I hate when people say games are supposed to be ‘fun’. It’s like saying movies are supposed to have explosions or songs are supposed to have electric guitar solos. A game is whatever the game maker wants it to be. Some games are supposed to be fun, maybe even most of them, but that doesn’t mean fun is the metric by which all games should be measured.
That Dragon, Cancer – an autobiographical game about a family discovering their infant son has terminal cancer – is one of the most beautiful and compelling games I’ve ever played, but it ain’t fun. If there’s anything games, or any kind of art, is supposed to be, it’s ‘engaging’.
My problem is that I am frequently engaged – deeply engaged – with games that infuriate me. I’m not talking about crashing out every time I lose a game of Marvel Rivals. I’m in my 30s now and I’d like to think I have a pretty high tolerance for losing (I’ve been doing it a long time). I’m talking about deeply flawed games that are so frustrating to play you wonder if the developers are masochists who made it bad on purpose.
My anger is totally rational, the irrational part is that I keep playing them. Games aren’t always supposed to be fun, but they definitely aren’t always supposed to be infuriating, either.
Getting Obsessed With Games That Upset You
The first game I developed an intense love-hate relationship with was Ark: Survival Evolved. I’ve written before about my descent into madness playing Ark, but here’s a short example of the kind of misery that game put me through.
My two-man tribe decided to build a perimeter around our land using behemoth stone dinosaur gateways. Every night for a week, all we did was gather stone and bring it back to our base. After 20 hours we finally had enough to complete the wall, and as we lined up the final gateway and clicked it into place, the entire structure vanished. A bug caused by linking two gates together with another gate instantly deleted all of our work. You know what we did? We spent another week gathering stone to build it again.
That should have been the end of the line for me with Ark, but it wasn’t even close. I have 600 hours in that game and I experienced even more heartache after Wallageddon, and a fair amount of it before it, too. One time a wild bear clipped inside my Quetzalcoatlus that took me 11 hours of continuous feeding to tame, and killed it before I could do anything. And yet, I kept playing. I will probably play more.
Right now I’m in a different depression spiral with another game that continuously enrages me: Pokemon Unite. Unite is a great casual MOBA with a number of fundamentally flawed systems that make it miserable to play seriously. There are huge, obvious problems with matchmaking, ranked progression, player reporting, and balance that have plagued the game since the day it was released, and haven’t been addressed. Late last year the developers came out and acknowledged the matchmaking issues and explained how it was going to be addressed, then pushed a major update that did absolutely nothing to address them.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
Every time I’ve tried to quit Unite it’s because I couldn’t deal with all these problems anymore, and yet for some bizarre reason I keep coming back to it. Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change. The entire time I’m playing it I’m just getting angrier and angrier. I finish every Pokemon Unite match upset, even when I win. Then I queue up for the next one knowing it will just upset me again.
Why do I keep playing games that make me so angry? There’s probably a deeply repressed psychological reason that would be best unpacked with a therapist, but I know this isn’t just a me problem. Look at the subreddit for any online game and you’ll find hundreds of people constantly complaining about how much they hate the game. As I write this there’s 40,000 people playing Ark: Survival Evolved and another 30,000 playing the remake, and I guarantee at least all of them sort of hate it.
We don’t have to do this! There’s an infinite number of video games out there. If you’re playing one for fun that makes you feel awful, you should just stop playing it and play something else instead. It’s so easy to say, but somehow so much harder to do. I refuse to take my own advice, but I will dedicate the next month grinding Pokemon Unite, getting madder and madder, until I just can’t take it anymore and swear to never play it again. Knowing this is exactly how it will play out, because it’s how it always goes, just makes me even more angry.
Ark: Survival Evolved sees players attempt to survive and thrive in the world of Ark. It is populated by prehistoric creatures that both prove a threat to the player and can also be tamed.