Guilty Pleasures

I was going to do a bit on the new gameplay footage released for Duke Nukem Forever (source: The Escapist). But, while watching it, something more intriguing came to mind.

During the video (if you watch it, you'll see it yourself), a quote from Xbox Official Magazine is shown: "A guilty  pleasure worth waiting for." This got me thinking about what is usually meant by "guilty pleasure". The Urban Dictionary defines is it as "Something that you shouldn't like, but like anyway." That is to say, a thing normally considered to be of low quality that is still enjoyed, even though it shouldn't be. It usually refers to sweets, drugs , or bad movies.

Whatever prediction OXM is making about how DNF (rolling out the acronyms here) is going to turn out on release, I got to wondering whether a game could become a proper guilty pleasure. I mean, let's look at that in other media a second. A "guilty pleasure" movie is usually poorly made: the script might be bad, the actors could be phoning it in hard, the sets might just be awful, but you like it anyway. For me, I'd say Judge Dredd (1995) fits in there. It's cheesy and silly, but fun. Books (corny spoofs or silly fantasy novels maybe) can do the same, I'm sure. But what about games? As I've said, to be a guilty pleasure it generally has to be poorly made but fun, but poorly made games are rarely fun. Even if you can think of one or two (and I'm sure you can) how many are the sort of thing you would feel bad admitting to liking? There's unlikely to be so much consensus of the game's awfulness for that; you can still be ok enjoying it.

One game did sort of spring to mind when I had a think about this was the Fable series. Any of you who have read other bits of this blog will know of my thoughts on the third of these games (check here if you haven't), but the other two do fit a bit more, the second one in particular. Fable 2 was, sad to sad, a rather flawed game. The story was a tad lame in places, the pacing was off a bit (unless you kept only to the main quests, in which case it was just too short), and there was very little challenge for anything other than a casual gamer. A lot of promises unfulfilled, as only Mr Molyneux can non-deliver. Yet, I found myself truly entertained, taking it all the way through to the end and coming back for more every so often. And yes, I did feel a bit uneasy telling certain friends that I enjoyed Fable 2.


Does this mean that Fable 2 was my guilty pleasure? A bad game I could enjoy, something so wrong yet so right? Sounds like it.

I think the way gaming fits into the "guilty pleasure" thing isn't always about specific games; maybe it's much broader than that. Rather than certain games being considered bad-yet-good, occasionally it can get attached to genres. Imagine telling your action-gamer friends that you liked [Job X] Simulator 2011? Sure, it's not embarrassing per se, but it can be a bit odd admitting to enjoying something that should be boring. Even broader than that, gaming as a hobby could be considered a guilty pleasure. Less and less every day, mind, but for demographics not readily associated with gaming (eg women over 30), identifying yourself as a gamer could generate that "wrong but right" feeling as well.

I think I'm just rambling out stuff now, but one should wonder: in a medium where the skill with which something is made is intrinsic to it's entertainment factor, and mistakes in development are usually just annoying rather than funny, could the traditional idea of the guilty pleasure exist? From the look of this entry, it might look like I think I have the answer, but I'm not 100% sure...and I'm not the only guy on the Internet :)

Comments below, please.