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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 7723350" data-attributes="member: 46713">Most of the things you list are a matter of personal preference; it's not really a list of things game designers should avoid.I've been thinking about the matter of 'fun' in the context of video and board games quite a bit. Especially regarding video games.I'm finding that most modern video games aren't very challenging or fun, but they're often extremely addictive:They achieve that by a constant stream of small 'rewards' given out for playing the game, which manages to keep players hooked.Every couple of months I review the games I'm currently playing and try to decide objectively if I'm still having fun playing them.More often than not I find them lacking in that regard and stop.By comparison, older video games had a tendency to be really hard, probably hearkening back to their origin as coin-operated arcade machines:They tried to hook players by spurring their ambition. And after getting past a tough spot, there was the infamous 'insert coin to continue',if you wanted to avoid having to replay from the beginning.(These games are also the only ones I feel having a connection to 'the flow':To play them well, you _had_ to enter a certain 'trance-like' state, allowing you to get past 'impossible' spots;something that was hard to replicate once you've left that state for even a short time.)What I've found when playing some of my old favorites is that I no longer have the high frustration tolerance required to be somewhat successful in these games.I consider that to be at least in part the result of being conditioned by modern games.Regarding board games, there's definitely quite a few really enjoy playing, although I wouldn't call them 'fun'.Typically, these are mentally exhausting games requiring good strategy and/or tactics; let's call them 'brain-burners'.However, these games manage to achieve something that somewhat shallower 'fun' games don't:They often create a truly memorable experience.RPGs are similar to this, and I tend to remember either really tough encounters or ingenious solutions to encounters that probably would have been really tough, otherwise.</blockquote>

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