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Game Shame

7 min read

Game Shame

Summary

Game shame is Keith Burgun’s term for the widespread cultural attitude that games — and especially video games — are inherently trivial or stupid, and therefore do not deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms. Burgun argues that game shame has profoundly distorted game design, causing developers to pursue cultural legitimacy by emulating other, “more respectable” media (cinema, literature) rather than developing what is genuinely interesting and valuable about games themselves (Burgun, Game Design Theory, Ch. 3–4, see source-game-design-theory).

Key ideas

The cultural condition

Burgun grounds game shame in personal observation: when he played in a band performing video game music at gaming tournaments, audiences responded as if the premise were inherently comedic — the music of games was funny because games are funny. The implicit premise: “video games are inherently stupid.”

Once that premise is visible, he argues, it explains a great deal about the history of commercial game design:

  • Why games try to look like movies: movies are not inherently stupid. Cinematic production values lend legitimacy.
  • Why games incorporate elaborate stories: literature is not inherently stupid.
  • Why the “art games” movement arose: art is not inherently stupid.
  • Why immersion discourse dominates: immersion sounds sophisticated and non-trivial.
  • Why technology is fetishised: technological achievement is not inherently stupid.

None of these pursuits are inherently wrong. But when they are driven by shame rather than by design logic — when story is added because games “need” legitimacy rather than because story serves the mechanical design — the results damage both the game and the story.

Consequences for design

Burgun traces game shame through the history of console generations (Ch. 3):

  • Third generation (NES era): the fantasy simulator emerges. Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy promised immersive worlds. Players were invited to overlook trivial mechanics (grinding, repetitive combat) in exchange for narrative and world-building. The implicit deal: the game doesn’t need to be interesting because the fantasy is interesting.
  • Fifth generation (PS1/N64 era): explicit cinema emulation. Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time — fully voice-acted, cinematographically directed cutscenes, epic stories. The goal was visibly to make games look like movies.
  • Sixth generation: the pattern cements. Innovation stalls. Most hits are upgraded reskins of fifth-generation templates.

The cultural result: a generation of players who experienced the fifth generation as “the era of the classics,” and who now expect every game to have a story, a cinematic presentation, and a character arc. Burgun calls this a “tragic” development.

Game shame vs game quality

Burgun distinguishes between two different ways of making games culturally acceptable:

  1. Make them resemble non-game media (cinema, literature). This is the game-shame response. It abandons what is distinctive and valuable about games in order to borrow legitimacy from other forms.
  2. Make games genuinely excellent as games — deep, balanced, elegantly designed systems with meaningful decisions. This earns legitimacy on the medium’s own terms.

He argues the second path is both correct and almost completely unexplored, primarily because there has never been a solid enough philosophy of game design to guide it. Without a theory of what makes games good as games, designers default to importing the quality criteria of other media.

Burgun connects game shame to a cluster of specific bad practices:

  • Cutscenes that interrupt gameplay to deliver cinematic story content.
  • “On rails” design (Half-Life 2’s lauded illusion of freedom as a corridor): praised for simulating agency while actually eliminating it.
  • Story-justified grinding: dull repetitive mechanics excused because the narrative frame makes the fantasy compelling.
  • Excessive length: the expectation that games must be 40–80 hours, justified by content volume rather than depth of decision-making.
  • Quicksave/load: exists primarily because stories require players to succeed and progress, which conflicts with the game needing to allow meaningful failure.

In practice

The concept is less a design technique than a diagnostic frame. Designers and critics can ask:

  • Is this design decision being made for design reasons, or for legitimacy reasons? A story element that serves the mechanics (thematic framing that makes rules easier to learn and remember, as Burgun allows for) is different from a story element that exists to make the game seem more like a film.
  • Am I building a game, a story, or a simulator? If the answer is unclear, the risk is building a hybrid that serves none of its aims well.
  • Am I treating “game” as a sufficient genre of its own? Or am I assuming the mechanical content must be supplemented with cinematic/narrative legitimacy to justify the player’s time?

This connects to second-order-design: designing rule-spaces rather than scripted experiences is, in part, a rejection of game shame — an insistence that a well-designed system is interesting in itself without requiring a thematic wrapper.

Evidence

Burgun (Ch. 3): “This is why we try to make our games look like movies — because movies aren’t inherently stupid! This is why we have a movement called art games — because art isn’t inherently stupid! This is why we focus on technology. This is why we focus on immersion … None of those things are inherently stupid, but games are.”

On the fifth generation: “The major innovation of the late 1990s was to make games look and sound like movies … the goal clearly was to emulate cinema. In no game was this more obvious than in Konami’s 1998 hit, Metal Gear Solid … I refer to this condition as game shame.”

On sport games and simulation: “I also attribute [Madden’s popularity] to game shame — people simply don’t respect games as an acceptable way to spend their time, and so the more a game looks like something else (even TV), the more acceptable it is.”

Implications

  • The concept offers a cultural explanation for why the industry has repeatedly de-prioritised mechanical depth in favour of production values, narrative, and technology.
  • It is a useful diagnostic for students and practitioners: when a design decision is being defended by an appeal to what the player “expects,” ask whether that expectation is grounded in design logic or in game shame.
  • Arguably, the indie game movement and the designer board game renaissance are both responses to game shame from the opposite direction — returning to mechanics-first design without the legitimacy anxiety.
  • Tension: Burgun’s own position could be called “mechanics shame” — the anxiety that games are only legitimate if they are elegantly mechanical. His critique of story-heavy games may itself reflect a kind of inverse snobbery. The relationship between mechanics and narrative in games is genuinely contested (compare mda-framework, narrative-design).

Open questions

  • Is game shame universal, or primarily a phenomenon of Western, Anglophone game culture? Japan’s RPG tradition, which Burgun partly criticises, seems to operate under different legitimacy norms.
  • Has the cultural status of games changed substantially since 2012 (Burgun’s publication date)? The growth of e-sports, the critical success of games like The Last of Us, and the broader acceptance of games as cultural objects suggest the landscape has shifted.
  • Does the critique of cinematic games hold for environmental-storytelling approaches, which embed narrative in the game system rather than interrupting it with cutscenes?

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