Personally, I’ve found myself performing better with no sound at all.

It’s solid advice, but it may not work for everyone. Upon firing up Super Hexagon, you’ll be greeted with a screen that recommends playing with headphones. Gamezebo’s guide provides you with the tips, tricks, and strategies you’ll need to play your very best. It takes little time to settle in and understand how to play, but getting good is an entirely different story. For those who haven’t played, you move a tiny cursor in a circular (er, hexagonal) fashion, dodging incoming obstacles. I conclude with a series of examples of no-fun games that illustrate how affect can communicate meaning as effectively and diversely as a game’s content, and how looking at games that go beyond fun creates new space for players, games, and queer worlds at the margins.Super Hexagon has gained a lot of notoriety in just a few short days. In this article, I argue for a different approach to affect in video games, one that focuses on experiences that are “no fun.” Drawing from writing by queer theorist Jack Halberstam, I demonstrate how no-fun emotions disrupt accepted paradigms of video games and heteronormative pleasures more broadly. Although some researchers, such as ludologist Jesper Juul, have acknowledged the prevalence of unpleasant moments in video-game play, they often make sense of these difficult experiences by reframing them as stepping stones on the road to happiness. It can be argued that video games are the twenty-first century’s most influential art form, and they can and do engender a wide range of feelings, from joy to sadness, annoyance to rage. However, there is much more to video games than fun. At the same time, in reactionary corners of gamer culture, the argument that games should be “just for fun” is shutting down discourse around diversity. Abstract Game designers and scholars alike commonly claim that video games should be first and foremost fun.

Super hexagon game real world