What is entertainment in the context of computer games?

The reason I play computer games is to be entertained. It is an alternative to reading a book or watching TV. As such, it helps me to relax and to forget about my every day worries for a while. The game cannot be too stressful or give rise to too much worries by itself in order for this to work. Of course, games generally depict very worrisome and stressful situations (wars for instance), but they seldom do this in a way that put that burden on the player. Instead, the are other, quite different things, that causes games to lose their function as entertainment.

All games, at their core, have a more or less abstract gameplay mechanics, and many of them also have a story that acts as a frame of reference to the game. When I play a game, I do this because I appreciate both the gameplay mechanics and the the story. Unfortunately, many games contains elements that gets in the way of the core of the game. These things would often be fairly easy to fix, as I will show on this blog.