A Theory of Fun for Game Design

A lot of old age is attributable to losing neurons, losing connections, losing the patterns we have built up, settling into fewer and fewer until all we can do is stand by helplessly as the world dissolves into noise around us.

When you feed a player through a game trellis, right now, we tend to speak only of “fun” and “boring.” Mastery of the medium of games will have to imply authorial intent. The formal systems must be capable of invoking desired learning patterns.

If they can’t, then games are a second-rate art form, and always will be.

The best test of a game’s fun in the strict sense is playing the game with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, nothing. If that is fun, then everything else will serve to focus, refine, empower, and magnify. But all the dressing in the world can’t change iceberg lettuce into roast turkey.

All media are abstract, formal systems. They have grammars, methods, and systems of craft. They follow rules, whether it is the rules of language, the rules of leading tones in music,* or the rules of visual composition. They often play with these rules and reveal startling new aspects to them.

And (if you’ve bought into the premises of this book) we have seen that the basic intent of games is rather communicative as well—it is the creation of a symbolic logic set that conveys meaning.

The most creative and fertile game designers working today tend to be the ones who make a point of not focusing too much on other games for inspiration.* Creativity comes from cross-pollination, not the reiteration of the same ideas. By making gaming their hobby, game designers are making an echo chamber of their own work. Because of this, it is critical that games be placed in context with the rest of human endeavor so that game designers can feel comfortable venturing outside their field in search of innovative ideas.

Ironically, these all converge most sharply in the most unlikely of candidates, the person who loves games more than anyone: the game designer.

Game designers spend less time playing individual games than the typical player does. Game designers finish games less often than typical players do. They have less time to play a given game because they typically sample so many of them. And perniciously, they are just as likely (if not more so because of business pressures) to turn to known solutions.

Basically, game designers suffer from what I call “designeritis.” They are hypersensitive to patterns in games. They grok them very readily and move on. They see past fiction very easily. They build up encyclopedic recollections of games past and present, and they then theoretically use these to make new games.

But they usually don’t make new games because their very experience, their very library of assumptions, holds them back. Remember what the brain is doing with these chunks it builds—it is trying to create a generically applicable library of solutions. The more solutions you have stored up, the less likely you are to go chasing after a new one.

The result has been, as you would expect, a lot of derivative work. Yes, you need to know the rules in order to break them, but given the lack of codification and critique of what games are, game designers have instead operated under the more guildlike model of apprenticeship. They do what they have seen work—and critically, so do the funders and publishers of games as product.

Priesthoods develop, terms enter common usage, and soon only the educated few can hack it.

The lesson for designers is simple: a game is destined to become boring, automated, cheated, and exploited. Your sole responsibility is to know what the game is about and to ensure that the game teaches that thing. That one thing, the theme, the core, the heart of the game, might require many systems or it might require few. But no system should be in the game that does not contribute towards that lesson. It is the cynosure of all the systems; it is the moral of the story; it is the point.

Not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design.