Do you believe that "Good" and "Fun" are not synonymous?

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Strain42

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Have you ever played a game where you find yourself going "This game isn't really all that good..." but you're still having fun playing it?

I personally believe that a game can be fun without necessarily being good and vice versa.
 

Shadowstar38

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Jul 20, 2011
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Killer 7 is a good example of this.

The art style? Excellent. The story? Rocks your face off. So overall a good game.

Then you pick up the controller and it mechanics are ass. Good game, but not fun until you adjust to that bit.
 

Euphbug

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I don't know about games themselves, but I do play plenty of Left 4 Dead 2 custom maps with people. When we find a really bad one sometimes we have a lot of fun with it. Their is one in particular for a map contest we played, it was obviously the first map this person ever did. Holes in the walls you can see through but can't walk through, buttomless pits into nothingness that if you survived the fall you could walk under the whole of the map. With all these problems and more we still had fun. Half at the expense of the map, the other in just running through and enjoying ourselves.

With that said, I think if it was a complete game I bought with my own money, and it was extremely bad, I currently can't see me having enough fun to make me forget the money I spent on it and enjoy myself. At least, I have yet to have such a experience.
 

winginson

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To me they are synonymous. To me the point of a game is to enjoy it, so if I enjoy it, it is a good game to me. Doesn't matter whether its let down by graphics, story or mechanics it's still a good game if I enjoy it.
 

ScrabbitRabbit

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A game can be good without being fun. The gameplay shouldn't be bad but it doesn't need to be "fun." Silent Hill 2 isn't fun, it's oppressive and atmospheric but it's still a good game for those reasons.

I don't think something can be fun but bad, though. If I'm having fun, if I'm enjoying myself then, in my eyes, it's good.

Then again, there is Big Rigs...
 

Sniper Team 4

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Oh yeah, I play a lot of games where I have fun, but they aren't good games. I always think of Final Fantasy VII Dirge of Cerberus game as an example. Laughable story, horrible controls, but I have a blast playing it. I enjoy the story and the gameplay.

Then there's Spec Ops: The Line. A solid game. A good game. But oh man, if you're still having 'fun' by the time you finish it, there's something wrong with you...
 

TeletubbiesGolfGun

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Sniper Team 4 said:
Oh yeah, I play a lot of games where I have fun, but they aren't good games. I always think of Final Fantasy VII Dirge of Cerberus game as an example. Laughable story, horrible controls, but I have a blast playing it. I enjoy the story and the gameplay.

Then there's Spec Ops: The Line. A solid game. A good game. But oh man, if you're still having 'fun' by the time you finish it, there's something wrong with you...
ah somone else who enjoyed dirge of cerberus! idk what it was about it but i could not put down the controller, i also enjoyed it!

OT: I think they are independant of each other, there are plenty of games i can recognize as "good", but in my personal opinion i think they are boring trash, same goes for movies. (especially movies, dear god, i fucking HATE most "good" movies that are adored by critics)
 

charge52

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Yes actually, the perfect example would be Dark Souls, I got it, I played it, I know that it is good, but fucking hell I did not have fun.
EDIT: Crap, misread OP's post. I guess a perfect example might be something like Coded Arms for PSP, good graphics for PSP and passable controls, but as for everything else, repetitive environments random spikes in difficulty, samey weapons, bad sound design(music was nice, but only played when you were fighting, which was a bit irritating after a while), and piss poor level design. I still fucking love it though.
 

BreakfastMan

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Jul 22, 2010
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Yeah, I guess. I have had some fun with crappy games (more just about mocking them, but still). To paraphrase Jonathan Blow: "To be a good game, a game has to be interesting and/or fun". I mean, if you don't have either, why would you be playing the game in the first place?
 

Shinsei-J

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Apr 28, 2011
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Knight Captain Kerr said:
A game doesn't have to be fun to be good. For example Spec Ops: The Line.

Then again "fun" and "good" are both subjective.
Beat to it, damn it.
I had no fun at all playing that but it was an incredible experiences and engaging to the point where I finished it in one session.
 

Signa

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Certainly. Metro 2033 is better than "good" but it's only fun enough to keep playing it. It's gameplay hardly does anything for me. I think Bioshock did that for me too.
 

eternal-chaplain

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Well when I was twelve I tried Kingdom Hearts on a friend's recommendation, and while I was fairly sure I was having fun, I always had the nagging sense in the back of my head that this game was a load of crap and I am only enjoying it because I was told that I would. And, yeah that pretty much turns out to be true.

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6th And Silver said:
Not all good games are fun, but all fun games are good.
I don't even know...how to respond to this.
 

Agayek

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Oct 23, 2008
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This is an incredibly subjective debate, thus nothing can really be determined.

That said, for me, the two are/can be very different. "Fun" means, basically, "did you enjoy it?", and it's absolutely possible to enjoy something that is objectively terrible (see: B-grade movies, schlock films, etc). Similarly, it's possible for a "good" experience (meaning well-crafted and executed, etc) to be blatantly not fun (see: Schindler's List, et al).

In the realm of video games, generally "good" is equivalent to "fun", simply because games aren't very, well, good at handling "not fun" subject matter. The only game I can think of that qualifies as "good" and "not fun" is Dear Esther, and that's mostly because there's very little actual game involved there.
 

vun

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While they are highly subjective, they are different for me. CoD games and Steven Seagal films are things I'll regularly mention in discussions like this. They're both fun, at least the IW CoD games, but I wouldn't call them good.
 

Realitycrash

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Strain42 said:
Have you ever played a game where you find yourself going "This game isn't really all that good..." but you're still having fun playing it?

I personally believe that a game can be fun without necessarily being good and vice versa.
Of course they aren't synonyms. A game can be meant to inspire a lot of things (Fear is an obvious example), which is not the same thing as it being "fun", or at least not "fun" in the same way as Super Mario is "fun".