What exactly is "fun?"

If you are anything like me, one of the only few reasons one can contemplate as to why one would click an article titled as such is maybe because of the possible, eluding irony of the question and one may wish to find that aforementioned irony within the article itself. EIther that or, the article’s title has sparked a genuine interest that you find yourself asking yourself more and more often as this video game generation continues down its timeline. Whatever the reason, this site (or the general gaming attitude of the gaming population today) has forced me, and now you to seek the right answer. At first glance this article kind of answers itself, in as far as what fun isn’t….which will be what this article is. I mean, reading is boring right?? For some perhaps. Also, when asked, the obvious answer comes right to us. What is fun to you can range through a myriad of things such as: Riding a bike, skating, playing sports, dating, exercising or playing video games. I ask you to focus your attention on the last selection. Playing, Video Games.

Obviously, playing video games is tremendously fun, otherwise I doubt any of us would be on this site. What we play, how we play, who we play with and when we play all vary between us with some starking differences and striking similarities. Some of us like split-screen, some of us like Online Multiplayer, some like long, single campaigns, others like 1 on 1 matches. Whatever your preferences, you enjoy what you do because of your individuality. Something a “professional” reviewer nor a friend can ever take away from you. What is fun to you and who you are, are directly related to one another. Obvious article is obvious right? Yet more and more today, I’m finding gamers around the world surrendering their individual tastes to these “reviewers.” Month after month they allow reviewers from all sorts of mediums to inject what goes into a gamers veins as respected opinion and transform it into a volatile solution which is then extracted or spewed out by that gamer as irrefutable fact or irreparable coercion. Needless to say, this isn’t the case with everybody, I just wish to address it and ultimately try to avoid a possible epidemic.

Before we can find the right answer, we must both find the right question and then make sure we understand what we are asking. According to Dictionary.com, fun can be defined as a noun: something that provides mirth or amusement. A verb: to joke or kid, or an adjective: of or pertaining to fun, esp. to social fun. The part of speech which wish to use this word in today is fun used as a noun or adjective. Now I personally like fighting, racing, TPS’s, FPS’s and RPG’s games usually in that order. Thousands of variables can be drawn to help define how fun these games are to me. Another thousand can show how fun they are not to someone else. All of these possible outcomes only should tell us one very important thing. Why are we letting something as arbitrary and absolute such as a review, help centralized what is constituted as fun? Even more so, why are we so adamant about throwing around what we judge as fun, (something that is unique to us as individuals) and passing it off as fact? Using a system as absolute as one mediums (man, magazine, website, etc.) opinion, no matter how well-respected, and using it to try to define something as capricious and dynamic as our own personal “fun factor systems” is mind-boggling in itself. As you can see, the entire thought process behind it is essentially flawed. It is equivalent to trying to use mathematics to explain social interactions.

Initially, I first conceptualized this article to be focused around the understanding of how and more importantly, why do gamers in this age more so than any other, allow other gamers (because thats all a reviewer is) to contort the notion of what is to be enjoyed on a console beyond their own personal, unmistakable preference? However, I believed the prospect of trying to first understand what compels a person to enjoy a game seem much more profound, essential and relevant to all of us. When I ask the question “What exactly is fun?”, Im doing so in an informal, ironic attempt at using reverse psychology to illicit a particular response from you. The response is one that shouldn’t have to be voiced, just realized and punctuated with a mental “oooooh, i see what he’s doing.” This simple, yet ambiguous question interestingly enough, doesn’t have any one answer and that’s the point of this article. Too many gamers today subject their sense of what’s fun into an arbitrary, numeric value system, designed to delegate what is fun or how fun something is, into how fun is something supposed to be or should be in accordance with a guy’s opinion or the general consensus. If needed be, the concepts, semantics and debates of such a question can go on forever, touching bases on points not brought up, and ones that may not need to be. More so than anything, my words today were just meant as a slither of enlightenment in an effort to awaken that individualism that resides inside all of us and lost within too many. What compelled us to favor sports games more than fighting, or MMO’s over Puzzles, what essentially defines us as a gamer should never be decided by an outside source. We, who enjoy what we do not because we were told to, but because we want to, cannot let the sudden insurrections of these console wars and armchair gaming journalists rob us of the gift that comes with being an individual. Help rekindle and transform that gaming spirit back into your heads then into your hearts, where only you and your unique gaming prowess can define what exactly is the definition of fun.*