Theory of Fun for Game Design

by Raph Koster

“A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.”

Big definition

Games might seem abstracted from reality because they are iconic depictions of patterns in the world.

Iconic depictions could mean thay they have gone through chunking and gronking from whoever came up with the game on design

A game designer might find those distinctions useful because they provide helpful guideposts. But all these things are the same at their most fundamental level.

This is an important insight for game designers: the more rigidly constructed your game is, the more limited it will be.*

Always keep a balanced mix of rigid and non-rigid rulesets

with games, learning is the drug.

A reward structure alone does not a game make.

the question to ask might be why the most popular games are the ones that teach obsolete skills, while the more sophisticated ones that teach subtler skills tend to reach smaller markets.

the part of games that is least understood is the formal abstract system portion of it, the mathematical part of it, the chunky part of it. Attacks on other aspects of games are likely to miss the key point — at their core, games need to develop this formal aspect of themselves in order to improve.

There is also a current of game design which unapologetically puts story first.* These are often powerful emotional experiences with relatively shallow game mechanics. This isn’t a flaw — it’s a deliberate design choice — but it doesn’t speak to the kind of learning we get from game systems.

Fun, as I define it, is the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes. Consider the basketball team that says, “We went out there to have fun tonight,” versus the one that says, “We went out there to win.” The latter team is approaching the game as no longer being practice. Fun is primarily about practicing and learning, not about exercising mastery. In fact, the fun often starts before the action does; anticipating a solution can be as exciting as applying one.* Exercising mastery will give us some other feeling, because we are doing it for a reason, such as status enhancement or survival.

Games aren’t stories. Games aren’t about beauty or delight. Games aren’t about jockeying for social status. They stand, in their own right, as something incredibly valuable. Fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure from consequence, and that is why games matter.

Often games are trying to teach techniques; they don’t merely give players goals and tell them to solve them any way they please.

Human beings are all about progress. We like life to be easier. We’re lazy that way. We like to find ways to become more efficient. We like to find ways to keep from doing something over and over. We dislike tedium, sure, but the fact is that we crave predictability.

That’s what games are for in the first place — to package up the unpredictable and the learning experience into a space and time where there is no risk.

the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun.* Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.

Rewards are one of the key components of a successful game activity; if there isn’t a quantifiable advantage to doing something, the brain will often discard it out of hand.

Not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design. At the same time, designers of games need to be careful not to make the game demand too much skill. They must keep in mind that players are always trying to reduce the difficulty of a task. The easiest way to do that is to not play.

The lesson for designers is simple: a game is destined to become boring, automated, cheated, and exploited. Your sole responsibility is to know what the game is about and to ensure that the game teaches that thing. That one thing, the theme, the core, the heart of the game, might require many systems or it might require few. But no system should be in the game that does not contribute towards that lesson. It is the cynosure of all the systems; it is the moral of the story; it is the point.

Different games appeal to different personality types, and not just because particular problems appeal to certain brain types. It’s also because particular solutions appeal to particular brain types, and when we’ve got a good thing going, we’re not likely to change it.

So what is art? My take on it is simple. Media provide information. Entertainment provides comforting, simplistic information. And art provides challenging information, stuff that you have to think about in order to absorb. Art uses a particular medium to communicate within the constraints of that medium, and often what is communicated is thoughts about the medium itself (in other words, a formalist approach to arts — much modern art falls in this category).

The designer who wants to use game system design as an expressive medium must be like the painter and the musician and the writer, in that she must learn what the strengths of the medium are, and what messages are best conveyed by it.

There is a difference between designing the content and designing the end-user experience.

When we describe a game, we almost never do so in terms of the formal abstract system alone; we describe it in terms of the overall experience.

People are the plants and the game is the trellis. The plants are shaped to some degree by the trellis. It also shouldn’t surprise us that the plants grow to escape the trellis. Both of these are merely in the nature of the plant. It learns from its environment and its inborn nature both, and it works to escape those confines, to progress, to reproduce and be the tallest plant in the garden. When we look at the great works of art, however, they are shaped in special ways. They are like trellises that form the plant in particular directions. They have intent behind them, and they have the purpose of achieving something in particular with the growth of that plant.

The obstacles to making games — trellises — that shape players in ways we choose are not mechanical ones. The primary obstacle is a state of mind. It’s an attitude. It’s a worldview. Fundamentally, it is intent.

It’s a lot like Pascal’s Wager.* If it’s all “just a game,” I was just a crackpot all along. But if it’s not, there are only two responsible ways to behave with such a tool: either step away from it altogether and let someone qualified take it up, or take it up and be as qualified as you can. My reply is, I won’t take a sucker bet.