Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9040213" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It's not that it's "difficult to measure"--most metrics of quality are going to be difficult to measure, but "fun," or especially "enjoyability," actually can be. The problem is much deeper than mere measurability.It's that it's a meaningless term. It's the same problem I have with a number of arguments in philosophy that attempt to assert that any degree of commensurability (=the ability to measure two things against each other) in ethical values means that there must be one, and only one, "good" that everything else is measured by and which contains all relevant information for moral/ethical decision-making. Pick the thing with more "good" in it, whatever "good" is. Or, to use a pretty widely-known example these days, "happiness." It's borderline common knowledge at this point that you're nearly guaranteed to fail to live a happy life if the goal you set is "become happy," yet if you instead set some other, specific goal or goals (any of the multitude you could pick), surprisingly often, you will get whatever that goal is and happiness at the same time!The problem with each of these things is, they go too far. They're too reductive, condensing out critical details. They try to capture the entire possible space with a single, perfect catch-all...and that's just not feasible nor realistic. It's like asking what the average color of the rainbow is in order to know what you should paint every surface to produce the most colorful possible room, and end up painting everything a uniform slightly yellowish-green. "Fun," like "playability" (any game that is truly unplayable is either simply incomprehensible, or a potent psychological weapon), is genuinely useless, not because you can't define ways to measure it (because, in fact, you can!), but because "just design your game to be more fun" doesn't actually lead to better game design.This is why I advocate strongly for defining the goals of your game design, the specific things you're shooting for. I'm reminded of something Jesse Cox once described, when talking about how thrilling but also how exhausting it was to get into video game design. TL;DR: He said something to the effect of, "We had this really awesome-sounding idea for a game. But every time it came up, I asked how we would do it, how we could make that fun idea become a fun mechanic, and every time, we came up empty." That's the issue with designing for "fun" and "playability": far too many concepts are "awesome but impractical" (thank you TVtropes) or just more interesting to talk about than to actually work through.Of course, none of this should be taken to mean that fun is irrelevant. It's just that you cannot set that as your destination. If you find that things aren't working out, if people aren't having fun, you listen to their complaints or criticism and make corrections, but setting sail for "fun" is an excellent way to doom the project from the start. "Fun" is thus...more of a heuristic than a design principle. In seeking your design goal, try to make that goal as fun as possible, and try to remove as many barriers to fun as possible, while still seeking the goal. That heuristic becomes uselessly tautological if you try to insert fun as your design goal.========================Separately from the above, and I know I've said this before so I apologize if I'm coming across as a broken record, but...I still don't get how "second-order design" is, well, design. It is by definition unplanned. It is by definition the opposite of arranged--it is haphazard, ad hoc, undefined, malleable. Frequently, it isn't even self-consistent. It is not "fashioned artistically or skillfully," because it isn't fashioned at all, it simply happens. It is like <a href="https://mindfulfamilymedicine.com/change-and-the-story-of-the-pot-roast/" target="_blank">cutting the end off the roast because it doesn't fit your pan</a>, not because it has anything to do with cooking it.So, why is it called "design"?</blockquote>

Verification