No, games should not be fun

I'm gonna instantly contradict my title: It's good when games are fun. I like it a lot! I literally just played 18 hours of the Astlibra DLC running on nothing but good controls and big number serotonin. But that's not me clickbaiting and instantly reneging; "no, games should not be fun" is sincerely the starting point of the argument I'm about to make.

Usually, I'll come across a conversation online where some rando decides to terminate a discussion with "but games should be fun." Frequently as a way of saying some game is bad, because it is not "fun".

That's the thing that makes me go "no, games should not be fun." What they should be is engaging. The umbrage I'm taking here might feel like semantic pedantry to you; if so, I'm not referring to your usage of "fun". But there's absolutely people out there who use "games should be fun" to mean, specifically:

And I hope after I specify to such a degree, you're on the same page with me. That's a reductive and restrictive understanding of engagement, and flattens the potential of video games severely.^[1] It's also simply not how... art works. People create stuff. And people aren't always perfectly-happy fun delivering machines. Stuff that's authentic always has the potential to be uncomfortable. But also, only stuff that's authentic has the potential to be truly engaging.

I think, to a degree, most people understand the concept. The easiest, kinda trivial, example is the famed and famous Souls poison swamp, a lovingly-hated tradition perpetrated by Miyazaki. They're never fun. They're rarely difficult, which is supposedly the point^[2]. They're just... there. But, crucially, the same guy who insisted on it also directed the rest of the game^[3]. And everybody loves the rest of the game.

Conceivably, could you make Dark Souls or Elden Ring without any poison swamps? Technically, I suppose, such a thing could exist.

But it wouldn't, though.

Because it's a thing made by people and directed by that one particular guy. They're the ones who made it. They left their mark on it. And for that reason, poison swamps are part of the DNA. A Dark Souls that is made to be exclusively fun would simply not exist^[4]. And the game we'd have in its place would be worse.

This extends beyond mundane stuff like poison swamps, of course. And I don't mean to imply that ~the auteur's vision is sacred~. You can absolutely make better and worse versions of the same concept.

But here's the main thing:

And, as established, games that are authentic in some way simply won't be pure fun. But it is, in my opinion, a mistake to point out the lack of "fun" in a given moment if you haven't tried to figure out what else it's trying to do instead.

In particular, I'm thinking back to the big kerfuffle about Dragon's Dogma 2 (lack of) fast travel^[5].

Walking is kind of the point of the game. You can still think that's a stupid thing to be about, but the way the conversation was going (from what I saw anyway), few even reached that point. It was just "this thing is annoying, so the entire game sucks". I ended up falling off the game myself, but I'd hate to live in a world where we didn't have it, because something "more fun" was made instead. I at least understand (or tried to understand!) what the vision was^[6].

And that's more or less what I mean when I say "games shouldn't be fun". They shouldn't be exclusively catered towards delivering pleasure, because that limits both the potential of the medium, and the ability of artists to do their thing.

The world is better with some friction.