Humans play a wide variety of games, from basketball and chess to video games and poker. Why are we so enthralled with these games, even when they don’t really have an impact on our lives outside the game?
Theory of Fun for Game Design, by veteran game designer Raph Koster (lead designer of Ultima Online), discusses why games are fun, what games teach their players, and ultimately how to make a meaningful game.
Most people play games to have fun. But what exactly is fun?
On a neurobiological level, fun is a boost of dopamine when we learn something or master a task. We are evolutionarily programmed to enjoy learning, just like we enjoy sex, because learning improved our chances of survival.
So why are games fun? Fun from games comes from learning, comprehension, and mastery.
Learning in games is different from learning in reality. Games present an environment where you can learn and have no pressure from consequence.
Games get boring when the player has learned the pattern, and there is nothing new to learn. They also get boring when they’re too trivial (you’ve mastered the pattern) or when they’re too difficult (you might not even identify the pattern).
So games are fun because they teach patterns. But what are these patterns? The author offers these:
These are universally helpful patterns to learn and have been helpful in evolutionary history. Consider how useful teamwork, memory, and social status were when humans were cavemen.
Many games we play today thus existed to train us to be better cavemen. But many skills we learn today are no longer immediately relevant, such as archery or running marathons.
The holy grail is a game that provides never-ending challenges, requires a wide range of skills to succeed, and has a difficulty curve that perfectly adjusts to your skill level over time. This is a lot like life.
We could use more games that teach relevant modern skills that might be counterintuitive and possibly against our nature.
For example, the game Simcity teaches large-scale network building and resource management, in ways that cavemen wouldn’t have needed to be concerned with.
The author suggests these counterintuitive behaviors that would be useful in the modern day:
For games to be as venerated as other media, like literature and film, they need to provide us with insight into ourselves.
Consider the strategy game MULE, which is a multiplayer strategy game featuring economics. In this game, off-world colonists compete to be the richest. As a player, it’s possible to become the richest colonist, but the colony could still perish and so cause everyone to lose. The game therefore teaches the delicate interaction between individuals and society.
If games are to follow the pattern of history of how other media evolved, they’re certain to be taken seriously as art sometime in the future.
Games involve thinking, and so a good place to start understanding games is to understand how we think.
When we think about things, it seems as though we’re generating novel thoughts all the time. In reality, cognition mostly uses your memory—your brain pattern-matches what you see with past experiences. It recognizes a situation as “just another one of those.” The purpose of this pattern-matching is to conserve energy. Your brain is evolutionarily programmed to enjoy learning patterns.
The author argues that the value of art is to shake up your brain’s pattern-matching. Art forces you to see things in a new way, rather than what you remember them to be. A poem about a tree forces you to reconsider the ruggedness of bark and whimsey of the leaf.
Noise is any pattern we don’t initially understand. You can, however, learn to find the pattern underneath the chaos. For example, bebop jazz sounds like noise, until you understand the underlying patterns in tempo and musical chord progressions.
As we’ll learn, games are puzzles designed to teach your brain new patterns.
There is a huge variety of games, from chess to basketball to videogames. There have thus been lots of attempts to define what a game is. Here’s a selection of definitions:
The author defines games as puzzles that teach underlying patterns for future use by providing live feedback to your actions, in an environment with lower stakes than reality.
Games are obviously not reality—a game of Monopoly won’t cause you to lose your mortgage—but they do mirror reality. They are iconic depictions of patterns in the real world.
Games define formal systems that are cleaner than reality; they exclude noise, and thus the patterns of the game are readily absorbed.
However, games do teach aspects of understanding that carry over into reality, like how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine.
Games that rigidly define rules and situations are more susceptible to mathematical analysis. The more rigidly constructed your game is, the more limited it will be. This is why a relatively simple game like Tic Tac Toe is more limited and less replayable than a complicated game like chess.
For games to be long-lasting and keep the attention of the player, they need to integrate less rigidity and more complexity. These may be math problems we don’t know the solution to, or more complex and unpredictable variables like human psychology or physics.
Most people play games to have fun. But what exactly is fun?
On a neurobiological level, fun is a boost of dopamine when we learn something or master a task. We are evolutionarily programmed to enjoy learning, just like we enjoy sex, because learning improved our chances of survival.
So why are games fun? Fun from games comes from learning, comprehension, and mastery.
Learning in games is different from learning in reality. Games present an environment where you can learn and have no pressure from consequence. As a result, games can be unpredictable without causing the player anxiety.
Humans are natural learners. Babies instinctively play games like hide-the-object. They are learning patterns, such as how the physics of the world work (hence why they knock over cups gleefully).
But somewhere in adulthood, society starts to stigmatize games as frivolous. This is a shame, since there’s a lot that can be taught through games.
Yet even still, we continue learning from abstract models of reality. For instance, we practice speeches in front of mirrors, or we run fire drills to prepare for a real fire.
Boredom is the opposite of learning. The brain is constantly looking for new data to reinforce existing patterns, or new patterns to learn. When there’s nothing new to learn, boredom results.
In games, boredom can arise in these situations:
It’s ok for games to become boring. Every game is destined to become boring.
Once a game gets boring and doesn’t teach anything new, it needs to encourage you to move on. Games should not exist to fulfill power fantasies.
Therefore, as a game designer, you must know what your game is about, and make sure it teaches that one thing.
If boredom arises when there is nothing to learn. So why are people bored in school or after work, when there is so much to learn?
There are a few possibilities here:
However valid these reasons are, not learning for these reasons is bad. The world is constantly changing, and it’s important for people to keep learning to adjust to the new world.
What is fun, and how does that different from enjoyment? The semantics are important. As the author sees it, fun is just one type of enjoyment. The four types of enjoyment are:
The three other types of enjoyment reinforce fun to give us positive feedback for fun, but are distinct from fun. Fun is mastering a problem; aesthetic appreciation, visceral reactions, and social status signals can reinforce the mastery of a problem and make it more enjoyable, but they don’t relate to mastery themselves.
Consider two ways a basketball team might reflect on their game: 1) “We went out there to have fun,” and 2) “We went out there to win.” The former is practicing and learning. The latter is exercising mastery.
Let’s dive into each of the four types of enjoyment and how they relate to fun.
Aesthetics is still about recognizing patterns. Delight happens when we’re surprised by patterns we recognize.
However, delight decays quickly. Once we’ve learned a pattern, it’s no longer surprising.
You can regain delight by distancing from and then returning to the object of delight. But it’s no longer fun—you’re just retrieving the pattern from memory.
Physical challenges by themselves aren’t fun. Running and putting one foot in front of the other isn’t fun.
Breaking a personal record is fun.
Social status often has to do with pushing yourself and others up and down the ladder, and signaling your own value. “Signaling theory” argues that many choices we make in our lives are unconsciously aimed at presenting our qualifications as mates and tribespeople to others.
There are a variety of positive emotions around social status:
So games are fun because they teach patterns. But what are these patterns? The author offers these:
These are universally helpful patterns to learn and have been helpful in evolutionary history. Consider how useful teamwork, memory, and social status were when humans were cavemen.
Many games we play today thus existed to train us to be better cavemen. But many skills we learn today are no longer immediately relevant, such as archery or running marathons.
We could use more games that teach relevant modern skills that might also be counterintuitive, and possibly against our nature.
To use an analogy, we’ve evolved to find certain types of things revolting, such as green, slimy, smelly things. We’ve learned these rules because green slimy things were often toxic to humans. However, in today’s world, there are many more dangerous things that we haven’t evolved a reaction to. Take cleaning fluid—it’s a clear, attractive blue color. We haven’t evolved a visceral reaction to this, yet drinking it would be incredibly damaging!
Likewise, there are plenty of skills that would be useful in the modern day that we haven’t naturally evolved. Games can teach these skills.
For example, the game Simcity teaches large-scale network building and resource management, in ways that cavemen wouldn’t have needed to be concerned with.
The author suggests these counterintuitive behaviors that would be useful in the modern day:
Games for some of the examples above do exist, but they’re niche. Why are they less popular than the ones that teach obsolete skills? The author suggests that simpler games that don’t challenge us and require thought are more pleasant—they allow us to stay in the pleasant subconscious.
Games may also teach lateral thinking, or finding alternative ways to reach the goal. This is sometimes known as cheating.
Circumventing rules has been useful in warfare, such as guerrilla ambushes during the Revolutionary War.
In games, we preserve rules and sportsmanship partly because otherwise the game loses meaning—it no longer teaches the “correct” lesson. What you learn in the game by cheating no longer works in the real world. Rules, in turn, become a social contract between those playing the game.
The author argues that for games to become as venerated as other media, they need to provide us with insights into ourselves.
A common criticism of games is that they feature gratuitous sex and violence, and thus aren’t reputable. The author argues just this isn’t the complete explanation—literature and film have plenty of sex and violence too, and yet they’re still admired as art. Rather, games feature shallow sex and violence that don’t teach anything more.
In contrast, consider the strategy game MULE, which is a multiplayer strategy game featuring economics. In this game, off-world colonists compete to be the richest. As a player, it’s possible to become the richest colonist, but the colony could still perish and so cause everyone to lose. The game therefore teaches the delicate interaction between individuals and society.
Or consider a hypothetical game where you gain power based on how many people you control, but you can heal yourself based on how many friends you have. Then include a rule that causes friends to fall away when you gain power. The success condition of the game is about the overall survival of the community.
These types of games provide self-insight that can make games more respectable and valuable to players.
Think about what a game you’re developing, or your favorite game, teaches.
What is the core lesson that your game teaches? What skill are you better at that can apply to real life?
How does your game keep itself interesting? Do you learn different patterns over time? Does the difficulty curve continue adjusting to your skill level?
At what point will your game get boring?
Games are composed of building blocks, or “ludemes.” Examples of ludemes include:
The holy grail is a game that provides never-ending challenges, requires a wide range of skills to succeed, and has a difficulty curve that perfectly adjusts to your skill level over time. This sounds a lot like life.
This is why many great games with enduring popularity are competitive head-to-head games. Having other opponents provides an infinite number of challenges.
Games also feature gameplay paradigms, such as:
Despite the vast number of game titles, new games typically improve only incrementally in the play space.
The author argues that there have only been 5 fighting games in all history
Every other fighter game is simply a fresh coat of paint on the same idea.
The author bemoans games that add additional complexity to a game genre without innovating the core mechanic—for instance, adding a bewildering array of weapons to a shooting game. This additional complexity makes it progressively esoteric and unappealing to newcomers.
Games that don’t innovate, such as platformers or shoot-em-ups, stagnate and wither away. People have learned the mechanic the game teaches, and they have learned patterns unlikely to be repeated elsewhere.
Game designers are partial culprits for unoriginality—they sample more games than the average player, build up ludeme blocks, and build from them.
To innovate in games, find a new dimension to add to the gameplay.
Take the game of Tetris. Changing the square blocks to hexagons isn’t a big change, and it’s unlikely to teach revelatory new things.
But what if you took a puzzle game and added a time component?
Consider extreme constraints—could you make a one-button game?
Try not to focus too much on other games for inspiration.
Aspects of a human activity can be put on a 3x3 grid. One axis is how the game is played in relation to other people: it can be collaborative, competitive, or played solo.
On the other axis is the purpose of the game: it can be constructive, deconstructive, or experiential.
Here’s the 3x3 grid for games:
| Collaborative | Competitive | Solo | |
| Constructive | Team game design | Commercial game development | Indie development |
| Experiential | Co-op gaming | PVP gaming | Single-player games |
| Deconstructive | Community unpacking (speedrunning, strategy guides) | Hacking, cheats | Solo deconstruction |
| Collaborative | Competitive | Solo | |
| Constructive | Community | Job | Hobby |
| Experiential | Performance | Sport | Audience |
| Deconstructive | Teaching | Criticism | Analysis |
People with different natural strengths will gravitate toward puzzles they can solve.
This is why some people prefer sports over Scrabble.
One model of how people vary in their capabilities is the different types of intelligences. These include:
People with strengths in a particular intelligence tend to enjoy games that cater to that intelligence.
People may play games that match their personalities. For example, social people play games that interact with others, such as Farmville. People who enjoy aggregating resources and building up abilities may enjoy role-playing games.
Research shows that genders differ in their preferences and strengths, and this suggests they may also enjoy different games.
Note that the differences between genders are shown in population averages. Variations between individuals are greater than the variations between population—even if men show a stronger trait than women on average, there are plenty of women who show that trait more strongly than the average man.
Research has shown these trends by gender:
Many of these gender differences are disappearing over time, so they may be an artifact of culture and how we raise kids of each gender.
Games have historically been associated with males. This might be because it suited their brains, and games were designed by people with the same bias.
Female players tend to gravitate to games with more emphasis on relationships, narrative, and empathy. They tend to avoid games with complex abstract systems and spatial reasoning.
As males age, they show hormonal shifts that bring them closer to women. Thus, you’d expect their play styles to shift over to be similar to women.
Research shows that girls who play “boys’ games” like sports tend to break out of traditional gender roles.
Given all this variation between people’s preferences, it’s impossible for any single game to appeal to everyone. The difficulty ramp will be wrong for many people, and what the game teaches may not match everyone’s preferences.
Since games are formal abstract systems with rules to understand, they bias toward systematizing brains.
To learn orthogonal skills, consider playing games you don’t get, games that don’t appeal to your nature. This might be the area where you can most stretch your capabilities.
We’ve talked so far about games in abstraction—what they teach, a game’s building blocks, and why they’re enjoyable.
Many games, however, are more than just abstract rules—there is more “window dressing” on them. Games may feature characters, a story, and images.
Games use these fictional metaphors to add variations to an underlying game. However, the metaphor is often ignored by players to focus on the underlying pattern.
The best test of a game’s fun is playing with no graphics, music, sound, or story. If this is fun, then all the dressing will amplify the fun. If it’s not fun, then no amount of dressing will make it fun.
This is why gamers disagree with criticism of games as teaching bad values or having gratuitous violence. In the game Grand Theft Auto, gamers don’t see the action as “run over a prostitute,” they see “get a powerup.”
But the author argues that the visual representation and metaphor are still part of the experience.
A mismatch between the core of the game and the dressing can result in problematic conflicts. For example, an aiming-shooting game about social cohesion would be confusing.
So game designers have a responsibility, like all media creators, to avoid transgressing social boundaries.
Games feature stories, but the author argues that games and stories are different:
Other points about stories:
Games cannot convey the same breadth that literature can, but they provide greater richness, complexity, and interactivity.
Instead of trying to think about whether games can feature stories, invert the question—can we make stories fun the way games can be? Unlike a static paperback, these fun stories would need to be interactive and give fast feedback.
This question is often pondered by gamers and critics, hoping to legitimize gaming.
Consider these definitions. Simple entertainment provides comforting, simplistic information. In contrast, art provides challenging information that you have to think about to absorb. The author argues that games certainly fulfill this criterion.
Many people have tried to classify games as art based on the following factors: their degree of interactivity, their level of fun; their formality of rules or systems. The author rejects these as missing the point.
All media go through a transition period where they’re seen as frivolous indulgences:
Media also go through Apollonian and Dionysian periods—the former is about developing the medium as a medium; the latter is about what could be said with that medium. A new medium matures with time as people continue to explore what the medium can communicate.
If games are to follow the pattern of history, they’re certain to be taken seriously as art sometime in the future.