I'm going to go ahead and apologize in advance for this piece, since you've probably seen a lot of this by now and will surely see more of it in the coming weeks.  This is another response to Jim Sterling's recent Destructoid column on the state of art games.  Specifically, their perceived pretentiousness and lack of "fun."

First, I want to address Jim's opinion, or at least as I interpreted it from his highly hyperbolic and inflammatory piece.  I wish I could believe that, at the end of the day, his point is just that games, as art, can both make a statement and still be fun.  I have a hard time believing anyone could disagree with that argument.  But his argument seems to be more that art games must be fun and can, assuming the former is true, feel free to make a statement.  To respond to the notion that art games must be vague, directionless, or "meaningful" with the notion that they must not is no less stubborn or pretentious.  He isn't stating his opinion on art games; he's issuing a mandate that art games should only be allowed to exist -- or at the very mildest, only be appreciated -- under the condition that they be fun.  This reasoning presupposes that games, as a medium, serve only a single purpose: to entertain.  And that is where I call bullshit.

Not many claim that paintings must be aesthetically pleasing.  Likewise, not many claim that film, as a medium, must be used to produce entertainment.  We don't hear arguments that claim that any other artistic medium can only be used to serve one purpose, or that they have to meet the criteria of that one purpose to do more.  There's a reason for that: such claims would be arbitrarily reductive, asserting that only if they accomplish the first ("fun"), can they proceed to the second ("value", "meaning", etc.).  I wouldn't consider Francis Bacon's work "fun" (pretty), but I derive a lot of interest and value from it.  Likewise, I never felt entertained by the work of Stan Brackage or Maya Deren, but that doesn't mean there isn't any value to be found in their films.

In the column, Jim focuses most of his vitriol on Tale of Tales' The Path.  I haven't played The Path, so I can't make any statement on it specifically.  Instead I'll use another game often criticized for being pretentious, overwrought, and "overly indie": last year's Flash darling, Every Day The Same Dream.  Right upfront I'll say that this is not a fun game.  The actual mechanics consist of "go right."  I felt no entertainment value by just pressing my index finger to the right arrow key.  But it's still one of the most narratively and creatively rewarding experiences I've had with a game.  I don't think that because of what I hear many refer to as a "bland, generic, overwrought" statement on modern life or office labor.  To be honest, I didn't get that from it at all.  The only meaning I derived from that game was in self-reflection; I didn't think about what the game had to say about the world (I honestly don't think it had anything to say about the world), but only on what it had to say about me, based on my own reaction.

But I'm supposed to believe that, because it wasn't fun, it also failed as a piece of art?  I can't comprehend why people are so married to the idea that "games need to be fun."  Why?  Why does art need to be fun?  It's like there's this inability among a particular group of gamers to accept that there's just a a part of this industry that doesn't hold any appeal for them.  If you don't like art, that's fine.  No one is forcing you to play Passage or Void, just as no one is forcing you into a museum to look at a painting you don't want to see, or to an art house theater to watch 20 minutes of paint on celluloid.  If you aren't interested in art, then why are you so interested in it?  Why do something that you don't enjoy just so you can complain about it?  Just calling something "pretentious" or "not fun" isn't valid criticism.  I'm not saying there isn't pretentious art in the world -- there's a lot of it -- but if your priority is fun and you just aren't interested in branching out, then why play games that aren't fun?

To reduce games, as a medium, to needing to be fun you're also cutting short their artistic potential.  You may not be doing it deliberately, but that is what you're doing.  Games, as an interactive medium, as a potential for an art medium, are still so young and still struggling to even walk.  The only way they're going to get there is through experimentation, and in the indie world, there's a lot of room for experimentation.

Art games shouldn't get a free pass. I feel like there's an illusion that they do, because out of the literally thousands of indie games floating around, only the cream of the crop gain any attention.  I'm not saying all games need to strive to be art and I'm not saying that all art games are good art.  But to claim that games are only this one thing, should only be this one thing (fun) and that anything else is secondary, not only ignores but willfully attempts to destroy their potential to be anything more than fun -- to be seen as a legitimate form of expression, reflection, or a way to say something about the human condition (which is not always fun).

I'm sorry I was kind of inarticulate there.  This is mostly a gut reaction; I didn't think it through much before I started writing.  Anyway, let me know what you think.