A friend of mine asked me to define what “fun” is in a relation to a game.  In other words, “What makes a game fun?” After giving it much thought, and through observing my children run around and tear up the house, laughing the entire way, I have come up with a working theory of what is generically fun.  In a future post, I will delve more into the subtleties of what makes a game fun.

Passive Fun

WinAmp Visualizer

Watching an infant, you can see how most of what they enjoy is simply passive stimuli.  When they see a friendly face, they react.  When they see colorful lights or a pleasing sound, they react.  A lot of what they derive of fun is merely passive stimuli.

As an adult, the positive feelings of simple sounds and bright colors don’t draw us in nearly as strongly as it would as an infant or young child.  So as we get older, simple sounds are arranged into notes, and chords, and eventually songs.  Bright colors become images, and then motion pictures.  And as we grow in complexity, the complexity of positive stimuli, of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and touches become more complex, and arranged in a variety of crescendos, climaxes, and plateaus.

Passive stimulus isn’t limited to just shapes and colors (though I do occassionally catch myself staring at the song visualizes when using my computer music player), but a passive stimulus could be a TV show wherein the story itself is something people enjoy.

There is a delicate balance of overstimulating and understimulating.  Too much color, too much sound can actually create a negative reaction much like too little color, sound and sensory information.  A delicate balance must be struck for having too little, too much and just the right kind of stimulus at the right time.  Whole schools are dedicated to discovering and teaching the right amount of stimulus to create visual presentations, movies, songs, and even stories to tell.

But all of this is merely passive fun.

Interactive Fun

A favorite toy

As an infant gets older, he explores the world around him.  The world isn’t just something that stimulates senses, but is something they can interact with.  My one and a half year old loves to see blocks fall down when he swipes at them.  My four year old wants to throw a ball and see how high it goes depending on how hard and what angle he throws things.  All of these are fun in exploring the interactions of a particular world and getting reactions.

Some reactions are negative, such as touching something hot.  But some reactions are positive like throwing a ball and watching it bounce.  And then there is learning how to create sequences of interactions such as crashing toy cars together, or lining up dominos.  Fun is a series of interactions with positive feedback.

Reading books is a kind of interactive stimulus because it engages the imagination to create images out of words.  So it is more than the passive audio/visual stimulus of movies.  Books and words engage on the plane of an interactive medium because it is an interaction on the imaginary plane.

Game Fun

"Crush the Castle" - a Game of Knocking Over Blocks

After a couple years, a child learns how to string along a series of interactions to accomplish certain results.  But once those interactions are placed into a goal-oriented situation and place limitations on how to accomplish those goals, suddenly you have a “game.”  Instead of merely seeing the ball bounce, you try to catch the ball with your hands and then throw it back.  Instead of just throwing blocks around, try to stack as many as you can and as high as you can before your younger brother tears them down.

Within rules and goals, the physical properties of gravity, elasticity, collisions, momentum start to become meaningful.  And another level of fun opens up – that of accomplishing goals.

Here, there is a delicate balance of goals that are not challenging enough or goals that are too challenging.  A right balance of challenge and skill growth are important to keep a game “fun.”  Also a certain amount of positive feedback keeps the game interesting.  If there is little positive stimulus as a result of accomplishing a goal, or during the process of achieving that goal, then accomplishing the goal can be very boring and can quickly lose interest.  One can extrapolate this to apply towards exciting jobs and boring jobs as well.

Beyond Fun

From here, you can extrapolate social aspects of different kinds of fun.  Social passive fun, is like watching the theatre or listening to a live band play.  A social interactive fun can be talking, conversing, or even dancing.  A social game fun can be competitive or cooperative goal-oriented play like cards, or sports.

Explore the Island of "Myst" OR Blow all the baddies away in "FAR CRY"

There is also a certain tension between non-goal-oriented fun (passive or interactive) and goal-oriented fun (games).  The non-goal-oriented fun tends to be more immersive and exploratory.  It involves absorbing the world and living in it.  Goal-oriented fun in games tends to be an abstraction of the world – a goal and a rules set.  Thus, there is a kind of tension between exploration and discovery versus stimulating gameplay.  No one really takes in the beautiful scenery while being shot at.

Prince of Persia - A moment to take a breath and see

Some games do a very good job of balancing the level of immersion into the world and compelling gameplay.  Prince of Persia does a remarkable job of letting you have moments to breathe and see the world and vast expanses, beauty and heights of the world you are traversing – Ancient Persia.

Another dynamic to consider in the spectrum is that a good deal of “art” games focus more on the immersion and exploration, while there are games that are purely about gameplay and goals.  Unlike movies and cinema, “art” games are interactive, and therefore cannot be easily directed and paced because it relies on the user’s interactions rather than the forced momentum of a movie or narrative story.  However, since an “art” game is more focused on exploration and immersion, it can be more impactful and poetic than something that forces a “goal”.

Lastly, to address a question posed by Brian of JoyfulGames on using “art” games as a means for preaching the Gospel, consider the following:

When it comes to a relationship, everyone loves spending time immersed with one another’s presence, even if it means passively sitting down together and watching a movie.  But no one wants to be made into a “game.”  A game trivializes because it abstracts things into goals and rules – when the goal of a meaningful relationship is simply to “just be with one another.”  Who wants to get into a relationship with an agenda?

TOGA TOGA TOGA

One of the things I’ve been questioning lately is the value of a college education, especially as I watch my sons grow.  My experiences in college had very little impact on my skills as a programmer.  In fact, I would say that 90% of what I have learned as a programmer has been “on the job” experience.

I remember one particular incident in college where a professor was describing to the students how the 4-digit IP (IPv4) addresses worked.  Being naive and believing that “there is no such thing as a stupid question”, I asked the professor what is going to happen once we hit the maximum number of possible IP addresses?  I got a good laugh from the professor and from my classmates because they said that there would be no way that there could ever be that many computers that need addresses in our lifetimes.

It’s only been ten years since I asked that question and we are already seeing the “end of the Internet” by 2011.

Recently, I ran into an article on the Escapist Magazine in defense of academia by Game Design veteran Brenda Brathwaite, who worked on the original Wizardry games.  In her article, I can see that the sentiment and disdain for academics is very prevalent in game programmer circles – that there is seemingly a huge difference between academic theory versus practical experience in the programming world.  On one side, the game designers frown upon academia and their ivory towers of learning.  And on the other side, univesity systems will not allow game industry veterans to teach game programming simply on account of not having a degree.

From my own experience, I believe Programming is more of a “technical skill” than it is an “academic” one, much more akin to going to vocational school to learn how to build and repair automobiles.  Programming is something you learn more by doing than by reading and memorizing textbooks, repeating the biases, and stroking the ego of your professor.  And I’ve said it before that the best programmers I have ever met had no bachelor’s degree or a degree in things other than programming – architecture and even pottery.

You don’t need a special school or training.  You just need the drive to learn, explore and expand your horizons every day.

Before I close, I did want to say something positive about pursuing a college degree.  I have found that quite a few potential employers look for a bachelor’s degree.  Salaries are sometimes indexed according to a person’s level of academic learning.  RFPs for government contract work often require senior developers or architects have at least a bachelor’s degree.  So there are practical reasons for pursuing a college degree.

But like the housing bubble, I wonder how long it will be before colleges will suffer a severe backlash from the continuing rising cost of education which is far and above the inflation rate?  How much is college merely “the thing to do” rather than a real opportunity for learning skills necessary for the workforce?

Programming – especially game programming – must be learned by doing.  And, at least in the game industry, you are hired by the strength of your portfolio.  And who says you need a professor’s approval or an academic degree to make one?

In an interview with Gamasutra, Tim Sweeny of Epic Games said that according to Moore’s Law, photorealism will be de facto in the industry in 10-15 years.

Believe what you want - she's not real.

I will go out on a limb and disagree.  This generation of game development can barely sustain itself.  In another article Krome’s Robert Walsh says:

“I think that’s one thing that the press, to a certain extent, is forgetting,” said Walsh tells industry site Develop. “They’re saying sales have increased over ten percent since last year or whatever; I mean, dev costs have probably doubled or tripled in the console transition.”

The market and games we will see in 10-15 years are going to be radically different and until there is significant cost reduction in the creation of photorealistic models, the costs are unsustainable for photorealistic games.

The console that makes the most money, the Wii, is all about creating meaningful gameplay experiences rather than photorealism.  And the games that make the most money on the margin?

Peggle by PopCap Games

Are anything but photorealistic…