The Fun of Games that Want Us to Lose: Against the Mastery Model of Games
Games usually stay motivating and fun for players by allowing them to expand in control, power, and/or variety of abilities. In role-playing games, players may unlock abilities and bonuses for their characters to become more masterful at confronting the core loop activity of defeating enemies. In action games, players often train their hand-eye coordination to perform better in the game. I will call this the “mastery” model of games. However, the horror and fumblecore genres do not use the mastery model. How do players find enjoyment from games where they do not grow in any of the three?
Horror games usually limit players’ ability to confront and neutralize a threat: this is what defines the genre. This is not a niche genre, as evidenced by the popularity of Five Nights at Freddy’s and Slender. There are limited resources (such having limited battery to power doors or flashlights to slow the monster) that regulate limited abilities (being unable to fight the monster, not being able to recover “health” after confronting it), or limited information (not knowing where the monster is). Perhaps horror games give players satisfaction from the release of tension that comes from actions: making an uncertain, dangerous future safe and certain. Not knowing where the monster is transitions to moments of intense emotional release, whether that is through a flood of satisfaction from successfully blocking its advance, or sudden terror from being attacked.
Fumblecore games similarly make it difficult for players to control their characters. Fumblecore games like QWOP make struggling with the controls part of the enjoyment of the game. It is not the player fighting a system of numbers and optimization. Players fight themselves. Players improve their own hand-eye coordination, muscle memory, and reflexes—not the simulated skills of a character. Unlike other genres of action games like shooters, the fumblecore genre does not encourage mastery with consistent mechanics and rules. Fumblecore games resist player mastery, both by making it difficult for players to improve with unintuitive controls, and also by adding randomization to resist muscle memory. The fun might come from a satisfaction similar to that of horror games: the satisfaction of hitting a correct mark after struggling, almost like the satisfaction coming from winning a gamble.
One fumblecore game in particular, Fall Guys, is also heavily tied to streaming and game videos. Perhaps the fun there comes from watching someone else struggle, and their reactions to the struggle. The enjoyment of playing may be primarily social: playing Fall Guys may be fun because you recall the fun of watching someone play it.
The popularity of horror and fumblecore games, which are both genres that emphasize players’ lack of control, show that the enjoyment of games does not only come from having mastery and control. While games that emphasize mastery are the dominant model of game creation, the two genre examples of this post show that there are more ways that players enjoy games.
If you have insight on the enjoyment of either of the horror or fumblecore genres, please comment below!
