That's the D&D article. It smacks of the old 'Tyranny of Fun' rants.
"People enjoying themselves too much? Not on my watch." ~tears off t-shirt to reveal a drab suit~
I mean, I do actually think there is an issue with "Tyranny of Fun," but it isn't the issue most people think of.
That is, there seem to be two different ways people present the concept, both of which I think are wrong-headed. One camp says, "You put in all these
rules and
limitations and
restrictions in the name of 'fun,' but all you did was kill the game!" Given my posting history, and the fact that my favorite edition of D&D is 4e, I think most people can figure out why I don't consider that argument even remotely effective. The other camp, however, says something to the effect of, "We
have all these rules in order to make choices actually
matter, to give
weight to things, and then you go and
obliterate them into freeform whatever-you-like! All you've done is kill the game!" It might surprise some of you that I find
that argument off-base as well, though I am much more sympathetic to the idea behind it ("rules should have a purpose," more or less) than I am to the previous ("rules are stupid and shouldn't exist," more or less.)
The
actual Tyranny of Fun I see is much deeper and more insidious. It is the holding up of "Fun" as simultaneously justification, panacea, and purpose all in one. "Fun" justifies
absolutely anything, no matter what, and so long as something
can maybe potentially be fun to
someone* then all of its ills are necessarily cured forever. Finally, the one and only purpose of game design is fun, and anything that could ever even potentially move toward anything else is anathema, to be purged with fire and steel.
In other words, the
actual Tyranny of Fun is a mindset regarding game design which eliminates all possibility of actually
learning, of developing a
field in which we study what games are, how they work, what approaches exist, how different tools can be applied effectively vs ineffectively, etc. It is a philosophical push toward the intuitive alone and absolute, toward designers as
auteurs whose work cannot ever be limited by anything whatsoever lest you poison its artistic purity, and toward GMs as amateur designers that must (not can, not should,
must) rebuild every game every time they play it, to the tune of Carl Sagan's famous line, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Fun
is important in game design. But we should not allow "make sure your game is fun" to become the end-all, be-all of game design. We should recognize that, for example, delayed gratification is a wonderful thing, even though it means having less fun some of the time. We should recognize that games can have purposes other than "have fun," such as "seek meaning," "tell stories," "display creativity," or "achieve understanding." We should embrace the idea that,
while we pursue fun, there can be different methods of getting there, and even if we are given certain mechanics or principles that must be adhered to (such as "XP=GP," "combat as war" as much as I hate the phrase, "balance," or "fail forward," or whatever), there are better and worse ways of
implementing those goals or ideas or mechanics so that we get to the end result. That there can be qualitative and quantitative differences in the kind of experience produced, and that we
can in fact perform tests, iterating on the products of our labor until they really do consistently perform as expected.
*Note, however, that things like
balance being fun to someone never matters, period. Only
some things are judged by the "someone, somewhere can find it fun" standard, while others are judged by a "it must be
universally fun for
everyone or it's bad" standard. As a rule, traditional options or mechanics are evaluated by the first standard. Novel/modern options or mechanics are evaluated by the second.
www.theatlantic.com
