Is the Bug Fun?

There are many things about producing video games that are surprising, but one of the weirdest has to be the approach to bugs. Like any piece of software, bugs are found through testing or user reports, triaged, then assigned to developers. Unlike normal business software they also ask the question, “is the bug fun?”

There are plenty of unintended features (bugs) in games that became beloved. Attack combos were an accident in Street Fighter II, but they became so popular that they are a part of basically every fighting game now. Rocket jumps are another example. The internet is full of examples.

Sometimes very glitchy games can be fun too, especially for a certain audience. Speed runners sometimes use glitches to lower their times. People love games for all sorts of reasons beyond just beating them and getting high scores. At the end of the day the goal of a game is to entertain more than be correct.

The next time a bug comes across your desk, maybe ask yourself if fixing it would make your app less fun.