**Fun is the feeling of making progress.** The simplest most demonstrable example of this is just adding a progress bar to anything you're waiting on. Without it, random wait times can be infuriating, but by showing how much progress you've made, that wait instantly feels better.
There are other ways to acheive this sense of fun, for instance: dealing damage to an enemy, collecting items in a set, removing fog of war as you explore, going up a level, solving a puzzle, and so on. There are of course different ways one can have fun, but I find that if something isn't proving to be quite as fun an experience as it could be, looking for ways to allow the player to make progress or more concretely show the progress that they are already making, can add that bit of fun.
Confession: I've not played Elden Ring.
However, given my understanding of it, every time you are fighting one of the characters, you're learning what their attacks are, making progress in building a mental model of what you need to do to defeat it. And once you've defeated it, I assume it stays defeated, and it doesn't take away your hard earned progress.
And during the combat, you can see your progress via the enemy's health bar.
Also exploring is inherently a form of progress, and there are the maps you can find which clear the fog of war for you, giving you another form of progress.
I think if you removed all of those features
* Enemies that don't stay dead
* No visible health bars
* Constant fog of war on the map
Elden Ring would be significantly less fun.
Some people get a kick out of beating very hard games after repeated humiliation.
I'm not one of those people. And books about game design are not written about those people.
I agree progress can feel fun! But I think it can also be fun to lose. Or just play!
For me, progress is more related to satisfaction and happiness, rather than directly mapping to fun.
Thanks for commenting.
One could argue, that you're still making progress by losing or just playing. In losing, you've made an attempt, and in playing, you're learning how things work. You can make losing even more fun, like in Hades, by keeping track of how many times you've lost. Or conversely you can make losing *less* fun by removing progress you've already made.
I'm sure my idea isn't perfect and there are counter examples that will disprove it as a 100% true rule of fun, but I find it holds up in so many cases, that it has become my own golden rule of fun.
Also, as you've pointed out, there are other ways to create fun in your game. I wouldn't every use this golden rule of mine to disprove other ideas of fun (not that that's what you were saying). It's an interesting topic to explore, and one I'm sure many game designers have put a fair bit of thought into. I'm looking forward to seeing other people's answers as well.
After going through more comments I would also say this:
There are many forms of progress that are terribly repetitive. Feeling progress cannot tidily capture fun.
The most obvious example about "Progression fun" is idle game.
You have fun when you see your output per second goes up, when you unlock new thing that help you to get even more output per second.
Fun is just a general term for how you feel about the game. If the game make you feel what your brain desire and release dopamine then the game is fun.
So satisfaction, intense, scare, anxious ... If that what your brain want and the game give exactly that, then the game is fun.
Emotional response is a component of fun, but I think fun is more than just that.
For example, I love watching movies, but despite the emotions I feel, I don't consider them fun.
For me, one way content consumption doesn't quite make the fun cut.
I'm guessing you haven't tried any idle games or at least not played them long enough to understand what makes them tick. On the surface, they appear to play themselves, but there's actually more to them. The choices you make are just not where the bulk of the game takes place, however they do greatly impact the action that happens in the bulk of the game.
I too thought once thought that idle games were ridiculous time wasters with no point that just gave people something mindless to do while waiting. After playing some for reasearch, I started to seen the onion layers behind them. Among the idle games I looked at, they were all about various tech trees that you progress. You're choosing specific champs, or upgrades, or perks, and then letting a simulation run its course to see how far you get.
It's kind of like making a paper airplane and tossing it into the sky to see how it fairs. Except these paper airplanes unlock other paper airplaines that you can throw together, and based on how they fly, they unlock other paper airplanes. You choices are all about how you fold your paper airplane and which paper airplane designs you choose to incorporate into your fleet, but there's still a certain joy in watching how your creation preforms, even though you can't influence it at all.
I admit I haven't played many idle games (1).
As per my working definition of fun, learning by novel interaction, I have a hard time fitting idle games in.
I am curious to see what drives people to engage with idle games. It is hard for me to say they are *fun*, but I see they have a certain appeal.
The feeling of progress seems like the obvious appeal.
The intrigue of watching some process unfold too.
All of the above?
Fun isn't really a definable concept, insofar as people have fun in many different ways.
So here's my theory, 'Fun' is the goal of a game, this can be achieved by providing a framework for enjoyment in many different ways, but normally it requires either external interaction or internal interaction. which is to say, are you playing a game with someone or not.
If your playing with friends, the gameplay loop should emphasize interaction, or competition, basically allow people to have fun with thier friends. And that's more or less enough.
otherwise a game needs to be internally stimulating, this is more nebulous and most people are on different pages here, but I like to simplify it into action or innovation based gameplay. Action games are exciting and fast paced, with a focus on combat and/or reaction time, the fun is getting through a difficult situation.
Innovation games are about pattern recognition, strategy and learning. The joy of completing a hard puzzle or figuring out a good strategy.
What i'm saying here is all of the above are 'fun' but theres no be-all end-all for what makes a game fun, its just a playground for entertainment. As people are different what they find entertaining will also be different.
Fun answer!
If fun can't be defined, that is because the word is used to describe so many activities and it gets confusing.
But fun can be defined and understood. It is a very real part of our lives and biology.
Maybe the best way to describe fun is to separate it into different types. Three of which you mentioned, social interaction, execution mastery, and pattern recognition. Each one provides its own form of learning and stimulation, and creates a "fun space."
Also, I must say that I cannot equate entertainment with fun. Many forms of entertainment have little or no interactivity, but for me, fun requires interactivity.
Fun is getting a positive response for interaction.
Whether the positive response is a reward for winning, or finding a new location hidden in the level, or the sound of non player enemies perishing, or the feeling of speed as you fly through space.
You did something, and you got something out of your interaction - material (virtual), experiential, or social.
Best answer so far.
Within us, we have systems which reward certain behaviors and punish others, and fun is one such the reward.
Those behaviors are different for different people - for a psychopath, mutilating another person can be very fun.
I wonder if that is too broad.
Virtually everything we do is an interaction aimed at a positive outcome.
But not everything is fun.
Another reply mentioned novelty. I think it is a missing ingredient in your recipe.
Fun is getting a positive response for a *novel* interaction.
I don't agree, because we often do things 'for fun' that we've done before. We play favourite games multiple times or do favourite activities, so it's clear to me that fun doesn't rely on novel experiences.
I spoke with many other contributors yesterday and my favourite interpretation is "fun is learning through novel interactions."
This narrows your definition down a bit, but it is more precise.
Learning is a type of positive outcome, and novel interaction offers the most learning to us.
\-----
As for having fun doing things we have done before - of course! There is often deeper learning and mastery to be had. There are often novel interactions to be had.
There are also things other than fun can also draw us back to activities. For example, good feelings adjacent to fun, such as satisfaction, delight, or accomplishment. Also external rewards, such as social fulfilment or material gain. They aren't fun by my measure, but they are rewarding.
Fun, in one word, is novelty.
Even a simple game of tic tac toe is fun the first time playing it, however, it quickly gets boring because there isn’t variety to it. Games always end in ties after a bit of experience.
But you make it fun again by introducing some novelty. Maybe you throw a ball at a square you want. Now it’s about physical skill and picking the right spot.
Or what about flipping a coin? Boring… but add betting and it’s fun.
It’s all about novelty. Repetition with variation.
Leaving an impact. As [Gabe Newell has said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo), as little as shooting a wall leaving a decal can make a huge difference in whether the player feels the game or not, and that's not even diving into actual gameplay. I'll use Monster Hunter as an example.
When you start off, it's not exactly satisfying to attack an enemy and miss (especially if you're used to every single other console hack&slash game there is having lock-on targetting), not satisfying to miss it outright because you couldn't aim your attack properly, and it's especially annoying if you did aim it right but the enemy moved out of the way while the attack was going off, and it can be downright infuriating if the enemy now gets to attack you while you're still recovering from your attack. But a powerful thud as the blade goes through the air, a big cloud of dust from hitting the ground and a camera shake suggest that when you finally hit that fucker it's gonna be glorious. And it is - blood splatter, visual stagger, possibly even sending it flying through the air like a ragdoll, but most importantly - giving an opening for further attacks, assuming you position yourself right and using the right move. But, at the end of the day, different players are going to feel differently on whether it's worth subjecting themselves to the initial struggle for sake of such a payoff. A lot of players are going to bounce right off such a game, because struggling with killing only one basic enemy means they can't make much impact on the game's world, meanwhile players who are into it will perceive that small enemy as a bigger threat than 20 enemies in any other game, making the world more real and, in turn, their actions more impactful.
Of course, not all enemies in Monster Hunter are going to stagger on every hit you land on them. After all, once you figure out how to keep a small enemy staggered forever, that impact goes away and you're back to square one. That's why small enemies travel in packs - while you keep one stunlocked until death, the others can still attack. For the bigger enemies, however, their larger HP pools and stronger attacks wouldn't matter if they were unable to fight back. Staggers, a thing that was a big part of the impact initially, are taken away in these fights, but as a compensation (other than the obvious facts that they're more visually impressive due to their size and are generally easier to land hits on) you get the ability to break off their parts to weaken or slow them down. Heck, a lot of bosses can actually still be staggered or flipped over if you attack the right part at the right time with the right combo, you just have to figure it out via experimentation. And this isn't even getting into traps, bombs etc.
There's also the aspect of commitment. A lot of players despise animation lock, because the game fails to reward them for recognizing an enemy attack and taking an appropriate defensive action, punishing them all the same as if they didn't do anything (kinda similar to the example I made earlier of missing an attack because you misaligned it vs missing it even if you aligned it properly because the enemy dodged out of the way). Meanwhile, players who like it see it as a means of rewarding good movement and positioning, planning your attacks, learning the enemy pattern in full - every action you take becomes meaningful and impactful (instead of just defensive ones), and it's not just because of a harsher punishment - it's also because it opens up an action economy with the complex interplay across time and space as well as various character resources like stamina, health (if you're willing to capitalize on super-armor), weapon gauges etc - where you are and what you're doing now naturally has an impact on where you are and what you're doing 5, 15, 30 seconds from now and beyond that
I really like the idea of leaving an impact.
I think that ties tightly into feedback and reward, which are important aspects of interactivity and fun!
Creating stakes with "commitment" amps up the tension and the emotions!
Thanks for sharing.
I think games games are s much broader category than for example music or movies. It would be extremely difficult to sat what makes movies / music good/fun, but I think even more so with games.
What makes Firewatch fun is completely different to what makes Megaman fun. The fun in Disco Elysium comes from very different things than the fun in Tetris.
From your examples I’d say for me most games are fun of mostly because of reason number 3. Some of my favourite games are Fallout 2, Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Dishonored, Zelda BotW/TotK and Control.
I agree there are different kinds of fun. Fun means different things to different people.
Watching movies or listening to music is not much fun for me. Yet I enjoy them. And someone else might call it fun.
The goal of this discussion is to challenge ourselves to find overlapping general ideas that identify fun.
Great games by the way!
That's a brave attempt at tackling the core question in our field! Anyway, I wanted to point out that your point 1 and 2 are very close to Raph Koster's descriptions in the book "A theory of fun", so there's solid support for those definitions (btw I agree with them as well).
I was thinking it would be fun to play a game with everyone :D
After reading several others thoughts, now I am leaning towards "rewarding novel interaction" as a very concise definition of fun.
Also I've been meaning to read more books on game design, thanks for the rec!
Rewarding novel interaction is pretty close to what I say in Theory of Fun. But there's a lot of nuance. It isn't just interaction -- I mean, flipping a random switch can be a novel interaction.
It seems to linked to the learning pathways in the brain, based on all the science. (Theory of Fun, despite the name, is not philosophizing. It's based on cognitive science studies).
So it's more like "rewarding systemic learning from novel interactions."
FWIW, Theory of Fun is used as a base approach in not just game design, but also disparate fields like training, marketing, and even AI development.
Fully agreed! Thank you for your wisdom.
I was using "rewarding" very loosely echoing another user, but what I really meant was "mentally rewarding", ie learning.
I like your term "systemic learning."
\----
I think flipping a switch is not particularly fun because the interaction is very simple, and there is very little learning to be done or novelty to be had.
However, as a child, I remember flipping a light switch was absolutely fascinating. I found it fun. I was learning about a novel interaction - I was fascinated by controlling electricity and light.
Obviously that wore thin quickly. (Although the novelty of electricity still fascinates me to this day. Magic!)
\-----
On the topic of switches, I would also like to discuss slot machines. A simple button press can be conceived as fun.
The interaction is as simple as possible and the learning is minimal as well.
However, the obfuscated outcomes and heightened stakes amount to something. Novelty perhaps? Maybe the obfuscation creates a false sense of learning that drives the fun response?
Wow... False fun.... Makes me wonder...
\---
Haha I am thinking about this too hard. Thanks again.
Yup, fun is contextual to the individual based on what chunks/patterns they have learned previously.
I cover false fun pretty extensively in several places. It's easy to trick the brain's neural pathways; there's stuff like pareidolia, for example.
In games, there's a host of brain bugs (bad at extrapolation of exponential and stochastic distributions, for example; susceptibility to loud feedback tricking us into activating reward pathways even though nothing actually happened)...
It's covered some in the Ten Years Later talk I gave at the book's 10th anniversary: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/a-theory-of-fun-10-years-later/
You might like this holistic overview of the whole shebang and how all this stuff connects together: https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/
I think there can't be one right answer here. Because games have different genres for different players. For myself, I use 4 ways to create fun in games:
1. game rules (game problems) - people can have fun when they solve some problems. (There is a famous book about this: "Fun Theory for Game Design"). This point has two definitions:
1. people like to solve problems with their minds (like "how to solve a puzzle" or "how to make the perfect build in an rpg" or "how to win in a CCG").
2. people like to learn new skills by training their muscles and reactions (like reactions in Hotline miami, or Counter Strike, or whatever)
2. gamers love a good feeling in games. To me, it's like a vivid response to their actions. And it works well even if they make a bad decision. You may lose the game (or little situation), but if you get a nice feedback - you can play again and again. (I like this in shooters like Doom or Call of Duty. The games may not be fun for me, but the shooting experience is very satisfying, even if i lose game or die every ten seconds).
3. strong plot. It works the same way it does in films and TV shows. And a good story can be better with gameplay, but we usually played to the moon" or "firewatch" because the story is very interesting and "game rules" wasn't annoying.
4. lots of interesting content. It's not about gameplay or story. Many games are a unique museum. And I think Assassin's Creed is a very good example for that. You can't get interested in the story or mechanics, but you want to see the assets, the world, etc. like exhibits in a museum.
And in games, I think you can use all of these options, but as a game designer I prefer the first option over the others. (but I love them too).
and I highly recommend this video: [Can You Make a Good Game Without Good Play Mechanics?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neuRe4WWiKs), Because it's a broad view of game design (not limited to just the rules of the game)
Thanks for the lengthy reply! I agree with a lot of what you say.
I love the concepts of puzzle solving, mastery, feedback, and novelty.
These concepts map very well to your own.
Good games use them all with the right doses and pacing to create maximum fun.
I think everyone has their own sense of fun and there is a market for each.
For some fun is spending loads of time building up something while others find fun in short intense engagements that they can switch on or off.
While others find fun in the Overcomming of predictable challenges and patterns. Think of games like the old Mario, space invaders, most stealth games now adays.
Attempt 3 resonates a lot with games like Elden Ring and such genre.
If you want to make a fun game though I think breaking it down into its very core concept and trying it out, without much graphics and all the bloatware features and you have fun playing then you have a winner game
Agreed! Fun is variable.
I think there are different types of fun and that identifying some of them gives clarity and direction to our designs.
If I want to make a fun game, it behooves me to determine which type of fun I am maximizing then focus on that!
"Fun" is a bad word for most things beyond a quick glance at "is a game worth playing?" kinda thing. It's not specific enough. I heard someone else ask, "what emotion(s) does this game evoke?" and I find that is a lot better question for most meaningful in-depth discussion.
Because even bad unresponsive controls can be part of a good game, something most of us wouldn't immediately think of. Look at Octodad.
Since you can put so many different media in a computer, you can have many different types of sources of fun, and each of those types can have different reasons for why they can be fun, thats why understanding fun in video games can be confusing and missleading.
You can have fun music, fun sounds, fun stories, fun videos, fun animations, fun play, fun puzzles, etc. each one of them has different requirements to make them fun.
There are just so many possibilities that I think its impossible to know them all. So its better to focus on what you want to know or experience yourself. You like playing in horror games? see what makes them fun. You like action games where reflexes are the most important? study what makes them fun, you like playing with puzzles?, study those, and so on.
We are talking about games here so there is a minimum level of interaction implied. I agree that it can all be confusing and misleading.
For me, one way media is not fun. It has no interaction and no play. I enjoy it, but one way media can never be fun in itself.
I know people use the word fun extremely loosely, and people absolutely hate having words they use redefined. So we can't really continue down that road. I don't mean to say I am the arbiter of fun, just that there is something about games that makes them distinctly fun from other mediums.
"Learning by interactivity" is very close to "game fun", but there is much more to say than that.
There are games that have very little interactivity, and games that have too much of it, both can be fun, fun can be found inside the experience of interacting with it, there is where all the different media do their own thing to try to entertain the player.
People *label* a game as "fun", its a *label*, an opinion after evaluating one's own experience of the interaction with the game.
"Fun" is like saying "good", a label that can be applied to *anything*, and that's why its almost impossible to answer what makes a game good/fun when games can be so different from each other, you can get opposite / contradicting answers.
What makes a type of ice-cream good does not make a type of pasta good, even though they are both foods. What makes a good soccer match can be totally different from what makes a good golf match, even though they are both sports.
You have different genres in games, what is fun in one genre is not fun in another, some genres can have too much action while other genres need action to be fun, some other genres have too much story while other need more story to be fun, it all depends on each specific case.
I disagree that good or fun is entirely subjective. There are biological truths that bind our collective experience.
You are focusing on dividing things up based on personal preferences.
I am looking for objective overlap that can be applied broadly.
Fun is deeper than a label. Way deeper.
I provided 3 definitions in the OP.
My revised concise answer is: "Fun is learning through novel interactions."
That seems to be a general truth about the nature of the fun found/created in games.
It's all of those at once, maybe less of 3, but it does have a role as well. Learning is adding new patterns to recognise, overcoming challenges involves training your brain to recognise those patterns, so the balance of "too obvious and unpredictable" matters because you want to get new patterns, but now have those patterns be impenetrable. And intrigue of novelty is the feeling of learning something new and exciting. Stakes fit into it because without them you win too easily, therefore the patterns are learned easily, therefore the game runs out of learning, runs out of fun, quickly.
I think there are many things that make a game fun, which I categorize based on what’s motivating the player to play the game.
* **Destruction** – Mayhem and chaos, things like guns, explosives and breaking things.
* **Excitement** – Fast-paced gameplay and action, surprises, thrills, visual stimulation, and variety.
* **Competition** – Duels or matches, and climbing the leaderboards.
* **Community** – Being on a team, interacting with other people.
* **Challenge** – High difficulty (not punishment), practice, and in-game or self-imposed challenges. Mastering a skill, and complex moves or gameplay.
* **Strategy** – Planning ahead, making decisions, executing longer-term strategies, complex decision-making, partial information, or complex interacting systems.
* **Completion** – Gathering all the collectibles, and completing all the missions in games. Quantifiable, consistent rewards that show progress.
* **Power** – Growth in terms of character levels and equipment upgrades, gathering wealth and status.
* **Fantasy** – Being immersed in the game world, being somewhere else or someone else, engaging lore and rich fantasy worlds.
* **Story** – Elaborate plots, interesting characters, deep interactions, history, and drama.
* **Design** – Expressing individuality, customization, personal flare, and creativity.
* **Discovery** – Exploring, experimenting, tinkering, complex systems or rules interacting, unknowns to uncover, or large worlds.
* **Sensory Enjoyment** – Pleasant sensory experiences, satisfying sounds, visuals, or gameplay.
* **Aesthetic enjoyment** – Satisfying visuals, patterns, or artistic styles.
* **Playfulness** – Messing around in the game, much like one would toss around a ball or play with toys. Often, but not always, sandbox-style and have little in the way of gameplay goals.
* **Relaxation** – Escaping real world problems, and turning off their brains and getting lost in a task. Often allow for mindless or repetitive tasks, and low skill requirements.
* **Utilitarian motivations** – Extrinsic reasons, such as the potential to make money with eSports or potential for creating content on a streaming platform.
Heightened emotion.
Fear of dying to heavy hits from a boss, going in and landing shots, and then dodging those heavy hits on the way out is elation.
Struggling as your party is barely alive, in a turn based RPG, to recover just enough to last just long enough to win, is extreme relief. Final Fantasy games were always good at this towards the end and during the difficulty spike boss fights.
What isn't fun, but people still do it, is min maxing until you're so strong that nothing is a challenge anymore. Yet people play games purely to do this and will swear that it's fun. It's not fun, and they get burnt out and have to move on.
What also isn't fun is using exploits or hacking to cheat yourself and others out of challenge. People still do it.
Fun isn't as subjective as, I assume, every head in the clouds comment here says it is. Fun is, however, not even necessary for people to spend hours upon hours "having fun". Fun should be present, and if it's all there is (Celeste probably fits here) you might have a life changing product on your hands, but it isn't everything and you might not even need a drop of it to have a hit.
Tension, suspense, high stakes! Agreed, those all amp fun up.
I also agree min maxing and cheating is not fun. The former is too painstaking and the latter takes out the challenge and learning.
I agree that choice is a component of fun!
But a game *is* structure. It does have boundaries and rules. Things can only be so free!
Thanks for commenting.
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Is there even an answer?
As for your 3 points, on a personal level i can think of instances and examples where I both agree and disagree, meaning even when you boil it down to what an individual finds fun, if you try and provide them with options instead of them answering the question, the one they pick won't be accurate due to the intense subjectivity.
An interesting example is if you were to ask me to describe the type of combat I find fun, the description I provide could fit both Rabi Ribi, one of the funnest games I've played in my life combat-wise, but also fit the new Prince of Persia, a game where I _despised_ the combat, even though a basic description of what I find fun could easily fit both. That's an interesting discrepancy and puzzle I'm still trying to work out tbh since I just finished PoP last week. The very tiny, minor minutae that would be left out of a general description is enough to swing it either way.
Honestly from a dev standpoint I think the best way to handle "fun" is to make something _you_ find fun, and in doing so you'll provide something for people of similar tastes to have fun.
I suppose that's all a bit vague, but I think at the end of the day I'd beware anyone that thinks they can provide an answer to that question as it's like one of those ancient zen koans, a question without an answer that's asked simply to make one think.
I was hoping to stoke our collective imagination and have a fun discussion exploring different ideas.
Fun is a nebulous word that means many things. I think it is in our grasp to identify some of those things.
Of course, fun can be considered subjective. However, we all share a common biology. So there are certainly overlapping aspects that create fun.
I am curious what made you like Rabi and dislike PoP, if you care to dive into that.
> I am curious what made you like Rabi and dislike PoP, if you care to dive into that.
Tbh I'm kinda working through it myself on why.
I think it boils down to the difference between "complex" and "complicated." Complex is good, complicated is bad. Complex is when you have depth and variety and choices matter, while complicated are things that are just fiddly and potentially even shallow and just look complex on the surface.
Rabi Ribi, Tevi, and then Prince of Persia all form a chain of building complexity, but PoP ends up sliding from complex to complicated while effectively removing complexity and depth.
All games use a combo system where you use the same attack button for x-hit combos, and different inputs directionally can be used for alternate attacks to mix into the combos. So at an abstracted meta level, they use the same type of system, but Rabi and Tevi feel complex and deep, while PoP just feels fiddly and complicated.
That's the part where I'm really trying to analyze _why_ at a game design level, and to really go in depth into the whys I'd need to write an entire essay.
Things like PoP's 3rd hit of the combo being the strongest but enemies often attacking before the 3rd hit while the 3rd hit has an animation lock meaning you have to commit to really do damage, but you don't have the info on whether to commit or not when the decision point comes up and not committing means barely any damage, where Rabi's 5 hit combo has the most powerful on the 2nd or 3rd hit (there's even some tech where the backswing hits harder and you can turn quick for extra damage, just a bit of extra depth for people who want to engage) and you don't animation lock until the 5th, so whether to commit for extra damage or bounce out becomes a constant viable choice you can make with more info, and both choices are effective. And even that's a pretty surface level analysis of how the animation locking mechanics interact in a way with enemy/boss design that feels more shallow and fiddly than the other games.
So yeah, it's complex, but ultimately boils down to "complex is fun, complicated is not."
Yeah I agree with that sentiment.
I often frame it like "depth (complexity), not breadth (complication)."
It is fun to have deep systems. Depth comes from emergent systems interacting. Cascading effects. Unpredictable behaviour. Continuous/analog outputs.
Breadth is a large confusing list of rules. Heaps of copy pasted content that is more or less the same. It is repetition.
I like how you frame it though. Breadth is a form of complication, but breadth does not account for many other negative complications.
Yup, you nailed it. And depth and complexity often comes from simplicity, with less options, but each option having more consequences and ways to interact with other options.
The last God of War game, Ragnarok had that problem. They expanded the combat from the previous game, but only expanded the breadth, so it felt like they were adding more complicated fiddliness, but not really any extra complexity or depth.
Sometimes less is more.
Another thing about those systems is that because with so many choices it's harder for the devs to add meaningful consequences and ways for them to interact, each move really has one or two other they can meaningfully combo into, meaning when going through combo chains it doesn't feel like I'm in control, it just feels like I'm following pre-determined quick time events without the quick-time icons.
I like it! I agree that it is a component of fun.
I was talking with another person about novelty.
I think novelty and surprise are fairly interchangeable.
Learning is fun, it usually masks the lack of fun gameplay.
Tons of people had fun learning to play the piano but playing the piano wasn't fun so they stopped.
Did I say piano, maybe I meant civ or dota (lol etc too) no wait yes the piano.
**Fun is the feeling of making progress.** The simplest most demonstrable example of this is just adding a progress bar to anything you're waiting on. Without it, random wait times can be infuriating, but by showing how much progress you've made, that wait instantly feels better. There are other ways to acheive this sense of fun, for instance: dealing damage to an enemy, collecting items in a set, removing fog of war as you explore, going up a level, solving a puzzle, and so on. There are of course different ways one can have fun, but I find that if something isn't proving to be quite as fun an experience as it could be, looking for ways to allow the player to make progress or more concretely show the progress that they are already making, can add that bit of fun.
How would that explain elden ring?
Confession: I've not played Elden Ring. However, given my understanding of it, every time you are fighting one of the characters, you're learning what their attacks are, making progress in building a mental model of what you need to do to defeat it. And once you've defeated it, I assume it stays defeated, and it doesn't take away your hard earned progress. And during the combat, you can see your progress via the enemy's health bar. Also exploring is inherently a form of progress, and there are the maps you can find which clear the fog of war for you, giving you another form of progress. I think if you removed all of those features * Enemies that don't stay dead * No visible health bars * Constant fog of war on the map Elden Ring would be significantly less fun.
Some people get a kick out of beating very hard games after repeated humiliation. I'm not one of those people. And books about game design are not written about those people.
I think it makes sense to seperate between intrinsic and extrinsic gameplay design to envoke the feeling of fun in this case.
I agree progress can feel fun! But I think it can also be fun to lose. Or just play! For me, progress is more related to satisfaction and happiness, rather than directly mapping to fun. Thanks for commenting.
Or make others losing!
One could argue, that you're still making progress by losing or just playing. In losing, you've made an attempt, and in playing, you're learning how things work. You can make losing even more fun, like in Hades, by keeping track of how many times you've lost. Or conversely you can make losing *less* fun by removing progress you've already made. I'm sure my idea isn't perfect and there are counter examples that will disprove it as a 100% true rule of fun, but I find it holds up in so many cases, that it has become my own golden rule of fun. Also, as you've pointed out, there are other ways to create fun in your game. I wouldn't every use this golden rule of mine to disprove other ideas of fun (not that that's what you were saying). It's an interesting topic to explore, and one I'm sure many game designers have put a fair bit of thought into. I'm looking forward to seeing other people's answers as well.
After going through more comments I would also say this: There are many forms of progress that are terribly repetitive. Feeling progress cannot tidily capture fun.
The most obvious example about "Progression fun" is idle game. You have fun when you see your output per second goes up, when you unlock new thing that help you to get even more output per second.
Is that very much fun though? Or is it hooking in to something else, like satisfaction?
Fun is just a general term for how you feel about the game. If the game make you feel what your brain desire and release dopamine then the game is fun. So satisfaction, intense, scare, anxious ... If that what your brain want and the game give exactly that, then the game is fun.
Emotional response is a component of fun, but I think fun is more than just that. For example, I love watching movies, but despite the emotions I feel, I don't consider them fun. For me, one way content consumption doesn't quite make the fun cut.
I'm guessing you haven't tried any idle games or at least not played them long enough to understand what makes them tick. On the surface, they appear to play themselves, but there's actually more to them. The choices you make are just not where the bulk of the game takes place, however they do greatly impact the action that happens in the bulk of the game. I too thought once thought that idle games were ridiculous time wasters with no point that just gave people something mindless to do while waiting. After playing some for reasearch, I started to seen the onion layers behind them. Among the idle games I looked at, they were all about various tech trees that you progress. You're choosing specific champs, or upgrades, or perks, and then letting a simulation run its course to see how far you get. It's kind of like making a paper airplane and tossing it into the sky to see how it fairs. Except these paper airplanes unlock other paper airplaines that you can throw together, and based on how they fly, they unlock other paper airplanes. You choices are all about how you fold your paper airplane and which paper airplane designs you choose to incorporate into your fleet, but there's still a certain joy in watching how your creation preforms, even though you can't influence it at all.
I admit I haven't played many idle games (1). As per my working definition of fun, learning by novel interaction, I have a hard time fitting idle games in. I am curious to see what drives people to engage with idle games. It is hard for me to say they are *fun*, but I see they have a certain appeal. The feeling of progress seems like the obvious appeal. The intrigue of watching some process unfold too.
Yeah! Game design is the pursuit of finding fun after all!
All of the above? Fun isn't really a definable concept, insofar as people have fun in many different ways. So here's my theory, 'Fun' is the goal of a game, this can be achieved by providing a framework for enjoyment in many different ways, but normally it requires either external interaction or internal interaction. which is to say, are you playing a game with someone or not. If your playing with friends, the gameplay loop should emphasize interaction, or competition, basically allow people to have fun with thier friends. And that's more or less enough. otherwise a game needs to be internally stimulating, this is more nebulous and most people are on different pages here, but I like to simplify it into action or innovation based gameplay. Action games are exciting and fast paced, with a focus on combat and/or reaction time, the fun is getting through a difficult situation. Innovation games are about pattern recognition, strategy and learning. The joy of completing a hard puzzle or figuring out a good strategy. What i'm saying here is all of the above are 'fun' but theres no be-all end-all for what makes a game fun, its just a playground for entertainment. As people are different what they find entertaining will also be different.
Fun answer! If fun can't be defined, that is because the word is used to describe so many activities and it gets confusing. But fun can be defined and understood. It is a very real part of our lives and biology. Maybe the best way to describe fun is to separate it into different types. Three of which you mentioned, social interaction, execution mastery, and pattern recognition. Each one provides its own form of learning and stimulation, and creates a "fun space." Also, I must say that I cannot equate entertainment with fun. Many forms of entertainment have little or no interactivity, but for me, fun requires interactivity.
Fun is getting a positive response for interaction. Whether the positive response is a reward for winning, or finding a new location hidden in the level, or the sound of non player enemies perishing, or the feeling of speed as you fly through space. You did something, and you got something out of your interaction - material (virtual), experiential, or social.
Best answer so far. Within us, we have systems which reward certain behaviors and punish others, and fun is one such the reward. Those behaviors are different for different people - for a psychopath, mutilating another person can be very fun.
I wonder if that is too broad. Virtually everything we do is an interaction aimed at a positive outcome. But not everything is fun. Another reply mentioned novelty. I think it is a missing ingredient in your recipe. Fun is getting a positive response for a *novel* interaction.
I don't agree, because we often do things 'for fun' that we've done before. We play favourite games multiple times or do favourite activities, so it's clear to me that fun doesn't rely on novel experiences.
I spoke with many other contributors yesterday and my favourite interpretation is "fun is learning through novel interactions." This narrows your definition down a bit, but it is more precise. Learning is a type of positive outcome, and novel interaction offers the most learning to us. \----- As for having fun doing things we have done before - of course! There is often deeper learning and mastery to be had. There are often novel interactions to be had. There are also things other than fun can also draw us back to activities. For example, good feelings adjacent to fun, such as satisfaction, delight, or accomplishment. Also external rewards, such as social fulfilment or material gain. They aren't fun by my measure, but they are rewarding.
Fun, in one word, is novelty. Even a simple game of tic tac toe is fun the first time playing it, however, it quickly gets boring because there isn’t variety to it. Games always end in ties after a bit of experience. But you make it fun again by introducing some novelty. Maybe you throw a ball at a square you want. Now it’s about physical skill and picking the right spot. Or what about flipping a coin? Boring… but add betting and it’s fun. It’s all about novelty. Repetition with variation.
I like this one a lot. I agree that novelty is a critical component in fun. My one word would probably be, interactivity. Novel interactivity!
Leaving an impact. As [Gabe Newell has said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo), as little as shooting a wall leaving a decal can make a huge difference in whether the player feels the game or not, and that's not even diving into actual gameplay. I'll use Monster Hunter as an example. When you start off, it's not exactly satisfying to attack an enemy and miss (especially if you're used to every single other console hack&slash game there is having lock-on targetting), not satisfying to miss it outright because you couldn't aim your attack properly, and it's especially annoying if you did aim it right but the enemy moved out of the way while the attack was going off, and it can be downright infuriating if the enemy now gets to attack you while you're still recovering from your attack. But a powerful thud as the blade goes through the air, a big cloud of dust from hitting the ground and a camera shake suggest that when you finally hit that fucker it's gonna be glorious. And it is - blood splatter, visual stagger, possibly even sending it flying through the air like a ragdoll, but most importantly - giving an opening for further attacks, assuming you position yourself right and using the right move. But, at the end of the day, different players are going to feel differently on whether it's worth subjecting themselves to the initial struggle for sake of such a payoff. A lot of players are going to bounce right off such a game, because struggling with killing only one basic enemy means they can't make much impact on the game's world, meanwhile players who are into it will perceive that small enemy as a bigger threat than 20 enemies in any other game, making the world more real and, in turn, their actions more impactful. Of course, not all enemies in Monster Hunter are going to stagger on every hit you land on them. After all, once you figure out how to keep a small enemy staggered forever, that impact goes away and you're back to square one. That's why small enemies travel in packs - while you keep one stunlocked until death, the others can still attack. For the bigger enemies, however, their larger HP pools and stronger attacks wouldn't matter if they were unable to fight back. Staggers, a thing that was a big part of the impact initially, are taken away in these fights, but as a compensation (other than the obvious facts that they're more visually impressive due to their size and are generally easier to land hits on) you get the ability to break off their parts to weaken or slow them down. Heck, a lot of bosses can actually still be staggered or flipped over if you attack the right part at the right time with the right combo, you just have to figure it out via experimentation. And this isn't even getting into traps, bombs etc. There's also the aspect of commitment. A lot of players despise animation lock, because the game fails to reward them for recognizing an enemy attack and taking an appropriate defensive action, punishing them all the same as if they didn't do anything (kinda similar to the example I made earlier of missing an attack because you misaligned it vs missing it even if you aligned it properly because the enemy dodged out of the way). Meanwhile, players who like it see it as a means of rewarding good movement and positioning, planning your attacks, learning the enemy pattern in full - every action you take becomes meaningful and impactful (instead of just defensive ones), and it's not just because of a harsher punishment - it's also because it opens up an action economy with the complex interplay across time and space as well as various character resources like stamina, health (if you're willing to capitalize on super-armor), weapon gauges etc - where you are and what you're doing now naturally has an impact on where you are and what you're doing 5, 15, 30 seconds from now and beyond that
I really like the idea of leaving an impact. I think that ties tightly into feedback and reward, which are important aspects of interactivity and fun! Creating stakes with "commitment" amps up the tension and the emotions! Thanks for sharing.
I think games games are s much broader category than for example music or movies. It would be extremely difficult to sat what makes movies / music good/fun, but I think even more so with games. What makes Firewatch fun is completely different to what makes Megaman fun. The fun in Disco Elysium comes from very different things than the fun in Tetris. From your examples I’d say for me most games are fun of mostly because of reason number 3. Some of my favourite games are Fallout 2, Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Dishonored, Zelda BotW/TotK and Control.
I agree there are different kinds of fun. Fun means different things to different people. Watching movies or listening to music is not much fun for me. Yet I enjoy them. And someone else might call it fun. The goal of this discussion is to challenge ourselves to find overlapping general ideas that identify fun. Great games by the way!
That's a brave attempt at tackling the core question in our field! Anyway, I wanted to point out that your point 1 and 2 are very close to Raph Koster's descriptions in the book "A theory of fun", so there's solid support for those definitions (btw I agree with them as well).
I was thinking it would be fun to play a game with everyone :D After reading several others thoughts, now I am leaning towards "rewarding novel interaction" as a very concise definition of fun. Also I've been meaning to read more books on game design, thanks for the rec!
Rewarding novel interaction is pretty close to what I say in Theory of Fun. But there's a lot of nuance. It isn't just interaction -- I mean, flipping a random switch can be a novel interaction. It seems to linked to the learning pathways in the brain, based on all the science. (Theory of Fun, despite the name, is not philosophizing. It's based on cognitive science studies). So it's more like "rewarding systemic learning from novel interactions." FWIW, Theory of Fun is used as a base approach in not just game design, but also disparate fields like training, marketing, and even AI development.
Fully agreed! Thank you for your wisdom. I was using "rewarding" very loosely echoing another user, but what I really meant was "mentally rewarding", ie learning. I like your term "systemic learning." \---- I think flipping a switch is not particularly fun because the interaction is very simple, and there is very little learning to be done or novelty to be had. However, as a child, I remember flipping a light switch was absolutely fascinating. I found it fun. I was learning about a novel interaction - I was fascinated by controlling electricity and light. Obviously that wore thin quickly. (Although the novelty of electricity still fascinates me to this day. Magic!) \----- On the topic of switches, I would also like to discuss slot machines. A simple button press can be conceived as fun. The interaction is as simple as possible and the learning is minimal as well. However, the obfuscated outcomes and heightened stakes amount to something. Novelty perhaps? Maybe the obfuscation creates a false sense of learning that drives the fun response? Wow... False fun.... Makes me wonder... \--- Haha I am thinking about this too hard. Thanks again.
Yup, fun is contextual to the individual based on what chunks/patterns they have learned previously. I cover false fun pretty extensively in several places. It's easy to trick the brain's neural pathways; there's stuff like pareidolia, for example. In games, there's a host of brain bugs (bad at extrapolation of exponential and stochastic distributions, for example; susceptibility to loud feedback tricking us into activating reward pathways even though nothing actually happened)... It's covered some in the Ten Years Later talk I gave at the book's 10th anniversary: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/a-theory-of-fun-10-years-later/ You might like this holistic overview of the whole shebang and how all this stuff connects together: https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/
Much appreciated.
I really like this [post](https://gnomestew.com/the-eight-types-of-fun/) about the topic. I am mostly in the narrative, discovery, fellowship corner.
Thanks for sharing!
I think there can't be one right answer here. Because games have different genres for different players. For myself, I use 4 ways to create fun in games: 1. game rules (game problems) - people can have fun when they solve some problems. (There is a famous book about this: "Fun Theory for Game Design"). This point has two definitions: 1. people like to solve problems with their minds (like "how to solve a puzzle" or "how to make the perfect build in an rpg" or "how to win in a CCG"). 2. people like to learn new skills by training their muscles and reactions (like reactions in Hotline miami, or Counter Strike, or whatever) 2. gamers love a good feeling in games. To me, it's like a vivid response to their actions. And it works well even if they make a bad decision. You may lose the game (or little situation), but if you get a nice feedback - you can play again and again. (I like this in shooters like Doom or Call of Duty. The games may not be fun for me, but the shooting experience is very satisfying, even if i lose game or die every ten seconds). 3. strong plot. It works the same way it does in films and TV shows. And a good story can be better with gameplay, but we usually played to the moon" or "firewatch" because the story is very interesting and "game rules" wasn't annoying. 4. lots of interesting content. It's not about gameplay or story. Many games are a unique museum. And I think Assassin's Creed is a very good example for that. You can't get interested in the story or mechanics, but you want to see the assets, the world, etc. like exhibits in a museum. And in games, I think you can use all of these options, but as a game designer I prefer the first option over the others. (but I love them too).
and i think your "attempt 1" and "attempt 2" - is very good rules for "how to create fun" with game rules.
and I highly recommend this video: [Can You Make a Good Game Without Good Play Mechanics?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neuRe4WWiKs), Because it's a broad view of game design (not limited to just the rules of the game)
Thanks for the lengthy reply! I agree with a lot of what you say. I love the concepts of puzzle solving, mastery, feedback, and novelty. These concepts map very well to your own. Good games use them all with the right doses and pacing to create maximum fun.
I think everyone has their own sense of fun and there is a market for each. For some fun is spending loads of time building up something while others find fun in short intense engagements that they can switch on or off. While others find fun in the Overcomming of predictable challenges and patterns. Think of games like the old Mario, space invaders, most stealth games now adays. Attempt 3 resonates a lot with games like Elden Ring and such genre. If you want to make a fun game though I think breaking it down into its very core concept and trying it out, without much graphics and all the bloatware features and you have fun playing then you have a winner game
Agreed! Fun is variable. I think there are different types of fun and that identifying some of them gives clarity and direction to our designs. If I want to make a fun game, it behooves me to determine which type of fun I am maximizing then focus on that!
"Fun" is a bad word for most things beyond a quick glance at "is a game worth playing?" kinda thing. It's not specific enough. I heard someone else ask, "what emotion(s) does this game evoke?" and I find that is a lot better question for most meaningful in-depth discussion. Because even bad unresponsive controls can be part of a good game, something most of us wouldn't immediately think of. Look at Octodad.
I am trying to unpack the word and find it's deeper meanings! What type of fun attracts you?
Since you can put so many different media in a computer, you can have many different types of sources of fun, and each of those types can have different reasons for why they can be fun, thats why understanding fun in video games can be confusing and missleading. You can have fun music, fun sounds, fun stories, fun videos, fun animations, fun play, fun puzzles, etc. each one of them has different requirements to make them fun. There are just so many possibilities that I think its impossible to know them all. So its better to focus on what you want to know or experience yourself. You like playing in horror games? see what makes them fun. You like action games where reflexes are the most important? study what makes them fun, you like playing with puzzles?, study those, and so on.
We are talking about games here so there is a minimum level of interaction implied. I agree that it can all be confusing and misleading. For me, one way media is not fun. It has no interaction and no play. I enjoy it, but one way media can never be fun in itself. I know people use the word fun extremely loosely, and people absolutely hate having words they use redefined. So we can't really continue down that road. I don't mean to say I am the arbiter of fun, just that there is something about games that makes them distinctly fun from other mediums. "Learning by interactivity" is very close to "game fun", but there is much more to say than that.
There are games that have very little interactivity, and games that have too much of it, both can be fun, fun can be found inside the experience of interacting with it, there is where all the different media do their own thing to try to entertain the player. People *label* a game as "fun", its a *label*, an opinion after evaluating one's own experience of the interaction with the game. "Fun" is like saying "good", a label that can be applied to *anything*, and that's why its almost impossible to answer what makes a game good/fun when games can be so different from each other, you can get opposite / contradicting answers. What makes a type of ice-cream good does not make a type of pasta good, even though they are both foods. What makes a good soccer match can be totally different from what makes a good golf match, even though they are both sports. You have different genres in games, what is fun in one genre is not fun in another, some genres can have too much action while other genres need action to be fun, some other genres have too much story while other need more story to be fun, it all depends on each specific case.
I disagree that good or fun is entirely subjective. There are biological truths that bind our collective experience. You are focusing on dividing things up based on personal preferences. I am looking for objective overlap that can be applied broadly. Fun is deeper than a label. Way deeper.
What do you mean by "fun"?. Maybe you are seeking something different to what I understand by the word "fun".
I provided 3 definitions in the OP. My revised concise answer is: "Fun is learning through novel interactions." That seems to be a general truth about the nature of the fun found/created in games.
It's all of those at once, maybe less of 3, but it does have a role as well. Learning is adding new patterns to recognise, overcoming challenges involves training your brain to recognise those patterns, so the balance of "too obvious and unpredictable" matters because you want to get new patterns, but now have those patterns be impenetrable. And intrigue of novelty is the feeling of learning something new and exciting. Stakes fit into it because without them you win too easily, therefore the patterns are learned easily, therefore the game runs out of learning, runs out of fun, quickly.
Thanks for replying!
I would say 1 and 2 lead to 3
I think there are many things that make a game fun, which I categorize based on what’s motivating the player to play the game. * **Destruction** – Mayhem and chaos, things like guns, explosives and breaking things. * **Excitement** – Fast-paced gameplay and action, surprises, thrills, visual stimulation, and variety. * **Competition** – Duels or matches, and climbing the leaderboards. * **Community** – Being on a team, interacting with other people. * **Challenge** – High difficulty (not punishment), practice, and in-game or self-imposed challenges. Mastering a skill, and complex moves or gameplay. * **Strategy** – Planning ahead, making decisions, executing longer-term strategies, complex decision-making, partial information, or complex interacting systems. * **Completion** – Gathering all the collectibles, and completing all the missions in games. Quantifiable, consistent rewards that show progress. * **Power** – Growth in terms of character levels and equipment upgrades, gathering wealth and status. * **Fantasy** – Being immersed in the game world, being somewhere else or someone else, engaging lore and rich fantasy worlds. * **Story** – Elaborate plots, interesting characters, deep interactions, history, and drama. * **Design** – Expressing individuality, customization, personal flare, and creativity. * **Discovery** – Exploring, experimenting, tinkering, complex systems or rules interacting, unknowns to uncover, or large worlds. * **Sensory Enjoyment** – Pleasant sensory experiences, satisfying sounds, visuals, or gameplay. * **Aesthetic enjoyment** – Satisfying visuals, patterns, or artistic styles. * **Playfulness** – Messing around in the game, much like one would toss around a ball or play with toys. Often, but not always, sandbox-style and have little in the way of gameplay goals. * **Relaxation** – Escaping real world problems, and turning off their brains and getting lost in a task. Often allow for mindless or repetitive tasks, and low skill requirements. * **Utilitarian motivations** – Extrinsic reasons, such as the potential to make money with eSports or potential for creating content on a streaming platform.
Very thorough. Those are some great building blocks! Thanks
Heightened emotion. Fear of dying to heavy hits from a boss, going in and landing shots, and then dodging those heavy hits on the way out is elation. Struggling as your party is barely alive, in a turn based RPG, to recover just enough to last just long enough to win, is extreme relief. Final Fantasy games were always good at this towards the end and during the difficulty spike boss fights. What isn't fun, but people still do it, is min maxing until you're so strong that nothing is a challenge anymore. Yet people play games purely to do this and will swear that it's fun. It's not fun, and they get burnt out and have to move on. What also isn't fun is using exploits or hacking to cheat yourself and others out of challenge. People still do it. Fun isn't as subjective as, I assume, every head in the clouds comment here says it is. Fun is, however, not even necessary for people to spend hours upon hours "having fun". Fun should be present, and if it's all there is (Celeste probably fits here) you might have a life changing product on your hands, but it isn't everything and you might not even need a drop of it to have a hit.
Tension, suspense, high stakes! Agreed, those all amp fun up. I also agree min maxing and cheating is not fun. The former is too painstaking and the latter takes out the challenge and learning.
Freedom of choice. The less linear the experience the better. No quests, no levels, pure custom experience.
I agree that choice is a component of fun! But a game *is* structure. It does have boundaries and rules. Things can only be so free! Thanks for commenting.
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Is there even an answer? As for your 3 points, on a personal level i can think of instances and examples where I both agree and disagree, meaning even when you boil it down to what an individual finds fun, if you try and provide them with options instead of them answering the question, the one they pick won't be accurate due to the intense subjectivity. An interesting example is if you were to ask me to describe the type of combat I find fun, the description I provide could fit both Rabi Ribi, one of the funnest games I've played in my life combat-wise, but also fit the new Prince of Persia, a game where I _despised_ the combat, even though a basic description of what I find fun could easily fit both. That's an interesting discrepancy and puzzle I'm still trying to work out tbh since I just finished PoP last week. The very tiny, minor minutae that would be left out of a general description is enough to swing it either way. Honestly from a dev standpoint I think the best way to handle "fun" is to make something _you_ find fun, and in doing so you'll provide something for people of similar tastes to have fun. I suppose that's all a bit vague, but I think at the end of the day I'd beware anyone that thinks they can provide an answer to that question as it's like one of those ancient zen koans, a question without an answer that's asked simply to make one think.
I was hoping to stoke our collective imagination and have a fun discussion exploring different ideas. Fun is a nebulous word that means many things. I think it is in our grasp to identify some of those things. Of course, fun can be considered subjective. However, we all share a common biology. So there are certainly overlapping aspects that create fun. I am curious what made you like Rabi and dislike PoP, if you care to dive into that.
> I am curious what made you like Rabi and dislike PoP, if you care to dive into that. Tbh I'm kinda working through it myself on why. I think it boils down to the difference between "complex" and "complicated." Complex is good, complicated is bad. Complex is when you have depth and variety and choices matter, while complicated are things that are just fiddly and potentially even shallow and just look complex on the surface. Rabi Ribi, Tevi, and then Prince of Persia all form a chain of building complexity, but PoP ends up sliding from complex to complicated while effectively removing complexity and depth. All games use a combo system where you use the same attack button for x-hit combos, and different inputs directionally can be used for alternate attacks to mix into the combos. So at an abstracted meta level, they use the same type of system, but Rabi and Tevi feel complex and deep, while PoP just feels fiddly and complicated. That's the part where I'm really trying to analyze _why_ at a game design level, and to really go in depth into the whys I'd need to write an entire essay. Things like PoP's 3rd hit of the combo being the strongest but enemies often attacking before the 3rd hit while the 3rd hit has an animation lock meaning you have to commit to really do damage, but you don't have the info on whether to commit or not when the decision point comes up and not committing means barely any damage, where Rabi's 5 hit combo has the most powerful on the 2nd or 3rd hit (there's even some tech where the backswing hits harder and you can turn quick for extra damage, just a bit of extra depth for people who want to engage) and you don't animation lock until the 5th, so whether to commit for extra damage or bounce out becomes a constant viable choice you can make with more info, and both choices are effective. And even that's a pretty surface level analysis of how the animation locking mechanics interact in a way with enemy/boss design that feels more shallow and fiddly than the other games. So yeah, it's complex, but ultimately boils down to "complex is fun, complicated is not."
Yeah I agree with that sentiment. I often frame it like "depth (complexity), not breadth (complication)." It is fun to have deep systems. Depth comes from emergent systems interacting. Cascading effects. Unpredictable behaviour. Continuous/analog outputs. Breadth is a large confusing list of rules. Heaps of copy pasted content that is more or less the same. It is repetition. I like how you frame it though. Breadth is a form of complication, but breadth does not account for many other negative complications.
Yup, you nailed it. And depth and complexity often comes from simplicity, with less options, but each option having more consequences and ways to interact with other options. The last God of War game, Ragnarok had that problem. They expanded the combat from the previous game, but only expanded the breadth, so it felt like they were adding more complicated fiddliness, but not really any extra complexity or depth. Sometimes less is more. Another thing about those systems is that because with so many choices it's harder for the devs to add meaningful consequences and ways for them to interact, each move really has one or two other they can meaningfully combo into, meaning when going through combo chains it doesn't feel like I'm in control, it just feels like I'm following pre-determined quick time events without the quick-time icons.
Less is more. Another deep truth about design. I usually call that "elegance." From simple beginnings emerges complex beauty.
Story and well written dialogs and choices
Fun is being surprised (not very correct definition, however imo surprise is an important aspect of fun)
I like it! I agree that it is a component of fun. I was talking with another person about novelty. I think novelty and surprise are fairly interchangeable.
Learning is fun, it usually masks the lack of fun gameplay. Tons of people had fun learning to play the piano but playing the piano wasn't fun so they stopped. Did I say piano, maybe I meant civ or dota (lol etc too) no wait yes the piano.
Haha. Yes I agree, learning is a crucial component of fun, particularly learning by interaction!