Engagement ≠ Fun (Patreon)

In the 2000s, everything was "fun".

Silent Hill had bad gameplay added by a Western Developer, because video games are supposed to be…

Fun.

Call of Duty had an AC-130 gunship mission so alike the real thing it unnerved its own developers within the studio, because it's supposed to be…

Fun.

And Bioshock made you decide between rescuing traumatically abused little girls or liquefying them into paste for your steampunk super drugs, because that's…

Fun?

Speaking of liquid, I apologize for the sarcasm that's not so much dripping, as it is leaking through your screen.

Point is, when I was a kid, video-games were still viewed under the lens of Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Donkey Kong-esk "FUN" and more mainstream video-games in the 90s and 2000s were starting to realize their potential to do more than just amuse kids and adults who are also kids.

While most games were still akin to the Nintendo and SEGA ways of "fun", a lot more in the 2000s were trying to explore other methods of making a game compelling.

Be it through scares like Silent Hill, high-stakes like Rainbow Six, or simulation like a whole host of racing, flight, and military Sims releasing during this era.

Sure, there was lots of edge masquerading as maturity, but that was all part of the charm seemingly in retrospect.

I mean…

Who can't be entertained by Shadow The Hedgehog shotgun pumping an MP5?

Perhaps we've gone too far though.

Not in Shadow the Hedgehog influences… frankly, if we had more of that charm, I wouldn't complain.

No, what I mean is that, there's a whole uproar of gamers in the last couple years complaining about how video-games aren't "fun anymore" and that there's nothing in the mainstream market appealing to them.

Part of me does want to yell at them to play Indies and Middle-Market releases like everybody else on Twitter, but when you sit down and look at a whole host of the popular games on the market, you start to sense that maybe these whiners are actually onto something…

My main-reference point is Rainbow Six Siege, but for a whole host of people these days, the game is Valorant, Destiny, Warzone, League, Dota, etc…

And having been on both sides of the fence of games like these, there's fun to be had, but fun isn't the only mechanism keeping people hooked to these popular titles.

When playing them, they're not paced like Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4, or a whole selection of games released during the 7th generation of consoles.

Those games might've had a ranking system or XP bar, maybe even a daily challenge or two… but they didn't have…

Months' worth of notifications.

$100+ skin bundles.

Limited time events.

Randomized loot crates.

Meta-altering characters.

Overhauled core-gameplay mechanics.

Things that don't really entail…

Fun.

Pressure.

Commitment.

Engagement.

But not…

Fun.

Level designers would talk about making sure that a multiplayer map is going to fun for the hundredth, and the two-hundredth, and the thousandth time.

Nowadays it's about setting up a goal for the player to achieve that's so engaging, they're going to play a level one hundred, two-hundred, or a thousand times to archive said goal, regardless if that journey is actually fun.

For me, it's frustrating, because I don't at all want games to just have "fun" be their only goal. It's not only extremely vague, it's also not suitable for every experience and franchise. Yet, if I have to pick between the developers old overused of "fun" versus their new overused term of "engagement", Fun wins in a landslide.

Halo should be engaging through its fun. Not through "engaging" mechanisms through battle-passes and large time-commitments.

Really, it doesn't seem that the problem are the words themselves. There's nothing wrong with Fun, or Engaging. There's a problem when the word stops meaning what it means.

"Fun" in the 2000s became "safe" and engaging has now become "addicting."