Who Says Video Games Have to Be Fun?

From Wired, the makers of the grim videogames Fatworld, Airport Security, and Bacteria Salad (among others) make a bid for artistic growth for the video game by claiming for it the same right as other art forms: to challenge and annoy us in a decidedly unfun manner:

"The question of fun hangs like a cloud over this medium," [Ian] Bogost [leader of Persuasive Games] says, pointing out that "fun" would hardly be accepted as the highest possible praise for a song, novel, or movie. In his new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost describes how games can engage us through irony, luring us into a pattern of actions that we recognize as reprehensible, or at least dismaying, while at the same time exciting our competitive drive and allowing us to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view….Bogost brings to gaming something that fiction writers have always known: Moral discomfort is the root of comedy, and pain can be a source of pleasure, too.

Kevin Parker in our April 2004 on the higher meaning and potential of video gaming.