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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmartkdr2" data-source="post: 9043188" data-attributes="member: 7017304">When I've seen it articulated well, the pushback for "fun" as a goal is that "fun" is too broad - there are many different kinds of fun. I've seen academic papers define at least 8, and one was "challenge" - a broad concept in itself. A game being fun is as good at directing design as saying it should be "good." Yes, a game should be good rather than bad, fun rather than boring, and playable rather than unplayable. But those are such broad and low standards that it's not telling you much. Link to the article: <a href="http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf</a> (it's a PDF not a web page. It's also a pretty easy read)Exceptions to the objection to fun-as-goal: 1. A game being "not fun" is a vague way to say it's not working - "unplayable" is a more damning phrase but "unfun" is still telling the designer they done goofed. But it's not really telling the designer how they failed or what needs fixing. (Of course, playtesters are notoriously bad at telling designers what's wrong, just that something's wrong.) "Enjoyable" is the same thing as "fun" in this context. 2. If you've already defined the game's genre, "fun" might have an understood (by people into the genre) meaning. If I'm making a dungeon-crawling game, then I've probably already decided to make it challenging rather than submission, exploration rather than narrative, etc. You've also probably decided on the kind of challenge you want to present - it's about conserving resources for long-term success. Once you're at a certain point of theme-picking, "fun" becomes a shorthand for some more specific concepts than can meaningfully drive design. 3. Although first-order design frames second-order design, the players can always add new kinds of fun if they really want to. You can roleplay parchisi if you want to; the cops can't stop you.</blockquote>

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