Theory Of Fun For Game Design

[droqen]

regarding Raph Koster's
"Theory Of Fun"
retrieved from archive.org here

[droqen]

p40,41

Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. . . . but you'll only play it until you master the pattern.

[droqen]

P44, Koster gives 'some ways in which boredom might strike', which I'll just summarize.

- You understand how the game works very quickly and dismiss it as trivial.

- You understand that there is lots of data, but are not interested in mastering that data, e.g. because it is too much raw data with no interesting-looking patterns.

- You see no patterns at all.

- New data (and new patterns) are encountered too slowly and you get bored.

- New data (and new patterns) are exposed too quickly and you cannot keep up.

- The game is completely mastered and there are no new patterns to form.

I'll re-summarize... or reconstruct this into a new form...

(1) You are in a situation where you have to think about what to do with raw data. Koster describes brain-strategies of how to parse raw data as 'chunking'.

(2) Under certain circumstances we will not chunk raw data. In some cases this is due to being incapable of doing so, and in other cases this is due to being unwilling to do so. (Koster does not, here, give any indication of the difference.)

(3) Once we've chunked all the raw data to our satisfaction, we don't need to do more chunking, and the activity of doing so has effectively ended.