The purpose of games is not to entertain.

Trust me; you don't want to design games that ping pong players between dopamine sources for the sole purpose of fleeing from their thoughts. Entertainment shouldn't be your purpose but a powerful means to an end. It's a tool that enhances your design and empowers the game's meaning.

This week, I'll show you 3 reasons why having entertainment as your game design purpose is dangerous both for you and the game artform.

Entertainment is a tool, and tools are meant to be used, not achieved.

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Here they are:

• Entertainment And Quality Are Not Correlated
• Entertainment Is Often Badly Used
• Entertainment Rejects The Deep And Requires The Shallow

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

#1: Entertainment And Quality Are Not Correlated

Entertainment is all about attention manipulation.

But what exactly is “Entertainment”? It consists of capturing someone’s attention toward something and holding it for a certain period for positive stimuli.

The keyword here is “attention”, the most desirable scarce resource in the modern world. Note that this definition doesn’t mention the type of content delivered. It could be anything, from a game to even crime news on TV.

And it doesn’t mention the structure of the content either.

I’m not saying it should be, but it’s important to note since it leads us to the next point.

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Entertainment says nothing about the quality of a work.

When we’re entertained, we simply give our attention toward something and expect positive feelings in return. However, that says nothing about whether that “something” is deep or shallow.

It’s the exact equivalent of a hamster running on a wheel that doesn’t care (for obvious reasons) about the meaning of its running. It’s simply responding to a stimulus by giving attention to that activity. We’re certainly not hamsters (meaning we’re capable of much more stuff), but sometimes we sadly behave like them.

If people are entertained by something, it doesn’t mean it’s something good. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean good in absolute terms (there’s no such a thing); it’s just a bad argument to judge the quality of the work.

Now, let’s look at the relationship between art and entertainment.

#2: Entertainment Is Often Badly Used

Art needs entertainment, but not as a purpose.

Art and entertainment are often considered antagonists and opposites. I disagree because they act at two different scales.

Entertainment is a phenomenon related to the attention manipulation contained within an experience. Art is a type of experience. Therefore, they're not opposites, but entertainment is an art component.

So entertainment is a tool that can make art more interesting and engaging by guiding the audience's attention. But it's not the final purpose; it's just a piece of the whole puzzle.

And like in any complex system, if you focus only on that piece, the whole is severely weakened.

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Entertainment-oriented works generate the opposite of art.

But what’s the opposite of art? It’s Monotony.

In his book Art as Experience, John Dewey writes,

“The enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission to convention in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of an experience.”

‍Entertainment for its own sake generates exactly this monotony that destroys the artistic experience. It throws it into meaninglessness, absence of reflection, routine of the obvious, meticulous adherence to expectations, and a desire to minimize all interpretative efforts.

By focusing on entertainment, you force yourself to engage with the worst part of your audience. The one which demands more of the same stimuli, punishes you for innovation, and rewards you for conformism.

This creates hordes of acritical fanatics who only want you to fulfill their demands.

But how exactly does entertainment-oriented work make this happen?

#3: Entertainment Rejects The Deep And Requires The Shallow

The deeper a work of art is, the worse it is for entertainment.

If the purpose of art were entertainment, producing works of art (especially video games) would be a highly inefficient way of achieving it. It takes much less to entertain a large audience (TV has been teaching this for dozens of years, and now social media).

Entertainment-oriented art causes depth and complexity to drop since it's not necessary to write the Divine Comedy to entertain someone. 50 Shades of Grey is more than enough. And I'll argue that, with entertainment as the purpose, The Divine Comedy would even do a poor job (or at least worse than 50 Shades of Grey).

The misconception is that entertainment is the goal when it's the outer layer of an experience. But if you want to stop there, the more you deepen and require thinking, the further you'll get from the surface.

This is why designing entertainment-oriented experiences requires them to be shallow.

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Entertainment is focused on stimulating the brain, not engaging it.

In an entertainment-driven design process, any attempt at abstraction and complexity is considered harmful. It should be clear why by now.

If you require thinking from the audience, you will alienate them from those very works whose purpose is entertainment. Entertainment is a low-level stimulus since it’s simply tied to mere attention (remember the hamster wheel?). What Neil Postman writes in his masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death describes perfectly what I mean:

‍For those who think I am here guilty of hyperbole, I offer the following description of television news by Robert MacNeil, executive editor and co-anchor of the “Macneil-Lehrer News-hour.” The idea, he writes, “is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to privde constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required […] to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.” He goes on to say that the assumptions controlling a news show are “that bite-sezed is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.”

‍Critical thinking instead emancipates and makes the audience demand different and more complex stimuli. Why?

Because you don’t need to stimulate in them the passage of time, but the cognitive process. This forces you to increase your work’s depth and complexity and disregard the audience’s expectations.

They want to be engaged through thought-provoking surprises and not entertained by the endless permutations of the same game.

Entertainment is just a superficial beginning that needs to go deeper.

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Key Takeaways:

• Entertainment is about attention manipulation, and it says nothing about quality.
• Entertainment is a tool of art, but when used as a purpose, it damages it.
• Entertainment is focused on superficially stimulating the brain, not deeply engaging it.