Fun, Taste & Games: An Aesthetics of the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful
by John Sharp and David Thomas
The MIT Press
“Fun” is somewhat ambiguous. If something is fun, is it pleasant? Entertaining? Silly? A way to trick students into learning? Fun also has baggage—it seems inconsequential, embarrassing, child’s play. In Fun, Taste, & Games, John Sharp and David Thomas reclaim fun as a productive and meaningful tool for understanding and appreciating play and games. They position fun at the heart of the aesthetics of games. As beauty was to art, they argue, fun is to play and games—the aesthetic goal that we measure our experiences and interpretations against.
Sharp and Thomas use this fun-centered aesthetic framework to explore a range of games and game issues—from workplace bingo to Meow Wolf, from basketball to Minecraft, from the consumer marketplace to Marcel Duchamp. They begin by outlining three elements for understanding the drive, creation, and experience of fun: set-outsideness, ludic forms, and ambiguity. Moving from theory to practice and back again, they explore the complicated relationships among the titular fun, taste, and games. They consider, among other things, the dismissal of fun by game journalists and designers; the seminal but under-influential game Myst, and how tastes change over time; the shattering of the gamer community in Gamergate; and an aesthetics of play that goes beyond games.
John Sharp
John Sharp is Associate Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design at the New School. He is the author of Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (MIT Press). With Colleen Macklin, John wrote Games, Design, and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design and Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure. More on John at heyimjohn.com.
David Thomas
David Thomas is Assistant Professor Attendant in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado Denver. A former game journalist, he runs the website Buzzcut.com and speaks regularly to business about fun in the workplace.