If you're going to design games, or GM RPGs, it helps to understand a little bit about what makes games enjoyable. Game publishers often say in their guidelines for designers "game must be fun," but I've always found this to be useless because fun means different things to different people.
I used to ask gamers who like to play chess, whether they regarded it as fun; about half do and half don't. It may be engaging, it may be enjoyable, it may be fascinating, but it's not fun for many of them. I like to use the terms enjoyable or interesting. I think that fun comes from the people you play games with, and the circumstances. So you can have fun playing Monopoly, even though Monopoly is a really dull game and not well-designed. Certainly there are games that are intended to be funny, often party games, but that's funny, not fun.
"When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game." -- Joe DiMaggio
We can still ask, though, why do people enjoy some games more than others? A Czech researcher who worked in the USA identified “the positive aspects of human experience - joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow." For game purposes people have an optimal experience when they are challenged, but not challenged too much. If somebody has low skills in the game and the challenges are high they're going to be anxious. If they're very skillful and there's not much challenge in a game they're going to be bored, it's too easy. You want people to be in that Flow area where the challenge matches the skills.
That's partly done with levels in Dungeons & Dragons. The deeper you go in a traditional dungeon, the tougher it is, so as your characters get better they go deeper into the dungeon. It doesn't make sense from a "realistic" point of view, but it works, and the technique has been adopted by video games. As you play the video game, and you become more skilled and your character gains capabilities, the levels become more difficult. This keeps players in the Flow.
Raph Koster characterized games as learning in a safe environment: players learn and they become better as they play the game, so the game has to adjust. If it's a GMed game, the GM has to adjust the challenge level. If it's a video game, then the designers have to provide adjustable challenge. If it's a tabletop game, and the player is playing with other people who are also getting better at the game, the challenge will increase.
But for good pacing you need to vary the challenge so that sometimes there's a lot of tension, because it's difficult, and sometimes the player can relax because it's relatively easy. You want ups and downs in games, just as in life, because that makes the ups more delicious.
Another time I'll talk about MDA and "8 Kinds of Fun."
Reference:
Csikszentmikalyi: Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), p. xi
Raph Koster: A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2010, 2013)
contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
I used to ask gamers who like to play chess, whether they regarded it as fun; about half do and half don't. It may be engaging, it may be enjoyable, it may be fascinating, but it's not fun for many of them. I like to use the terms enjoyable or interesting. I think that fun comes from the people you play games with, and the circumstances. So you can have fun playing Monopoly, even though Monopoly is a really dull game and not well-designed. Certainly there are games that are intended to be funny, often party games, but that's funny, not fun.
"When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game." -- Joe DiMaggio
We can still ask, though, why do people enjoy some games more than others? A Czech researcher who worked in the USA identified “the positive aspects of human experience - joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow." For game purposes people have an optimal experience when they are challenged, but not challenged too much. If somebody has low skills in the game and the challenges are high they're going to be anxious. If they're very skillful and there's not much challenge in a game they're going to be bored, it's too easy. You want people to be in that Flow area where the challenge matches the skills.
That's partly done with levels in Dungeons & Dragons. The deeper you go in a traditional dungeon, the tougher it is, so as your characters get better they go deeper into the dungeon. It doesn't make sense from a "realistic" point of view, but it works, and the technique has been adopted by video games. As you play the video game, and you become more skilled and your character gains capabilities, the levels become more difficult. This keeps players in the Flow.
Raph Koster characterized games as learning in a safe environment: players learn and they become better as they play the game, so the game has to adjust. If it's a GMed game, the GM has to adjust the challenge level. If it's a video game, then the designers have to provide adjustable challenge. If it's a tabletop game, and the player is playing with other people who are also getting better at the game, the challenge will increase.
But for good pacing you need to vary the challenge so that sometimes there's a lot of tension, because it's difficult, and sometimes the player can relax because it's relatively easy. You want ups and downs in games, just as in life, because that makes the ups more delicious.
Another time I'll talk about MDA and "8 Kinds of Fun."
Reference:
Csikszentmikalyi: Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), p. xi
Raph Koster: A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2010, 2013)
contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
