It's Not Just About "Fun"

Let's say I'm talking to some coworker or new acquaintance about one of my many different endeavors (possibly medieval wargaming, or music, or even mathematics). Maybe we're not quite making a connection about why it's important to me. How can I make them understand why I spend time on these projects? As I struggle for a conclusion, I might say something like, “So yeah, we're having fun”. And the other person will then say, “Oh, all right then”. Apparently, they'll achieve closure from that, and walk away untroubled.

And you know what? I'm trying really hard to stop doing that, because for the most part it's just total bullshit.

I know a lot of us have the same problem. Our art and our gaming are important to us. We feel it in our gut. But when it comes time to explain it, we routinely say “It's just fun”, or “As long as we have fun,” or “The only important thing is having fun”. We wave the word “fun” at the problem of explaining ourselves and assume that it suffices.

But I hereby choose to resist that temptation. Our gaming and our art are so much more important and multifaceted than that! The “fun” explanation is really just a convenient cop-out. It leaves mute the vast majority of our experiences in any of these deeply-felt projects. Like the best literature (or theater or movies or TV), they may be: sad, scary, inspiring, informative, arousing, inflammatory, tragic, dramatic, elegiac... without necessarily being "fun".

You can see one iteration of this in the “AngryMath Manifesto”, on my math blog (over here). Most mathematicians tend to describe their work as “a play of patterns... a wonderful beauty... a crystalline serenity”. But that's not an accurate representation of our actual work in math – it's trouble, it's a problem to be solved, it's a barrier seeking destruction, and it's the jolt of relief and excitement when the light-bulb clicks on.

Consider the experience when I'm playing drums with my garage-punk band Victor Bravo (blog over here). If I'm weak-minded, I might describe the experience as “fun”, but that's not really truthful. It's hard work, and it's pre-show-anxiety, and it's also the overcoming of all that in myself. It's fast and hard-hitting, it's incredibly precise, and yet it's totally chaotic at the same time, too. We're singing songs about people's failings and disgust and destruction – and the heartfelt desire for things to be better. I'm trying to hit, I'm trying to listen, I'm trying to move my wrists and fingers properly, I'm trying to track what instruments are being damaged, and I'm trying to simply breathe properly. People are jumping and dancing and shoving each other in our mosh pit. Sometimes I'm trying to dodge stuff being thrown at us, and occasionally I'm trying to track how badly I'm being damaged (for example). That's many things, but “fun” is probably the weakest, faintest of all approximations of the experience.

Now let's come back to our gaming hobby, which is all of these things all at once. Whether players or DM, when we're at the table, we're trying to: Solve problems, support our teammates emotionally, improvisationally act out our character personalities, remember rules, crunch probabilities in our heads, decide whether to use our resources now or later, gauge risk-versus-reward, and consider a simulation of near-medieval life and technology. We're trying to manage our own emotions and come back from a bad beat or a difficult situation, and find some way to fight on (!) to victory. We're listening and parsing language and narrative descriptions for meaning. It's a puzzle and math and theater and history and a sporting event all at once. I've seen players go directly from sputtering anger to cheering joy at the roll of a single die or the discovery of a puzzle's solution (and vice-versa).

Is all of that “fun”? No, I don't think so. Much of it is heartache and uncertainty and struggle against overwhelming odds while the game is in progress. And that emotional, intellectual test is so very much more than just “fun”.

So, if “fun” is so miserably incomplete, what would a fuller explanation look like? Obviously, I can't pretend to think that I have a complete answer. But let's say, just for a moment, that we consider Aristotle's famed analysis of “Tragic Poetry” (and if he's not completely right, we can at least take this as a carefully-considered initial hypothesis). He specifies six components: (1) Plot, (2) Character, (3) Thought, (4) Diction, (5) Melody, and (6) Spectacle. Now, isn't that an almost eerily prescient description of our fantasy role-playing games? (And possibly even moreso, good rock'n'roll?) The Plot is meant to contain “reversals, recognition, and suffering... arousing horror, fear, and pity”, and meant to effect catharsis of same; the Characters are expected to “change from happiness to misery because of some tragic mistake” (see here). Is that not a fair description of our games that have no “win” condition for our avatar-selves, but only, ultimately, ways to lose?

(Now, obviously, there's another volume of Aristotle's analysis lost to us over time; but I think it's rather obvious that our RPGs are more like “Drama” than they are “Comedy”.)

Now think: Where is “fun” in this analysis? Has it been overlooked? Is it fundamentally unnecessary? Is it implied by the last and least-important item of “Spectacle”? And are the other rewards from our dramas, from our own Tragic Poetry, not immensely deeper than just “fun”? Let us be courageous and assert all of these deeper aspects, together, and not be satisfied with talking about the merely consolatory notion, which is to say, “fun”.


Edit: James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess helpfully points out in the comments that he'd written on related subjects at around the same time I wrote this. See the original I Hate Fun (6/12/2008), and his follow-up I Hate Fun - One Year Later (5/12/2009), posted one week before my article here.