Earlier this week, MOP’s Bree and I were discussing my plans in Final Fantasy XIV as part of the Dawntrail early access launch. Now, needless to say I have a pretty intense schedule lined up for Friday and then the weekend. I am going to be playing until my fingers bleed. (Metaphorically.) And Bree said to me, point-blank, that my schedule sounds not only really intense but actually kind of not fun because I want to get a bunch of stuff done really quickly. She was quick to say that I could back off and go slower.
Which was funny to me because she was right about it being pretty intense… but, like, that was the fun part. The idea of trying to go incredibly hard and take out challenges very fast was the point. That was the fun part to me! It will be difficult and I want to see if I can do it and celebrate the success! This, of course, prompts a question about something that we don’t talk about all that often in MMOs: the intersection of different challenge styles and how that informs our fun.
I’ve once did a Perfect Ten listing some of the types of skill we encounter in MMOs, and obviously those map pretty decently onto the sorts of challenges that we encounter in games. In order for experimentation to be a skill in an MMO, the game first has to give you things to experiment with. If you only have one class (Dude) and one ability (Abide), there is a minimum of experimentation to be done! You get the idea.
But the thing is that we do tend to think of challenge in a somewhat narrower sense. This is kind of a part of how video games are structured in general. We think of games like, say, Elden Ring as being Hard Games because they bias toward a handful of skills (reaction speed and either the ability to synthesize a build or the knowledge to look one up and follow it) that we have collectively slotted as Video Game Skills. Challenges of memory, patience, and planning are frequently seen as less serious challenges (whether they should be or not).
It’s why there’s a way of thinking where adventure games are “less challenging” games, because their challenge is almost entirely in figuring out designer logic to solve puzzles. (Although some of that is that they can often involve logical leaps that make no sense, but that’s a different problem.)
Fun, by contrast, is far less finely sorted. You know when you are having fun. “I am having fun right now.” There are admittedly a number of different sorts of fun in the abstract; like, having Chris make me a delicious sandwich is going to be a different kind of fun than getting to cuddle my cats. But video games are not really going to provide a wide spread of different sorts of fun. A video game is never going to deliver the fun of a nice meal with a friend.
In many ways, fun in MMORPGs is derived from challenge. This is the one thing that the people who insist that high-end structured group content is the be-all end-all of the genre approach being right about. This is, in fact, not untrue! What is untrue is that the only type of challenge worth caring about is high-end structured group content. And no, that’s not because PvP victories are the real challenge.
Allow me to use the obvious example: managing to fit a whole lot of content and/or progress into a very narrow field of time – that is a challenge! It’s a challenge of planning, of understanding the game, of execution, and preparation. The challenge you are facing is not one where you are likely to be able to do it so wrong that your character might die, but it is absolutely a challenge. It’s the kind of challenge that gets you things like server-first leveling objectives. It’s an accomplishment!
I’m not here validating the ways that I choose to spend my free time, but rather advancing the understanding that there are a lot of different kinds of challenges. Sometimes a challenge can be about portraying a character in a consistent way and exploring the relationships and fears shaping a fictional person’s world. Sometimes it’s about stocking your droids in a game that theoretically includes fighting but it’s mostly about stocking droids. Sometimes it’s about catching as many of God’s perfect children as you can. They are all challenges.
And some of those challenges I just described sound like tedious non-fun to some of our readers. Just like high-end progression content sounds like non-fun to others. I love speedrunning dungeons in FFXIVÂ because I love seeing how fast I can go. Some people who really love dungeons would not find that fun! And even though I do love speedrunning, the thought of playing, say, Ninja Gaiden until I can shave one second off the world record does not sound fun to me! I’m not Arcus.
But that’s part of what makes it fun.
Lots of people find lots of different things fun. I’ve seen no shortage of people who for whatever reason struggle to accept the idea that others might not find what they see as the most challenging possible content to be fun, but I think some of that lies in what sort of challenge you actually find satisfying to overcome. If you believe that, say, every fight in Elden Ring is about “dodge bad thing, hit the guy” in various permutations, well, that probably feels less interesting as a challenge than something else. Maybe what you think is more challenging is PvP, or keeping track of multiple crafts, or any number of other goals. Collecting every mount. Leveling as fast as possible. You get the idea.
It’s not as if it’s somehow wrong to find something not fun or not challenging in a way you find satisfying. It’s totally fair if Bree looks at my schedule for Friday and thinks, “Wow, that sounds like you could burn yourself out and be miserable.” There are a lot of people who would probably agree! And those people are not wrong. This would not be fun for them. This would not spark joy. They should not attempt to do this because they would hate it.
But I am not these people. For me, this is fun. This is a challenge of getting a lot done in a short period of time and I can be proud of that fact. If I were the sort of person who would then be upset about having nothing to do, it probably would not feel fun! But I am not that person, and so I am being the kind of person that I am.
None of us can ever really experience the things that go on within another person’s mind and heart, and we are all doing our best – at least theoretically – to understand one another with incomplete information. But I think we do ourselves a disservice to not recognize that a fun challenge for one person is not fun for another, and understanding that the kind of fun each person seeks out is the kind of challenge that is fun.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
