Games, fun and you

The above video (from by far the best games site out there) is long and more than a little soap-boxy, but it gets at something I have been mulling over a lot lately.

Do video games have to be "fun" to be "good"? I use quotes because those terms are very fluid and kind of meaningless, but the basic question -- does the act of playing a video game have to be pleasurable for said game to be deemed worthy of your time/money -- is a valid one as the world's newest medium of art moves forward.

I just finished a review for the DS title Flower, Sun, and Rain. It was not a fun game. The main gameplay conceit is sifting through a large collection of information to find a numerical code to unlock story elements and move the game forward. This was not fun. At all. There was no thrill of discovery in solving the puzzles, no joy in finding the solution. But the story is compelling.

I ask, is this game worth playing? Despite giving it a 2/10, I say yes, it is. If only because it's one of the first games I have ever come across (reading about or playing) in which playing it was not fun, yet I wanted to keep going.

The above video argues that fun is not enough, that games need to be more serious, even unfun, in order to succeed and mean something. I struggle with this, as I find it very difficult (puns always intended) to play a game which is difficult to have fun with. I look at a book like Gravity's Rainbow. When it came out, it was deemed "unreadable" and "shitty" (the Pulitzer board may have used cleaner language) and yet, is undeniably important and looked upon as one of the best novels of this century.

So we wait. We wait for the day when a game is so great, has such an amazing story or commentary on life, but is not fun to play. Will anyone want to play it?