I wish to add that the balance between "be relaxed" and "but not too relaxed." differs from person to person in my view, because of that is a wide range of difficulty levels with very big differences between them a good thing in my view.

[edited by - kolpo on April 17, 2002 1:42:47 PM]

Kylotan-
Well, I guess my psych major didn''t really help me since I''m not in psych But really, trying to pin point something like fun is an incredibly subjective thing....almost a diametric opposite to the objectivity needed to codify something.

I think there also needs to be something said between the difference of what people want...and what they think they want. This can be clearly demonstrated in marketing. Hype something up enough and you can persuade people to believe they want it, need it or like it. Now you can codify people''s NEEDS, but I don''t think you can codify their wants...and that''s really what fun is...a want. All people would like to have fun, but the form that fun can take is enormously varied and varies by gender, by culture, by religion and hosts of other things. If you can narrow down certain demographics, then you probably can get a pretty good feel for what that group considers "fun", but otherwise, I don''t see much point to it. That being said, gamers do tend to be vastly male, and in the 22+ age group (I''d guess between 25-35 actually). But you have hosts of other factors (religion, culture, area of country, tastes, etc.)

What most people find fun, I do not. For example, eating Ice cream....I never really did like it even as a child. Or as a guy....watching sports. I could play sports, but I was never into watching them. I don''t have TV and I don''t miss it either. And I have never, nor never will be drunk (or even a buzz). Does that make me a weirdo...well yes But I think it goes to show you that what one person finds fun does not equate across the board. You can get into semantics or statistics and try to find what the majority likes. But even this is perilous. Take music for example. While pop may stand for popular, it actually only sells a little more than Rap, or Country. And most people that I know that like pop can''t stand country and vice versa.

Basically, "to each his own", "everyone marches to a different drummer", and "one man''s garbage is another man''s treasure".

True, it's not necessary to become an expert in psychology in order to create fun games, but only good can come from understanding the psychological principles behind those elements of games which consistently improve player enjoyment. Nobody here is asking for a "fun metric", only for psychological insights into how players respond and react to various game elements.

Consider music and music theory, architecture and geometry, or art and the behavior of light. All these are things which benefit from a certain degree of discipline without reducing them to a cold, mechanical process.

Psychology is very important in the field of human-computer interaction, and such interaction is the essence of any game. Things like designing interfaces, defining goals, defining and presenting obstacles, defining and presenting rewards, and creating logical relationships within the game all involve various aspects of human psychology, and game designers would do well to study and understand these things from a psychological standpoint.

[edited by - chronos on April 18, 2002 4:10:38 AM]

Hehe. You''re pretty funny. You put so much thought into something that could be sufficed to this:

DON''T BE A GEEK! JUST PLAY GAMES, MAKE GAMES, AND HAVE FUN DOING IT!

If you don''t have fun, that game you''re making won''t be. Why keep drawing a picture if you don''t care, don''t like it, and have no motivation to finish it?

quote: [ That being said, gamers do tend to be vastly male, and in the 22+ age group (I''d guess between 25-35 actually). But you have hosts of other factors (religion, culture, area of country, tastes, etc.)

Actually, the average gamer is 28 years old. Just FYI and all...

I''ve only got one motto that I apply to all areas of game design...

Cool, not fustrating and depth.

Its kinda an engrish motto, but it serves me well... Imagine what a player would find cool, use that, what they''d find fustrating, elimate that and depth, so that the game isn''t shallow and can provide a good solid amount of entertainment.

Zaptruder

Well, that''s no problem. Just use the scientific method.

I believe it was: come up with a hypothesis, find a way to test it, run some tests, see if you were right.

Continue doing that until you''re satisfied.

What? No, that''s not trial and error! It''s very scientific I tell you!

Remember, science is built up from observation.

On a somewhat related tangent, this is one of the reasons that I think software packages (as they either become open source, or more affordable to smaller companies) will become more and more important to game development. With the proper engine components in place, it could greatly reduce the amount of time it would take to answer the quesiton of fun. I''d imagine a sort of setup where in 2-6 months you could draft a quick set of rules, and a few connectivity classes (changing input into physics and world data, converting world data into graphics and sound) and have a prototype up and running for testing.

Because game development is darn hard right now, and there''s no room for expirementation, simply because of the amount of work it takes to get to the entry level of gaming.

quote: Original post by Dauntless
Well, I guess my psych major didn''t really help me since I''m not in psych But really, trying to pin point something like fun is an incredibly subjective thing....almost a diametric opposite to the objectivity needed to codify something.

Depends on your philosophy. As you will well know, many psychologists would argue that all behaviour is deterministic and predictable, which makes it totally objective - in theory. Others disagree.

On this forum, I''m not interested in arguing philosophical issues. If someone believes my approach is invalid because science is invalid, or my approach is immoral/against their religion/whatever, I humbly ask that they just ignore me.

I''ve seen too many philosophical debates in this forum that didn''t really do anyone any good...

quote: All people would like to have fun, but the form that fun can take is enormously varied and varies by gender, by culture, by religion and hosts of other things. If you can narrow down certain demographics, then you probably can get a pretty good feel for what that group considers "fun", but otherwise, I don''t see much point to it.

The fact that most languages have a word for "fun" should be a pretty good indicator that activities can be classified into "fun" and "not fun". (Of course, it''s not a fixed boundary - more like a fuzzy one.)

The more you narrow down your demographic, the more accurate your judgements can be. And you can widen your demographic if you''re willing to make your predictions more abstract. And as you said, the game playing demographic is pretty damn narrow already. And growing more and more homogeneous as time goes by.

Nothing I said really hinged around probability or ''the majority''. It is a layer of abstraction above that. The 3 examples I gave were fairly culture-neutral, yet they lead to real and implementable ideas. No-one is finding errors in my logic: they''re just taking offense that I apply logic to something they don''t want to involve logic. So I stand by what I said and furthermore, I assert that it would be quite easy to go into more detail to provide a set of rules that would provide a high-quality set of heuristics for high-level game design.

[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost | Asking Questions ]

Yes, but how many angels dance on the head of a pin?

to paraphrase Friday by Robert A. Heinlein,
''the surface area of the pin divided by the area it takes for an angel to dance''

Dauntless:
what exactly did you not like about Crusade?
I wish they had been filmed in the show''s chronological order and I wish I could see the end(I don''t think they got that far but I could be wrong), although it seems certain that they succeed since Franklin was stuck on Earth at the time of the plague and we see him 15 years later(from an episode of Babylon 5), I didn''t like fifth season though, despite being a huge Tracy Scoggins fan(she''s hot)