Don't Have a Fun Game

I so often hear people giving the golden rule of RPG’s as ‘remember it’s a game, and to just have fun’. I can see that if nobody likes the game then it’s not a good game, but the ‘have fun’ advice, while common enough, doesn’t help anyone to do anything.

John Mill discussed the paradox of happiness. If you want to build a boat, you try to build a boat. If you want to go to the shop then the best thing to attempt to do is to go to the bloody shop. But if you want to have fun? Well, try it now. It really doesn’t work. So what can you do to ‘have fun’? Well, there’s sports, catching up with friends, learning new maths and a whole host of other things. Notice a common element - none of them have ‘fun’ as an objective. Sports may be fun, but don’t ‘play just for fun’. Play to win. You play to score points and stop the enemy scoring points. If you’re catching up with friends and you want to have fun, where exactly does that lead you? Probably nowhere. You might be better off seeing where the conversation takes you. If you’re learning maths, don’t go with what’s fun. Who knows what maths is fun before learning it? Better to work at examples quickly and look at why things work as they do. By the end of the night, you might find you’ve had fun whether you get all the right answers or not.