Making Hell Fun (pt 1)
How a 30-year-old game franchise shows that fun isn't what you think it is
It’s a silly premise, yet fans love it. You are an ex-marine-and-ex-space-knight obsessed with killing demons. In the course of your crusade, you journey to hell and back, saving earth and mars multiple times. Armed with bigger and bigger guns (of which the BFG is this trope’s ultimate meme-ification), you single-handedly stop the legions of hell with cartoonishly-violent glee. Along the way, you uncover hidden files, arcane texts, and cutscenes that feature enemies, friends, and strangers commenting on your awesomeness. Except most players don’t actually look like badasses while playing. Rather than cruising through the game like the Terminator after raiding a gunstore, they’re cowering in corners or scrounging for more ammo. Levels are rarely conquered on the first try. Many die over and over again before making serious progress. Nonetheless, for anyone who’s donned the green helmet, Doom is undeniably fun.
At nearly 30 years old, Doom is one of gaming’s most successful and longest-running franchises. And yet many are embarrassed to admit they like it. Despite the latest entry to the series being one of the year’s best-selling games, millions of gamers were outraged that Doom Eternal lost out to a more user-friendly, story-driven competitor, The Last of Us Part II, in 2020’s biggest videogame awards.
Why does this matter? Because games are productized fun. Each game release is designed to maximize playability and enjoyment for players. Unlike more passive mediums like books or movies, which were created first as a means of transmitting information, fun is the number one raison d’etre for games. Books and documentary movies aren’t always meant to be fun, they’re meant to be educational, thought-provoking, worldview-changing. In other words, art. But games?
They must epitomize fun before they can be anything else.
On the surface, what played out in the judging of the two games was a debate between art and mass entertainment. For the same reason action movies rarely beat artistic dramas at the Oscars, a power fantasy about murdering hell’s denizens didn’t stand a chance against a post-apocalyptic drama dealing with tough issues like cruelty, regret, and survivor guilt. But where the latter might stand up better as social commentary or even as art, the former doubled down on game mechanics.
The result?
Critics loved The Last of Us Part II, but gamers were much more divided. With at least one player going so far as to call it “pretentious garbage”, and thousands of others deriding its simplistic gameplay, comparing it to a “playable movie”.
Meanwhile, as many critics worried that Doom Eternal would be too hard for the average gamer, the gamers themselves largely loved the challenge. Many praised the game for its adrenaline-inducing intensity. Says user fabiolongo on Metacritic, “This game is not to relax after a hard day, it will take all your time and strength. 10 chopped demons out of 10.”
Something strange is happening here. If fun is supposed to be pleasure, if games are supposed to alleviate boredom, then why do gamers clamor for skippable cutscenes and brutally-difficult and complex gameplay requiring intense concentration? Shouldn’t a game like The Last of Us Part II, which couples easier, more rewarding gameplay with a richer, more engrossing narrative, be more “fun”?
We’ve long held this belief that entertainment is meant to help us relax. A pleasant diversion. Yet here people are praising one of these diversions precisely for its ability to do the opposite of “relax after a hard day”.
To them, fun isn’t easy, it’s hard. It isn’t pleasing, it’s brutal.
Balanced against this is another contradiction: As much as we might admire people who struggle and fight for every inch of achievement they’ve attained in their hard lives, we secretly long for the heroes who can do the same or more but make it look easy. Where the main characters in The Last of Us Part II portrayed very human emotions in their fights for revenge, redemption, and resolution, Doom Eternal’s Doom Slayer (yes, that’s his name) has kept a sneering, Charles Bronson-like scowl throughout.
Maybe we’ve got fun all wrong. Maybe, in reverse-engineering what it is that gets so many millions of gamers obsessed over a dumb game about killing monsters with big guns and chainsaws, we’ll find the keys to unlocking more fun in our own lives. In doing so, we may even have to confront the demons that make feel less like hell-razing badasses and more like scared refugees of armageddon in our own lives.
So strap on your Super Shotgun, because we’re about to go deep.
To be continued…