Post by Rémi Töötätä in Discuss your manifesto!

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First of all, thanks to everybody for the great great manifestos you made! This jam was wonderful <3

As for me, I wrote THE JOYFUL GAME, a text about the state of joy and fun in games. It came from a reflexion I always have when thinking about games, whether looking for fun as the main goal of games is a good or bad thing. Lots of people have said that games are meant to be fun, whereas others have replied that fun is an obstacle in the way to "making games an Art". The manifesto I wrote tries to propose another solution: what if joy was a way to make art with games?

I'm obviously not the first one to talk about that, several designers and people I admire already work that way, and I wanted to use this jam to take my stance about the issue, based on what I know and what I feel.

I'd love to hear what others think about that topic, especially since some of the manifestos made these last days call for avoiding fun or stopping looking for it: the most direct being EdwardGreysky's No Fun Manifesto, with which I don't agree wholeheartedly but is definitely thought-provoking :)

The manifesto I liked the most is, I believe, Let Us Embrace The Fleeting Nature Of Time And Free Up Space On Our Hard Drives by Holly Gramazio (phew that's a long name!). It's very radical and I'd love to see the world it would create (although I'm not sure if I'd like to live in that world, but I'm definitely curious). Games and technology are moving so quickly that they become obsolete very fast already, so the ideas Holly develop could seem like just the next step to what's already happening, or a way to accept obsolescence and enjoy our time with our games, because we'd know they're not here for a long time. I don't know if what I said makes sense but that's just how I feel with this text: is it genius? But does it makes any sense at all?

Emma Dee6 years ago

I am so fond of the Joyful Game. I think it's important (especially in the gaming sphere, where things tend to get competitive at best and vitriolic at worst) that we have games that make us more hyper-aware of our positive connections to other people. Having joy in turn makes you want to share joy with other people!! And in the face of seriousness & pain out in the world, our minds need to...in a sense, "fill up with joy" to combat the world! The definition of a Joyful Player is also nice. Could a Joyful Player in turn make any game into a Joyful Game?

I like how the examples of Joyful Games given all embody a similar aesthetic as well: bright colors, pleasant sound design, and friendly shapes! I'd also like to nominate Videoball by Action Button as a Joyful game. Maybe some people will disagree with me, I don't know. Also, I think what makes a good Icebreaker game is similar qualities to Joyful Games.

Rémi Töötätä6 years ago

"Could a Joyful Player in turn make any game into a Joyful Game?"

I think so! I played The Binding of Isaac with a friend some time ago, and while the game is super stressing and gory, we'd try to play in tandem, them controlling the movement and me the shooting, and vice versa. And this is a thing I've heard everywhere: people are playing games like Dark Souls with strange constraints, there was this 'Twitch plays XXX' thing that was really fun and unique (until it got stale of course)... So yeah, if you have a joyful mind, you can play anything in joyful ways, alone or with your friends :)

I didn't know Videoball, I looked up a video online, and I think it'd be at home with all the other joyful games! And it made me think of Rocket League too. I don't have much experience with icebreaker games but if the goal is to have quick laughs and get in the mood to engage with people you don't necessarily know, then it definitely has connections with the joyful game.

Oportet6 years ago

Having read both THE JOYFUL GAME and the No Fun Manifesto, neither proved persuasive.

On the one hand, fun has positives. You get to destress, relax with friends, enjoy life. THE JOYFUL GAME explains this better than I ever could; I won't go on about something you already know.

On the other hand, there's other benefits to games besides fun. And I don't just mean that cold, clinical education side of gaming. I think of Pathologic. If you aren't familiar, it's a janky Russian horror game that might be the most depressing thing in existence. It is the exact opposite of fun, but in doing so, primes the player to explore deep, emotionally-charged themes. When people play it, they can't help but argue. This guy argued killing one to save many. These guys called each other fascists. The lack of fun made people think about important questions they never considered; I wouldn't want to take that from games.

And don't forget; fun can be manipulative. I'm thinking of exploitative free-to-play schemes, drip feeding dopamine in just the right ways while exploiting their playerbase. And then there's series like Far Cry; fun games, but they come with unfortunate implications. If we only judged games for fun, we'd open the door to exploitation and propaganda.
My question: why can't we have both? Why can't we have fun games with greater meanings? I mentioned Far Cry's narrative, but the core gameplay loop (scouting and clearing bases) doesn't make the game fun. It's superfluous; you don't need dumb to have fun. And then there's games like Minecraft, which use fun as a vessel to be educational, to explain complex engineering concepts in a way people enjoy. I can see both side's point, but I don't see a reason to fight over this.

While I'm typing; I strongly disagree with Let Us Embrace Our Long Titles. Looking back a lot of my childhood games, leaving them in a box for a decade has let me revisit them for whole new experiences. If anyone here has played Pokemon XD: Gales Of Darkness, try replaying it today. Turns out, your most powerful ally is a benevolent cable news executive who, among other things, puts you in contact with a whistleblower. I guess Pokemon supports journalism. I don't know if it was uncontroversial at the time, or if 12-year-old me didn't think about it, or if I didn't have needed context my first time around, but the game was definitely different the second time around. If I had traded it in. And it's not the only one: literally every game I've owned has become a new experience over time. Each of them has shown me how much I've changed as a person, in ways I wasn't even aware of. Ten years down the line, I'd love to revisit the games on my hard drive.

The very idea of deleting our games scares me. If anything, we need to be saving our games. We live in a world where online-only games can be lost forever as soon as the servers shut down, where games can be wiped off the PS4 storefront because Konami said so. We have a history to protect; wiping our hard drives will only shoot us in the foot.

Rémi Töötätä6 years ago (3 edits)

I totally understand what you're saying, and I kinda agree with you: games don't have to be fun, or to put fun at the center of their design. My take is that it's OK for some games to be focused around simple fun, and fun can have the "greater meanings" you're talking about: Minecraft is a good example of that, and I'm thinking of Tearaway, a game about paper made by the studio behind Little Big Planet, which explores the link between the player and the digital world in clever and unique ways, and it definitely has interesting things to say about creativity and how everybody can create. Fun can let players explore deep themes, it's just a particular lens to do so, and it isn't the best one for some subjects of course. In a way, the greatest meaning I can think of (for this specific kind of games I called joyful games) is if a game makes you want to share it with others, play with others and get to know others: putting people together is the best thing that these games can do, in my opinion.

On the other hand, I'm completely okay with games that aren't fun. I didn't know about Pathologic, but I have a few examples in mind of games that explore frustration, fear or disagreement between the player and the game in interesting ways (Papers Please comes is the first name I can think of). As for exploitative fun games, I hadn't thought about that: of course there are things to avoid, but as long as there's big loads of money to gain, some studios will take the manipulative path. Fortunately, for each of these games, there's a respectful game out there somewhere.

Another thing that comes to my mind: you talked about Pathologic as a game that let people argue, defend their opinions and, in some way, engage with each other; and I talked about how joyful games can aim to get people together. Isn't that the same goal? Would it be possible to say that, beyond fun or no fun, games have the power of connecting people, and they just take different paths to that?

I don't know, but it's such an interesting subject.

itch.io

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