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?

I will admit that I am a very jaded gamer.  I am often surprised when a game not only captures my interest, but also delivers a good and sometimes powerful story in the midst.  And so I have a tendency to over think my designs and think of the games that I want to see and play.

Admittedly, this is a problem.  Not only am I a jaded gamer, I could also be considered part of the “hardcore gamer” demographic – up to and including playing (and winning) a gaming tournament.  This skews my vision of what is considered “fun.”

My eldest son liked my game, but I could see he didn’t enjoy it.  It was too complicated for him and after a while, he lost interest.  And my wife didn’t like it at all.  She was proud of what I was able to accomplish with so little resources and time, but it wasn’t the kind of game that she looked forward to playing.

The “golden chalice” of game design is finding what this demographic likes to play – especially women who outnumber men on the Internet.  So I realized that I stepped away from making games for my boys and for my wife and made a game that I would play, but not them.  And even then, the graphics of Strike Eagle, though technically savvy, were not enough eye-candy to cover up its design flaws.

Over the last weekend, I was playing with my two boys.  The eldest was trying to stack a bunch of blocks while the youngest was trying to knock it down.  And they were doing it over and over again, laughing at blowing up castles made of blocks.  I was amazed at how something so simple could be so much fun.

So I thought back to the kinds of games I loved to play as a kid and instead of overcomplicating a design, I was thinking of doing something smaller, simpler and much more fun for my wife and kids – to make something that they would want to play over and over again.

Danc at Lost Garden wrote a great article asking “What is your game design style?”

I am unabashedly a “Copycat.” I honestly don’t believe in seeking innovation or originality.

This may come as a shock because I am also through-and-through indie but I believe that the the constant search for something “new and innovative” in game design is a fruitless quest. In fact, we already have another medium that shows us what the constant drive for that ambiguous “something new” leads us – the Modern Art Industry.

And these are the pieces they come up with:

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp

The endless seeking of something new and innovative tends to be a fruitless search that ends up “in the toilet.”  Originality and innovation comes when you least expect it.  It cannot be forced.  It comes from mastering and understanding the craft first.   Then with proper understanding of the craft, are you truly free to express something the world has never seen before.

"Le Ravissement de Psyche" by William Bouguereau

I believe in classical training.  Imitation and mastery – buidling upon the knowledge and experience garnered by the giants that have come before you.  Only then are you truly free to express something new.