A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Raph Koster)

Notes from reading “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster

Prologue: My Grandfather

Is making games something worthwhile? Yes. It can connect and teach people.

Chapter 1: Why Write This Book?

Kids play and learn. Nicaraguan Sign Language was invented by kids in a few generations. Kids are fascinated with tic tac toe, then understand it, then lose interest. You learn to drive a car or speak language without being taught the theory.

As you get older, you lose interest in learning new things because you understand what the arc of that learning will look like ahead of time.

Games delaying Alzheimer’s

Games are finite, when you’ve seen the whole thing you get bored.

Games that are too hard or too easy are boring. What’s too hard varies over time and by person.

Chapter 2: How the Brain Works

Defining “game”:

These don’t help finding “fun”.

The brain is a consumer of patterns. Games are tasty patterns.

Kids try once, make mistakes, push boundaries, watch the same video over and over and over…

Brains fill in the blanks with assumptions, like seeing faces in wood grain or plaster.

Cognitive theory:

When you cross your eyes, you don’t see your nose, and your brain fills the space with an assumption.

The invisible gorilla experiment: brains also tune things out.

People in hypnotic trance can remember more than when you just recall normally. (people notice more than they realize)

It’s easier to draw an icon than the real thing (brains hide the real world).

Most are examples of something called “chunking.” You can say you “got dressed” but would have a hard time describing every single stage of that.

It’s been chunked into a routine.

Essence of art is forcing us to see things as they are, e.g. poems.

3 level brain:

Practice takes you from conscious to grokking. Practice can be done just by thinking (Anne Issac study in 1992) if thinking is very detailed.

Chapter 3: What Games Are

Games are described as:

But games are real, they’re iconic depictions of patterns in the world.

Games are puzzles to solve like learning to drive or play an instrument or learn arithmetic.

Distinction between toys (no goal)/games (have goal) or play/sport is irrelevant – they’re all the same thing fundamentally.

These all are “iconified representations of human experience that we can practice with and learn patterns from.”

Linguists noticed sentences like The house the cheese the rat the cat the dog chased caught ate lay in was built by Jack are too deeply nested and require slow conscious brain. Games have similar limits.

If games fail to exercise the brain, like tic tac toe, they become boring.

With many games you quickly grok a wide swath of their possibility space and get bored.

Fun comes from “richly interpretable” situations.

A longer lasting game will incorporate math problems we don’t know the solutions to or more variables like psychology/physics from outside the “magic circle”.

Fun is about brains feeling good – release of endorphins.

When you master a task, that feeling of triumph makes you smile. With games, learning is the drug. (Chris Crawford: fun is the emotional response to learning, Biederman & Vessel’s research into curiosity being inherently pleasurable)

Boredom is the opposite of learning. You get it when there are no visible patterns to absorb, either because there’s no challenge or the pattern is over your head.

Brain craves stimuli/data, but not necessarily new experiences. Sensory overload (excessive chaos, noise) and sensory deprivation (silence, excessive order) are both not the sweet spot.

Ways that boredom might strike:

Boredom is the signal that you have failed as a designer.

Fun is another word for learning. Games teach. What do they teach?

Chapter 4: What Games Teach Us

Games don’t usually have a moral or a theme the way a story or novel does.

The young use games most effectively as a learning tool.

Adults don’t give up “having fun” or constructing abstract models to practice, e.g. practicing speeches, fire drills, training, role-play in therapy. These are games too.

Would fire drills be more effective if they were fun?

A reward structure doesn’t make a game, you need rich interpretability. http://bit.ly/cant-play-wont-play http://bit.ly/gamification-bogost-atlantic

All games are models that reflect on reality, either mathematical structures or calculating odds, or combat, or power and status. Games almost always teach tools for being the top monkey or the top tribe of monkeys.

Many games teach us about spatial relationships and territory in either cartesian space or in a graph (in graph theory sense).

They teach how space and rules react to change, so we can learn how to exercise power over them.

First person shooters teach teamwork.

During world war 2, there were games about rationing supplies. These aren’t played anymore. [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27313/ration-board](ration board game)

Queens in chess are argued to have arisen due to increasing power wielded by actual queens.

Mancala is about seeds and farming.

Modern farm games are about business.

Word games were once restricted to the elite.

Music is more limited than literature and game systems might be as well. (Diplomacy is very rich though). The mainly teach remembering, matching, timing, hunting, controlling/surrounding territory, power projection, and aiming.

Games can have stories, artwork, and music embedded, and this potential has not yet been fulfilled.

They should evolve toward skills that are commonly needed today.

Many games teach treating opponent as “not like us” but this doesn’t match the modern world.

Current game designs tend to reinforce:

Instead of more variants of pong teaching something the skill of judging trajectories, more useful would be teaching if oil prices would rise in response to signing/not signing a global warming treaty.

Why do games teaching obsolete skills reach big markets and games teaching subtler skills tend to reach smaller markets.

Playing variations on old irrelevant challenges is easier.

There are sweet spot timings (per Ben Cousins in August 2002 Develop Magazine) for level lengths (either 1 minute or 10 seconds) and elapsed time in air for jumps of around 0.7 second, and 3 combat moves in succession around 2 seconds.

Common features of games ask you to do the same task

Five basic fighting games:

Similarly, not many distinct 2D shooters.

Chapter 5: What Games Aren’t

Games are often dressed up in a fiction to make them non-abstract. They’re like word problems, dressing up the abstract math underneath.

Violent games are decried, but the game is training you to see past the window dressing to the underlying abstraction. Deathrace is just any other game that’s about picking up objects on a 2D playing field.

Many people focus on the story. Often, there’s a mediocre story with obstacles, like forcing you to solve a crossword to turn to the next page of the novel.

Marc LeBlank defined 8 types of fun: sense-pleasure, make-believe, drama, obstacle, social framework, discovery, self-discovery and expression and surrender.

Paul Elkman identified dozens of emotions

Nicole Lazzaro arrived at 4 clusters: hard fun, easy fun, altered states and people factor

Raph Koster’s theory of what makes you feel good:

Social interactions (feel good but not “fun”):

Fun is when you’re absorbing patterns. Think “playing for fun” (learning) vs “playing to win” (exercising mastery)

If learning new things didn’t feel good, we’d be more like sharks and ants, only getting positive feedback for eating.

Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “Flow” feels good, but is often exercising mastery, not learning. So fun isn’t flow.

Fun is learning where there is no pressure/consequence, and that’s why games matter.

Chapter 6: Different Fun for Different Folks

Howard Gardner: 7 forms of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intra-personal

females on average have more trouble with spatial perception and males on average have greater trouble with language skills. doctors know it takes longer for boys to become verbally proficient. many differences are disappearing over time, suggesting differences are cultural.

video games can contribute to this disappearance.

spatial perception games give permanent mastery.

simon baron-cohen thinks there are systematizing brains and empathizing brains.

many different models for personality: keirsey, myers-briggs, five factor model.

anecdote: people seem to like games that correspond to their personalities. (this, impossible for a given game to appeal to everyone.)

this would imply:

girls who play “boy’s games” tend to break out of traditional gender roles years later. (Reuters 2004 report on study at Penn State)

This argues that if people are to achieve their maximum potential, they need to play the games they don’t get.

Chapter 7: The Problem With Learning

Human mind wants to take shortcuts, like when you just see the answer to a problem in math class.

This leads to the desire to cheat in games to reach the goal as optimally as possible. Shows cunning and lateral thinking.

Cheating shows the player groks the game. But cheating in the sub-game can result in a major mistake in the metagame.

Human beings are all about progress. We like to find ways to be more efficient. We want real life to be more predictable and safe, but to avoid tedium, want unpredictability in predictable boxes like games or TV shows.

This leads to behaviors like “bottom feeding” where player will beat weaker opponents 200 times to build up lives. It’s like stockpiling food for winter – very sensible.

The destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Fun is a process and “routine” is its destination.

Ben Cousins “ludemes” (atoms) of gameplay

If game has no preparation, it relies on chance. If there’s no sense of space, it’s called trivial. No core mechanic, means no game system. No challenges: exhausted quickly No choices: simplistic No skill: tedious

Competitive head to head challenges are the easiest way to create new content.

Removing skill fixes the mastery problem, but should be considered a cardinal sin.

Don’t make game too hard: Players are always trying to reduce the difficulty of a task, and the easiest way is to not play.

Think of a checklist:

Make sure all answers are “yes”.

Games are destined to become boring, automated, cheated, and exploited. Your responsibility is to know what you’re teaching and ensure the game teaches that thing and don’t include systems that are unrelated.

Chapter 8: The Problem With People

Holy grail of game design is make challenges never ending, skills are varied, and difficulty curve is perfect. This is already done, it’s called “life”.

We hear a lot about emergent behavior (often generates loopholes and exploits) and storytelling (people tend to either skip the story or skip the game).

placing players head to head is common tactic, but mastery problem rears its head.

using players to generate content is useful tactic.

designers try to expand the possibility space of a game and players try to reduce it as fast as they can.

players ultimately are lazy and want to do the same thing over and over. example: players pick the same role playing character over and over across many games.

however, sticking to one solution isn’t a survival trait in the modern world.

consider a role playing game where every player gets exactly two characters, one female and one male – would world be more or less sexist as a result?

another thing that people do is go back to games they’ve mastered and replay them to be in the zone and feel flow. It’s not productive and games should encourage you to move on, but people do it.

many media have swing between Apollonian to Dionysian style (Romanesque vs Gothic churches, art rock to punk, French academy to impressionism). Games are always formal, and have only ever marched toward more complexity.

game designers are hypersensitive to patterns in games. they grok them quickly and move on.

Chapter 9: Games In Context

2D grid:

crossed with

All media can be analyzed with these axes.

Indie game development or modding games is solo constructive

Solo experiential for music is practicing playing. for games is single player games.

Games are being recognized as a new medium, so we can start thinking about whether art can be made in games.

Media provide information. Entertainment is comforting simplistic information. Art is challenging information.

A game that was open to interpretation and could be replayed multiple times where you kept learning something new would:

All media are abstract formal systems. They have grammars, methods, and systems of craft. they follow rules. they often play with the rules and reveal startling new aspects about the rules.

All artists choose constraints: draw on a postage stamp or on a broad canvas, rhyme vs free verse, piano vs guitar.

games too can be constrained. Create a one button game. Invent a game using nothing more than pennies and a deck of cards. Design a game that is about exact cover.

Playing good games is fundamentally a creative act. That speaks well for the medium.

There has been impressionist art, music, writing.

What would be an impressionist game? Object you seek is not visible. Negative space is more important than space. Repetition with variation is central to understanding. It’s called Minesweeper.

Games may afford less scope to the designer. can express generalities, not specifics. A game can tell you that small groups can prevail over large ones, but can’t tell the story about Saving Private Ryan.

Chapter 10: The Ethics of Entertainment

Delivery is important.

People like glass Chinese checkers sets, the singer of a song is important. Rock climbing a real rock is different than a fake one.

The composer creates the content of the music, but the conductor and players are the ultimate arbiter.

Director trumps writer in a movie.

The choreographer creates the content of the dance, but the dancer is the ultimate arbiter. Set designer, lighting, casting, costuming, music performance all contribute.

Games are the same way.

Game system design, content design, lead designer, level design, world builder.

Right choice of dressing can reinforce experience and make learning experience more direct.

Most games about aiming are shooting games, but a few are about taking photos.

Industry has spent time improving the dressing instead of the ludemes.

Saying that this improves experience is like saying the 16 track improved songwriting.

Best test of game fun is playing with no graphics, no music, no sound, no story, nothing.

Complaints about murder, misogyny are complaining about the dressing, not the games themselves.

But bare mechanics of game do not determine meaning. Consider a mass murder game where there’s a gas chamber shaped like a well, and you throw people in, then when enough people fit together at the bottom, they get gassed and die. It’s Tetris.

The art of the game is the whole.

Hate Crime Shooters can be considered hate speech.

All media have influence. Not all artists and critics agree that art has a social responsibility.

Push the boundary gently so it doesn’t backfire. This is how we got Lolita, Catcher in the Rye and Apocalypse Now.

Chapter 11: Where Games Should Go

Games often put human behavior in crude primite form on display. There’s a lot of sex and violence. That’s not a fatal flaw. Movies, books and TV are rooted in sex and violence, but more subtle.

People are plants, and the game is the trellis. People are shaped by the trellis and plants grow to escape the trellis.

Great works of art shape plans in particular directions.

Many games involve climbing a ladder of status, but none yet are about the loneliness of being at the top.

A game might give you power as you control more people, but gain power to heal yourself based on number of friends. Friends would fall away as you gain power. The victory condition would be something other than being on top or bottom, but something else like survival of the tribe.

Being on top with no allies becomes a choice. Being lower in status is also a choice, and might be more satisfying.

There are many possible lessons to be extracted, and no right answer. It is simply representing some aspects of the world as it is.

Chapter 12: Taking Their Rightful Place

Games from Dani Bunten Berry portray concepts like social good or honor through mechanics. Games are capable of art and portraying the human condition. They may not be able to do everything of other media. We wouldn’t ask architecture or dance to either.

Other media have mass market non-art content, like “pop music” or “mass market”.

Art and Entertainment are not terms of type, merely terms of intensity.

Tremendous amount of content has mere comforting, confirming and cocooning as the goal. We listen to music we already like, morals we already know, and characters that behave predictably.

The calling of the creator is to provde people with the tools to adapt.

Play teaches survival, but has been allowed to be denigrated and minimized.

Childhood is a state of mind, it’s an ongoing quest for learning.

Epilogue: Fun Matters, Grandpa

A lot of old age is attributable to losing neurons, connections, and patterns we have built up.

Games can push us to tackle new mental challenges.

It’s Pascal’s wager. If games are “just a game”, then this book is a crackpot idea and doesn’t matter. If games matter, then to be responsible, you must take it up and be as qualified as you can.

This will push boundaries and create work that shocks, offends, or chellenges deeply cherished beliefs. All other media do it.

Games deserve respect.

Painting, dance, novels, film, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll were all seen as blasphemous or nonsense or unworthy of attention.

Someday games will have their Shakespeare.

Afterword: Ten Years Later

Now I see games not just a swirl as systems anymore. Since then, play has been accepted as a form of learning, games have been exhibited at the Smithsonian, and a supreme court case upheld them as worthy of First Amendment protection.

#game-design