As a rule, I usually avoid writing about “fun.” I don’t feel “Fun” is a very useful term for analyzing game design – it’s poorly defined, it’s subjective, it’s regarded as a self-evidently good thing to have. In short, “fun” isn’t very fun – to write about, anyway. That said, I think there is a kind of fun that merits discussion: The kind that has been intentionally removed from a game. This might be a confusing statement! “Surely,” you may say, “developers try to add as much fun as possible, for whatever value of ‘fun’ they may personally hold – or, if they don’t, it must be for some grand artistic purpose, some emotional experience that supersedes mere fun.” This is not the case: It may never have been the case, but it is particularly not so now. Game developers remove fun all the time, in the same way that one might remove caffeine to make decaf coffee – then use it later as an additive.
This didn’t happen all at once. First, let’s talk about the Metroidvania genre. Primarily defined by Metroid in 1987, in these games you explore a large open map which hides various upgrades, each of which allow you to explore more of the map. The main thing distinguishing Metroidvanias from any other exploration adventure is that most upgrades have both everyday utilitarian use and exploration use. A good example is the freeze ray in Metroid: This weapon freezes enemies in place, which makes them easier to dispatch, makes certain enemies uniquely vulnerable, and allows one to reach higher areas by using frozen enemies as platforms. Because of this structure, the gameplay you start with in this genre is usually just a shadow of the gameplay you eventually get: At its best, this can feel like a gradual unfolding, a world that keeps expanding the more you explore it. At it’s worst, it can feel like forcing yourself to push through a bad game in the hopes of finding a better one at the other end of it.
Around the same time as Metroidvanias were being formalized and popularized by Metroid, JRPGs were getting being formalized and popularized by Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987). In these, the player gets more powerful over time gradually as a side-effect of winning battles. This effectively also grants access to more of the map, simply by making the player able to win the progressively more difficult battles that populate those sections of map. Just as in Metroid, they have more tactical options at their disposal over time – and, just as in Metroid, this can leave the early parts of the game feeling quite bland relative to the later parts. In the best case, this leads to the novelty of a new world and adventure slowly giving way to investment in story and strategy – but, as well, sometimes this simply leads to players who find it not worthwhile putting in the early rote repetitive work of progressing through repeated trivial victories.
Games are, in terms of the abilities offered to the player, usually designed from the top down. The designer has some core idea of what the player will be able to do, and adds all of these capabilities to the game first to ensure that they work and feel good together. However, if your game design relies on the player character getting more powerful over time – or even if you simply want to avoid overwhelming the player with options right away – these abilities will probably be mostly stripped away at the start of the game and drip-fed back to the player across its duration. The version of the game that was fully designed and tested is gated behind tens of hours of potentially sub-optimal gameplay, the version the player encounters designed to be intentionally worse-feeling, clumsier, more off-putting: Bad on purpose. How much gets left behind, how punishing the impact on overall enjoyment is, varies a lot based on the specifics of how these abilities get stripped away – however, the alternative can be even worse, when the player finds an “upgrade” only to find it makes the game clunkier and less enjoyable.
Modern games, particularly AAA games, tend to treat established game mechanics from different genres as a kind of buffet to select from. You’ve got your crafting systems, your experience systems, your movement upgrades, your different weapons, each of these often included just as much to be an exclamation mark on a box (or store page) as for actual gameplay reasons. Often, because of this approach, you see a weird fusion of the RPG experience system approach and the Metroidvania upgrading approach: As the player plays, they accumulate experience points (or some other similar upgrade currency) which, rather than giving the player stat upgrades to tackle otherwise too difficult encounters, instead unlock one of the abilities the game was designed with. At first this might seem like a similar system to those it draws from, but its impact is insidiously different: Because the worlds are seldom designed with multiple modes of exploration in mind, the outcome is wholly subtractive, with none of the joy of being able to explore new parts of the world by unlocking them through choice and insight, merely a grind to reach a threshold where another narrow slice of the real game is released to the player.
This has also, unfortunately, become endemic to the “Roguelite” genre. With Rogue Legacy, the design trend started shifting towards each run contributing to a set of meta unlocks that make the player more powerful, allowing them to access new areas and work towards completing the game – very similar to the JRPG system, but in a genre that purports to be about systemic discovery, challenge, and consequence. Discovery, understanding, exploration, and systemic richness are stripped away… to make a game where you grind to unlock stuff and to more efficiently explore more or less the same areas you have already explored.
While I think this often creates shallow and unpleasant games, many of these ideas have ensconced themselves in the hallowed halls of “best practices.” You see, while the games may not be as enjoyable, they are more addictive: As humans, we tend to crave the sensation of accumulation, of improvement, because this translates fairly directly to sensations of safety and mastery. These feedback mechanisms short-circuit the logical part of the brain, make us feel like we are fundamentally doing something right and good, incontrovertibly beneficial. If this is your game’s main value proposition, though, it’s essentially just a job for the player that they don’t get paid for – investing untold hours in the promise that one day it will all be worth it. I dislike this trend: If you are making a work of art, it should be a worthwhile experience from its first to its last moments, and crafting this worthwhile experience should always be the focus. To dilute that experience, pad it out for hours, pump it full of empty calories, seems cruel and wasteful to me. Surely, the medium can offer better than a treadmill to walk indefinitely, hour after hour, until our legs give out.