Theory of Fun for Game Design

by Raph Koster

Successful games tend to incorporate the following elements:* Preparation. Before taking on a given challenge, the player gets to make some choices that affect her odds of success. This might be healing up before a battle, handicapping the opponent, or practicing in advance. She might set up a strategic landscape, such as building a particular hand of cards in a card game. Prior moves in a game are automatically part of the preparation stage, because virtually all games consist of multiple challenges in sequence. A sense of space. The space might be the landscape of a war game, a chessboard, or the network of relationships between the players during the bridge game. A solid core mechanic. This is a puzzle to solve, an intrinsically interesting rule set into which content can be poured. An example might be “moving a piece in chess.” The core mechanic is usually a fairly small rule; the intricacies of games come from either having a lot of mechanics or having a few, very elegantly chosen ones. Most of these mechanics turn out to be from a fairly small set of problem types: estimating curves, optimizing, matching, balancing, or classifying. A range of challenges. This is basically content. It does not change the rules, it operates within the rules, and brings slightly different parameters to the table. Each enemy you encounter in a game is one of these. A range of abilities required to solve the encounter. If all you have is a hammer, and you can only do one thing with it, th...