I Think that people get really angry when they hear about people trying to make what are now called "Art games" right? That these people are making games, and they're not good game designers, or something, because they're not making a game that's as fun, and they couldn't make that was fun even if they wanted to, so its sort of take the easy road and trying to just do something because they're bad game designers, and "games should always be fun." People get really angry online about this, especially people who are big fans of the existing video game medium. But that's sort of like saying every single movie has to be exciting or something like that; and maybe it's a little bit different because, I don't know, this long history of games even before video games, you know, people playing them for fun? <Laughs> And that connects back to sports and all these other things, so its sort of like this existing cultural baggage that we have; this existing cultural perception of how games fit into culture and why people play them generally, even outside of the medium of video games. But at the same time, it's like handcuffs, in terms of what kinds of things you can deal with, because certain subject matter isn't fun. And if you want to make games about those types of things, if you wanted to have a full expressive palate available to you, the types of games that you can make, and the types of things those games can be about, and you're still trying to shoehorn fun into each of those designs, the fun, in certain situations, may feel really out of place. If you're making a game about what if feels like to be in a very scary situation where police are brutalizing somebody and trying to figure out what you're going to do to be a good Samaritan and not sort of be a bystander who's not part of the problem and part of the solution, if you create that experience and you create fun mechanics as a part of that experience, and the player comes away with this dissonance where, "Yeah, I was really feeling oppressed there, but there was this really fun thing that I got into and I was really enjoying myself and it sort of felt weird," right? So, creating an experience where a player feels frustrated and doesn't enjoy themselves might be the right choice, depending on what the game is about. And so, I mean, that "Police Brutality" example is a perfect example of that, and in fact, some of the people that played that game, they complained that, not that the game was too fun, but that I didn't hit that feeling of dread just right and that the game was interesting and well-balanced and so on, but it didn't really capture how scary it is to be confronted by police in a situation like that. And therefore it was a failure. So it should've been even less...mechanically interesting and less engaging and more scary. And so...so yeah, I think that its just a matter of changing people's perceptions a little bit about what they expect from a game, and showing them a game that is interesting- it still has to be interesting, there is plenty of boring out there in all sorts of different mediums: art that sort of fails in one way or another. And I think that one of the primary ways that a piece of art might fail is just by not being interesting, by not being engaging, not being something that you want, in the case of linear meanings, not something that you want to keep watching or keep reading. Where it sort of loses you as an audience member. So I think that that is the first order of business, right? Is making something that, for whatever reason, not necessarily that it's exciting or fun, makes you want to stick with the work and see it through and see a lot of different things about the work and sort of immerse yourself in it in some way. So I think that, even if we're trying to make a game that feels frustrating, or that conveys some sort of feeling of despair or feeling of sadness or feeling of love or feeling of relaxation, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be exciting and fun- on the other hand, those things still need to be engaging and make you want to sort of stick with the work and see where its going. Otherwise, the work fails. So I think that its possible to do that, I think it definitely is. I think that those emotionally-engaging kind of things, where a game can be engaging in those other ways, might even latch into people maybe more than the sort-of addictive, mindless- what you might call "Addictive, mindless, fun" which is what a lot of people are potentially looking for from a video game. At the end of a long, addictive session of mindless fun, a lot of people really feel kind of bad about themselves; they kind of feel "wait a minute- how many hours have I been sitting here? Aww man, I hate this game!" <laughs And maybe they're drawn back to it later again and they sort of hate themselves after another session. You can imagine a different situation where they were compelled to stick with it because of something else, not because they were addicted to it, and where they were compelled to stick with it because it engaged them so strongly in an emotional way that they weren't expecting, and at the end of the experience they feel like, "Wow, that was really worth it. That was a good use of my time. That transformed me. That made me feel something that I wasn't expecting to feel and now I'm thinking about the rest of my day in a different way," as opposed to thinking of the rest of my day by saying, "Wow, now I have three less hours than I thought I would have this afternoon to do some of these other things in my life." So I think that basically we need to prove it to people- we need to create games that are like that, that engage them in different ways, and have them say, "Yes, wow, that was worth it. I want to play more games that engage me in that way." And then that discussion about whether gaming should always be fun or not would disappear. But we don't have too many examples of that and I think we need to make more.
