be fun”.
objectors take it like in the second case I guess.

Here is where I have failed to communicate to pretty much everyone:

I don’t think the industry that makes games should change AT ALL. I think any game made to sell MUST be fun, and that fun is more important than elegance, mechanics, or anything else, just like you.

I think that the people you play with are more important than the game you play. I think you can have a great time with dumb games, and a bad time with “great” games.

I do not advocate only Eurogames, as you can see from my Gift Guide. In fact, I’ve been complaining right from the beginning of my blog that one style of gaming is not any better than any other, and that all tabletop players have a lot more in common than otherwise.

In fact, gaming isn’t critical to me; it’s good times with friends and family that matter. If you have a great time together without games, and you don’t like games, don’t play them.

Nothing I wrote was meant to argue with any of this.

What I wrote was about the definition of the word “game”. That’s it.

It’s a theoretical discussion which was meant to have implications only for artists, not for game players, designers, or publishers!

No company should ever try to sell a game that is not fun. Nobody should ever, in the context of their house, family, or game group, ever play a game that is not fun, for whatever your definition of fun is. Fun is paramount to games when played for entertainment.

My point, which again I’ll agree was made badly both because I’m not a great writer nor any kind of artist, is that the “game format” should be usable as an art form as well, like any other interactive art format.

And my point, ditto, was that this has not seriously happened until now because the word “game” is currently only associated with corporations, homes, entertainment, and game groups.

I’m NOT saying that corporations, homes, entertainment, or game groups should change! I’m saying that other people in other industries could make some interesting experiments out of the game like process, experiments that are not purely sales-driven, fun-driven, and entertainment-based.

That’s it.

Oh, one more thing. I also never said that for something to be artistic it has to not be fun. There is no relation between them. Something could be both, either, or neither.

Yehuda

Yehuda, I think a lot of people read the topic title and made preconceived notions without really reading the article itself. I understood where you were coming from.