Cool thread. Nice to know that I had an intuitive understanding of these principles when designing my first game.

What I find most fun in games is reward for effort.

There's also sandbox fun, or the fun in allowing players to express themselves in a gameworld with no particular long-term goal or agenda, other than to explore the limits of what that gameworld has to offer. Many of Maxis's Sim games fall here, but you could also treat every game in such a way.

Quote:

Original post by Tangireon If you can't or do not aim to add in multiplayer or mod-ability, the game has to be challenging enough for me to be interested, but not too challenging for me to lose interest.

Basically games should be easy to learn but hard to master, the player should be able to pick up the game and do well quickly, but still feel that he is improving all the time.