Book Review: Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful

Fun, Taste and Games is part of MIT’s “Playful Thinking” series, which comprised short argumentative books that can fit into a coat pocket. While this book adopts a casual, alacritous tone throughout, it also set out to go beyond setting forth mere provocations that may destabilize our conventional sense of “fun”: the authors ambitiously attempt to advance, among other things, a theoretical account of “fun.” This they do primarily in the first quarter of the book (“Finding the Fun”). Each of the 15 short chapters amounts to independently readable vignettes that subtend that overarching theorization. There is some artfulness to this, yet what also emerge are a series of problems that threaten the coherence of the book’s goal of reclaiming “fun as an important philosophical concept for making sense of play and games” (p. 4). At the outset, I felt that Sharp and Thomas could have dwelt longer on whether we should theorize “fun” at all, and if so, how we ought to do so. Is there any place, for example, for univocal definitions? The definitions of “fun” proffered are myriad and potentially circular. This can partly be excused insofar as “fun” is closely tethered to other key concepts in game studies. Sharp and Thomas state that

[f]un is not a given; it is a carefully constructed opportunity built from a context (the ludic form), the individual's attitude toward that context (set-outsidedness), and the individual's embrace of the structures and meaning to be made from the moment (ambiguity). (p. 17) In order for fun to occur then, there must be a suitable state of mind, a facilitating game-like context, and the ambiguity of layers of meanings being tended to by the player. What is unfortunate is not that they utilize a constellation of inter-related terms but that even as each one leans on the others, none boasts the stable foundations necessary to support the whole edifice. I was unable to find, for example, a clear sense of what the authors mean by "play" (towards the end, they do draw on Santayana's rather expansive definition of "play" as "whatever is done spontaneously and for its own new media & society 24(11) sake"; p. 157). Tellingly, it is in the final chapter that confusions proliferate rather than dissipate. "Go East (or West or North or South)" concerns Minecraft (and the ludic form that it offers); Thomas avers that the "special sauce that makes Minecraft unique" is that "[i]t's about fun" (p. 179) and nothing could be more fun than a frontier fantasy where Lewis and Clark go west eternally, since "[f]reedom itself is fun. Fun itself is freedom" (p. 179). "Freedom," however, appears to be something of a footnote as it is not accorded an entry in the index. Consequently, it lends no support to the authors' theoretical ambitions.
"Fun" appears to be, for the most part, aligned with the notion of "experience," which is well-known in the literature on aesthetics. However, the authors do little to address the questions that traditionally orbit this concept. The authors give an overview of how "fun" has been explored in various contexts, such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), but strikingly, little is said about the socio-cultural significance of the pleasure or sensation associated with the conception that they invoke. Here, we might consider how other concepts have been situated within a philosophical framework or worldview from which they derive their significance: Spinoza's "joy" concerns how an individual's conatus, their power of acting, is increased; Barthes' jouissance is a subversive oblivion from the dominant ideology; Foucault's "limit experiences" foments "desubjectification"; Plato's ekstasis brings madness by captivating and overcoming the subject; while Aristotle's view of pleasure stressed a self-strengthening dimension; and the spiritual joy of the Stoics (gaudium) was to be found in achieving possession of oneself through universal reason, in contrast to the external pleasures of hedone and voluptas. In the chapter "Fun in the Age of Consumerism," the authors borrow the term "smaller aesthetics" (p. 52) from Sianne Ngai to argue that there were only ever an abundance of smaller beauties and that a wide range of fun can be created through the multiplicity of small aesthetics (p. 57). This is significant but it is a timorous section of the book, one that seems to equivocate between the prescriptive and the descriptive. Nevertheless, it is clear that the case is being made both for a pluralist sense of "fun" and means of achieving it. The lineaments of this pluralism, however, do not enjoy ample conceptual support and as such, we may wonder whether this seemingly pluralistic account of "fun" might not also be susceptible to becoming hegemonic in some way.
The book is stronger in expressing what it takes aim against -the "tyranny of taste" that inheres when "the aesthetic of meaningful choice" (p. 59) dominates in game design. In short, this aesthetic is said to consist of a number of core values: that games have goals; that each decision encountered by the player (the gameplay) must be legible as goal-oriented; and that these decisions should lead to different outcomes. It is perhaps best encapsulated in Sid Meier's definition of game as "a series of interesting choices." This dominant perspective has delineated "what we think games are and what the experience ought to be like when we play them" (p. 59) thereby bracketing other possibilities from being realized. Those that do escape it, such as the queer games and altgames that adroitly explore personal experiences, nonetheless become framed and critiqued in terms of meaningful choices.
Such an argument is well-supported in a number of chapters. In this way, the main edifice of claiming "fun" as a philosophical concept is watered, albeit indirectly. Thomas' background as a games journalist aptly positioned him to comment on how game journalists promoted and "cultivated a taste in gamers and nerd culture that we adopted from the industry but ultimately couldn't control" (p. 146). The journalists' failure to stand up to industry interests by facilitating a more pluralistic taste in games and approach to fun had led to the conditions that birthed Frankenstein's monster in the form of Gamergate. In the chapter on Myst, Thomas makes the case against the prevalence of speed and death in games, that games "can be slow, can lead with stories, and can offer puzzles as their central pleasure" (p. 133). However, the authors could have done more to temper the determinist bent of the argument that would seem to single out this aesthetic of meaningful choice as the sole bogeyman behind the perfidious encroachments on fun. If people largely do not find Myst fun to play, is that simply because they have become dominated by the aesthetic of meaningful choice? In another chapter, Sharp recounts his personal lifelong experiences with the game of basketball, poignantly making the case that " [t] here is nothing in the rules of basketball that inherently produces the win-at-all-costs attitude that pervades high-level play" (p. 168). It is an elegant essay on how play communities and the culture around a game can define the play more so than the rules, one that I immediately recommended to my students. Yet, in the context of the book itself, it also invites a series of questions around how such cultures are likely the outcome of a network of innumerable factors (beyond merely an aesthetic of meaningful choice that pervades the game industry).
Sharp and Thomas clearly have some firm ideas about what is contained in the remit of "fun" that are born from their years of experience in critiquing, making, and teaching about games. A philosophical treatise on "fun" is elusive here but this book may be of interest to players, designers, and academics looking to engage with a series of provocations written in a conversational tone that assemble a pluralistic conception of "fun." "That Charles Ess has written a good textbook is uninteresting," Luciano Floridi writes in his foreword to the third edition of Digital Media Ethics (p. viii). Whether you tend to agree or disagree with Floridi's positions, this is one that is hard to argue against. Charles Ess was not only an early, impactful figure in the now rapidly growing interest area of technology ethics, he has also played a significant role in shaping the field. His contributions, particularly to the subfield oriented toward virtue ethics, cannot be overestimated and few can claim to have provided the same generous mentorship to junior scholars and graduate students. So, of course, Charles Ess has written a good textbook.

ORCID iD
To make the claim is indeed uninteresting, since it is barely reasonable to expect anything to the contrary.