Where’s the fun in gaming?

Avatar highlights an odd phenomenon in the entertainment industry. It is not the most entertaining movie you will ever watch. The acting will not win Oscars, the story is by no means revolutionary, and the cinematography and direction are mediocre at best. Even within its own genre, most people could think of a dozen movies that are superior in any number of ways. Avatar’s real edge, its gimmick, was in class leading special effects, which will probably be superseded in the next five years or so. So why has this movie become the most successful film of all time in less than three months? I think the answer lies in broad cross-market appeal (the lowest common denominator effect) – you have action for the blokes, a romantic sub-plot for the girls, geektastic special effects for your nerds, an eco-warrior moral message for your smug middle class types and a giant fibre optic Christmas tree for your council estate scum. Personally I would give this movie six out of ten, its just interesting enough for me to go and watch it. I suspect that most of the population would say the same thing for the various reasons listed above. No-one who has seen it will ever say it’s the best film they’ve ever seen, and yet everyone can point to something they enjoyed in it.

Extrapolate that theory to gaming, except take out a large chunk of the population and leave behind core gamers. What makes a game fun? Take the GTA franchise for example, a real personal favourite of mine. GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas are in my list of top ten games of all time. GTA IV is better than all of them put together, and I wouldn’t include it in my list, and I’ll tell you why. It’s no fun to play. The broadcaster and writer, Charlie Brooker, has given impassioned defences in the past for GTA IV, explaining that it should be regarded as a modern classic in any art form for its biting satire and brutal deconstruction of the American dream. He’s absolutely correct of course, when I played through it and took part in a mission where you beat up some loan sharks with a baseball bat, I did so whilst nodding sagely and noting to myself that it is indeed true that the wheels of commerce are oiled by the blood of the workers. This is to gaming what Dostoevksy’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ is to literature – a magnificent addition to the medium, and anything but light entertainment. This game is depressing to play, its about the futility of ambition, its like that terrible episode of Rolf’s Animal Hospital when Rolf got drunk on cheap vodka and gave lethal injections to all the animals (Ok, so that didn’t really happen but you get the point). In earlier entries to the series you start as a nobody, work for a mafia-type kingpin, and eventually run the city. You get to take down cops with an Apache helicopter! It’s the most fun thing in the world to do. This leads me on to the spiritual successor to San Andreas and the rest of the pre-GTA IV games from that franchise – Saints Row 2.

SR2 is not a perfectly polished game, and not having played the first instalment in the series, I did have concerns that it may be a GTA-lite. However my fears were allayed when I discovered that I could issue my character with a greeting action, I went for the Fonzy double finger point/thumbs up gesture, and accompanying “ayyy” – one of the side missions sees you spray the streets with sewage, knocking over pedestrians, coating cop cars and defiling buildings. It is riotously good fun to play, mainly because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

One games company that recognised the difference between faithful recreation and entertainment is Codemasters. With their earlier racing franchise, Race Driver, players were punished for being over aggressive, displaying hubris and daring to defy the ‘racing line’. Their most recent series, Grid, is still mighty competitive, and tough, but it is much more forgiving, bringing in an old-school arcade feel to the action which makes you feel about ten years old again.

Think how dull Modern Warfare would be if you were killed with a single shot, how uninspiring an RPG would be if you never ascend to being some kind of hero or champion. With the exception of puzzle games, such as the ridiculously addictive Portal, videogames should provide a form of escapism, and why escape to a world more depressing than your own – unless your can conquer it?

To come full circle with this argument I would like to return to Rockstar (of GTA fame), who also brought us the exceptional Bully (or Canis Canem Edit, as the UK nanny state decided it should be called). This game superbly captures the simplicity and charm of a game set in a school environment, such as retro heroes like Skool Daze did back in the 80s. All the playground humour is there, all the pranks, the cliques, the frustrations. Bully was released in 2006, midway between San Andreas (2004) and GTA IV (2008), and it feels like Rockstar Vice President and writer Dan Houser retreated to his bedroom with a Commodore C64 and relived some playground glory before penning Bully. Bully has all the satire of GTA, without any of the gritty realism (a sort of Grange Hill-em-up), it is nothing short of a laugh-riot to play from start to finish, and personally I am delighted by rumours of a sequel. The whole ambience of the game is about fun, and one of the earliest clues that this game will be a treat is the soundtrack, which (and this is a bold claim that few will agree with) I think is the best in gaming history. The generic walking theme in Bully can only be described as a ‘Harry Potter porn groove’ – and should a dodgy home movie of Emma Watson ever appear on the internet at some point in the future, I sincerely hope the Bully walking theme is used to accompany it.

Better doesn’t always mean more fun. I have been known to play bejewelled blitz for hours on end, and its shit! Having deep moral choices and a fancy physics engine is great, but it’s supposed to be entertaining. Get that bit right first, then put the whistles and bells on, otherwise it’s an exercise in turd polishing.