Playing with Fire: The Little Game That Could - Gonzalo Frasca
3 million players is practically half the amount of people who play World of Warcraft. 3 million players is more than what Halo 2 got on its launch day. Of course, it’s not fair to compare a crappy, viral Flash game with two magnificent examples of AAA entertainment. And that is exactly my point. They are totally different on every level except for one: the players. 3 million players are 3 million players are 3 million players. Game designers know that at the end of the day, what really matters is if your game was able to harvest a smile or trigger an emotion. Certainly, we all love to play with expensive toys and create realistic graphics and smooth animations. But just like it happens in the realm of love, we soon learn that beautiful features wear off very quickly. The Zidane game was popular because it spoke to people about something that they cared about. Its popularity declined after a few days -that’s a common feature of newsgames. Still, it made an impact. It shone very brightly before fading out. We take for granted that all games should work like commercial games but we could not be more wrong. Not all games should provide 40-80 hours of gameplay. Not all games should have top of the line production values. We don’t expect that to happen in other media and we shouldn’t expect it in video games. The ultimate truth behind all this is that games do not necessarily need to be fun. Yes, that’s right. Fun is overrated. Games need to be compelling, they need to grab our attention, they need to give us something that we didn’t have before we played them. Newscasts do not need to be fun. Kafka is definitively not fun. Ideas do not need to be fun. Still, we cannot imagine a world without news, drama or philosophy. I’m tired of reading reviews of serious games arguing that “the game is not fun”. Keep in mind that I am not here advocating lame games (and in the serious games community we do have our share of those). A serious game may be designed to be played only once or twice. It may be created to encourage thinking and reflection rather than laugh. Boring is not the opposite of fun. A game can be not fun without being boring. Alain Resnais’ documentary on Nazi concentration camps Night and Fog is not fun to watch. But it is certainly not boring.
Surely, Darfur is Dying’s gameplay could be better. So what? Who cares if it is not fun? What matters is that it is a product sound enough for people to play and learn more about a current event. Personally, before playing the game, the only thing that I knew about Darfur is that people were talking about it on the news. Because of the game, I googled more info and learned more about the situation. That is what turns this kind of game into a real success, regardless of graphics, replayability and fun. Video games will never reach their full potential in our culture until we stop dividing the world between “hardcore” and “casual” gamers and between “real” games and “the rest”. Many non-AAA games do play an essential role in the games landscape. They may have lower production values, they may have simple gameplay but they can reach the same amount of players or even more. And what is more important, they have a point to make. If you could chose only one, which one would you chose: a selection of Hollywood blockbusters or a selection of your family’s home videos? The latter may be technically poor, out of focus and lacking a coherent three act structure, but it speaks to your heart. Our job, either as AAA or non-AAA game developers, regardless of budgets, techniques and hours of gameplay, has nothing to do with fun. Our mission is to create compelling games that players deeply care about. The rest is mere entertainment.
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