This leads to another question. What makes a game a fun game?

What is fun? It's a learned response (back to psychology). Playing games to win might be just one of an infinite number of possibilities, but I think we'll agree it's the most common.

Here's a rhetorical situation. Two boys play a board game for the very first time with adult supervision. The parents are all avid players and they have fun watching the game. The winner is cajoled and whether the game is random chance or not he thinks he did something right. The other player gets a pat on the back and a maybe next time, he's either bored or he'll cry for attention. Either way, one boy learns it's fun to win, the other boy observed it's fun to win.

Continuing on. In the case of the board game we have the fame vs shame phenomenon. Later in life the boys learn they are slightly talented in respective areas, one may know math with good hand-eye coordination, the other likes to experiment and is incredibly patient with attention in detail. If given a chance, they'll discover they win more when playing to their strength, they may even get better.

So this goes on.

Another more complex example. A high stakes player with the most money at the end wins. Just winning is fun. For a shark, new tricks earn even more money, and becoming a con artist through deception is very valuable.

Not exactly a change of topic, but the following will sound odd. It's possible for people to play games and sound like they are not having fun, specifically because it annoys them. I saw someone play games, not feel a challenge, and complain about how inevitable it is the game would force them to lose if they hadn't gone to extreme lengths to win. I can only guess they had fun in denial, or there was some extrinsic reward like adrenaline or masochism.

To echo a concept mentioned in Navezof's video, it is useful to identify which part of the design is the objective and which part is the implementation. When we ask the question "How to make a fun game?" we need to acknowledge that we are limiting the scope to the context of games, which might not be an objective, but an implementation. Prematurely deciding that you are "making a game" could limit your design space to achieve your objective.

I think what makes something fun is the anticipation of a cognitively rewarding experience.

An interaction is not fun until the participant is being cognitively rewarded, or can look forward to that.

What is cognitively rewarding for one person might be different from another person. What is fun for a person can change over time. A person can learn or unlearn what is fun to them, sometimes it has nothing to do with the interaction itself but the context and condition of their participation. To design something fun, you need to know what is fun for the target audience, or have a way to introduce the interaction so that the audience accepts that it is fun.

If you know what is fun for the target audience, then the design should have the interaction that can lead to that kind of fun, and not so much interactions that would distract or discourage the player from it. The design would also need to show the player the fun part early on so that the player can confirm and anticipate more. The "fun" of the interaction is not in the promise by the designer that the game is fun, but in the player's anticipation of it.

If the interaction is new to the player such that the player has no initial feeling on whether it is fun or not, then the game and advertisement of the game need to define and influence the player to accept that it is fun. In this case, what makes the game fun may not be in the design of the game itself, but in the advertising method that promotes it.

Some advertisement methods include:

1. You present a group of people who find the game fun, and take advantage of the human tendency to want to do things with other people and not be left behind.

2. You show people having fun playing it and let the image sips into the audience's subconscious to let them accept that it is game that is fun.

3. Instead of showing the game, you start by showing a story that makes the viewer want to participate in the story world and be able to make decisions in situations similar to those presented to the story characters.

Sometimes once this gets going, the player would start to convince themselves that what they play is fun to justify the time they spend with it. At that point, it becomes difficult to distinguish whether the game itself is fun or just because the player asserts that it is.

I wonder if there is a such term as "play mechanics", because personally, there are few games that feel like play. These war games feel like training or simulation.

There are indeed some different theories of play mechanics and psychology of how and why we play. Script theory is one of them. I was going to link to the Wikipedia article here but it's unusually lousy for a wikipedia article. So here's my attempt at an explanation. Young children's learning is focused on (besides learning to talk and control their bodies to manipulate objects) patterns of events, especially those which are socially regarded as having emotional importance. Humans have an innate love of patterns, and completing a pattern can feel good to us even if the pattern itself isn't good, as the genres of tragedy and horror demonstrate.

Approval, disapproval, pain/punishment, pitiableness/sorrow, and celebration are categories of emotional meaning that children observe to be connected with patterns of events. The term script actually refers to the template of a sequence of events stored in the child's head. Most pretend play is roleplay, and roleplay consists of acting out one or more scripts, to the emotional satisfaction of the roleplayer. Ursula Schwartz studied children playing pretend and came to the conclusion that Children’s pretend play is generally based on one of three basic scripts: separation-reunion, threat-neutralization, and deprivation-provision. Common variants of these include, for separation-reunion: death-rebirth, object lost-object found, person absent-person present; for threat-neutralization: danger-rescue, villain present-villain defeated, injury-healing; and for deprivation-provision: food deprivation-food provision, care deprivation-care provision. From my own observations, slightly older children add scripts like: heroic accomplishment-party in the hero's honor/wealth/romantic admiration, brainy accomplishment-respect/praise/obedience from allies, efficiency-wealth/prosperity, stealing-going to jail, eating and/or practicing-physical growth/increasing in power, and all sorts of cultural concepts about what kind of role the player can act out to earn a particular response from others or the world.

These kind of things don't directly apply to abstract games, but players who choose a particular type of play often have a consistent reason for doing so. Sudokus, for example, are typically regarded as a "brainy accomplishment", so people who choose that type of puzzle typically do so because they want to feel praised for being smart. Those are a puzzle, but the same applies to games. Hidden object games are often chosen by people who want to feel praised for being observant. Tetris is a bit more complex - it could be about being dexterous, being calm in a situation that might cause panic, or making problems vanish. Most games aren't that abstract, and use story and/or visual symbolism to explicitly give the player a role to act out and then respond to the player's success at acting out that script.

In terms of cognitive rewards, as Wai mentions, there are two different types involved here; both the pattern completion I mentioned at the beginning of this post, and the specific types of praise or other reaction that players anticipate as the payout of acting out a script. These are not the only kind of cognitive rewards in game either; customization opportunities are creativity rewards, in-game currency and salable loot are economic rewards, and multiplayer games have both competitive social rewards and cooperative social rewards. The various systems of player taxonomy or categorization are usually based on what type of reward(s) players look for from a game, and what action they want to perform within that game to earn that reward.

The various systems of player taxonomy or categorization are usually based on what type of reward(s) players look for from a game, and what action they want to perform within that game to earn that reward.

Good point! Hmmm.

A lot of my posts can be tied together to show something more profound not just of games, but of humans in general. I usually only post on such interesting topics here. I am not just posting these things for a response, but for a deeper exploration of games.

Why? Well, that is what I do for everything I learn. I dig deep until I find the gemstone. I then bring that gemstone to the surface and try to explain my adventure as simple and clearly as possible.

Besides, how can you expect to find a gem like that on the surface? Otherwise, it would mean that games are simple and trivial things people occupy themselves with. Does anyone agree with that?

As a reply to that quote, it is interesting that you say "it's based on what players look for from a game."

If someone want's a story, they will play a game that tells a story. If someone wants to have some since of pride for being more intelligent than the next person, then they might play some strategy game like chess. In fact, chess was so popular in the world, and chess tournaments were so popular because it was more of a pride issue of nation against nation. If one nation had the best chess player in the world, then that meant that nation was more strategically competent than the others. It was a symbol of social dominance.

I know for myself I like to play certain games to exercise my knowledge, or expand it. And sometimes I do it to show of my knowledge (wink).

Perhaps this is the case in sports also, which are not games according to game theory.

Wait, why would sports not be games according to game theory? In any competitive sport, whether 1 v 1 or team v team, they have a defined interaction mode and a defined failure mode that will occur by default if you don't play.

Wait, why would sports not be games according to game theory? In any competitive sport, whether 1 v 1 or team v team, they have a defined interaction mode and a defined failure mode that will occur by default if you don't play.

I think the difference was that a sport is based on ones actual physical aptitude, which is why chess is considered a game, and not a sport.

I guess it would be where physical dexterity determines the victor.

If me not being able to see as well as you determined your victory in that game, the game becomes a sport (seeing contest).

Dance dance revelation might then become more of a sport than a game when a component is introduced, therefore perfect for a competition.

I need to check up on the definitions, but yeah, they make a distinction there.

Wait, why would sports not be games according to game theory? In any competitive sport, whether 1 v 1 or team v team, they have a defined interaction mode and a defined failure mode that will occur by default if you don't play.

I think the difference was that a sport is based on ones actual physical aptitude, which is why chess is considered a game, and not a sport.

I guess it would be where physical dexterity determines the victor.

If me not being able to see as well as you determined your victory in that game, the game becomes a sport (seeing contest).

Dance dance revelation might then become more of a sport than a game when a component is introduced, therefore perfect for a competition.

I need to check up on the definitions, but yeah, they make a distinction there.

Almost all video games require some kind of physical skill or ability, so for practical purposes I don't think it's useful to focus on games that don't.

I think what you were trying to get at is there's a deeply rooted Psychology necessary to understand games 'why?'. I'm just going to propose now that it's easier not to question.

So games have a human component. Using what is understood from Psychology we can explain why humans play games. I think this is beneficial for someone because it should explain why people like games that the reader might actually find quite boring.

What you might wonder is what other things a game has. Quoting Wikipedia: "The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms." Neither side of the ludology vs narratology debate sits quite right with me, I'm thinking of it as a more all-encompassing means that can be described and morphed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_analysis_%28problem-solving%29

Sometimes there are too many possible solutions.

Here's some fuel for the fire. I haven't read this entire page yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies

Maybe if I took a look at all the academic journals referenced I could give more insight.

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Riddle: If a game were a living thing; You can't poison it, you can't hold it, you can't fool it, it is immune to all disease, it is ageless, it defies gravity, it has children, and yet a game can still die. How do you kill one?

I find the definition that Craford used interesting. It defines "games" and "play" by conflict rather than interaction. This is interesting to me, especially due to my recent experience (literally this morning) with a game called Proteus.

Link to a short trailer for the game

I mention this game because although most games are based around central conflict or combat, some can manage without that and still manage to be enjoyable. As people we tend to be problem solvers or conflict resolvers. I discovered this about myself during the time that I was playing this game.

During my first ten or so minutes I was confused by my environment. I had no prior knowledge of anything in this game at all. In fact, I didn't even know it was included in the bundle I purchased. I started up and noticed a lack of mechanic in terms of player commands and control. I have no weapons, hands, items, quests, allies, enemies, etc. The only actions I could manage were movement, looking around, taking pictures, and this odd touch mechanic that I still don't understand.

So all I'm doing is walking around, looking and listening to this very relaxing music. I pass by a large tree that is surrounded by some sort of bobbing wildlife at its base. As I make my pass, I see in my periphery, the small wildlife "bobs" retreat to the ground in a single audible "ting". I then pass a swarm of small bees as they pollinate a field of pixelated daisies. Again, there are the audible notes as they repeatedly drop onto the small flowers. The small tones mixes well into the soft, harmonious track playing over my adventure through my headphones. I look at the sun as it collapses slowly over the horizon. A mirrored image on the opposite horizon shows the white, cool moon rise. The music follows example and calms more so into an even more relaxing tune.

Throughout all of this, I slowly discovered that perhaps the conflict that we experience in games now isn't entirely necessary for a game to be enjoyable. Perhaps we shouldn't define a game by who you're fighting and how you're doing it. As children, we had great fun simply playing house or pretending to be various animals or people. This game really did a great job to remind me of the value of the mechanics that are sometimes looked over.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, a game is fun, a game is played, a game offers an experience. We shouldn't restrict ourselves to the subject matter because the subject doesn't matter.

Games are meant to be played and enjoyed. All they need are the means to allow that experience.

Interesting trailer indeed. As for childhood games, that is what I want to capture, and I have some good ideas for a few. I think the Nintendo WII sorta captures that with several of its games.

The interactivity the WII's wiimote presented sort of brings back that childhood game feel, even a few I played using the move.