What is Fun? A Game Design Introduction

A game design intro exploring what 'fun' means, from Raph Koster's dopamine-based theory to taxonomies of fun and using design pillars to shape games.

Key Takeaways

Fun is best understood as multiple types or flavors rather than one universal feeling.
No game can deliver every type of fun at once; designers must choose which to prioritize.
Designers should define design pillars to make intentional choices about the player experience.
Social interaction and shared experience are central sources of game enjoyment.

What the video covers

Opens by asking what fun is and why it matters to game designers, noting biology explains only part of it.
Introduces Raph Koster's theory that fun is the emotional sensation of dopamine rewarding learning and mastering new skills.
Critiques Koster's view for dismissing pleasures like surprise, fear, and comedy that don't involve learning a skill.
Argues that a taxonomy of fun types is more practically useful for designers than a single definition.
Presents Raina Newbury's 1985 three types of fun: enjoyable-in-the-moment fun, fun remembered through achievement, and 'fun gone wrong'.
Explains Michael Rucker's view that one person's type two fun can be another's type three, depending on individual tolerance.
Highlights the social dimension of fun, such as bonding through shared play, watching others, and discussing games.
Discusses mimicry and challenge as distinct pleasures, contrasting turn-based RPGs with action RPGs.
Cites Pierre-Andre Garner's 2001 article proposing a list of fourteen forms of fun.
Introduces design pillars as foundational concepts that guide a game's feel, illustrated with an interior design analogy.

Chapters

What is Raph Koster's definition of fun in this video?

Koster defines fun as the emotional name for the dopamine reward we get from learning and practicing new skills. The video notes this view originated in an evolutionary need to strategize and survive. It criticizes the theory for not explaining how designers should actually build fun games.

What are Newbury's three types of fun?

Type one is fun while doing an activity, type two is fun remembered through a sense of achievement, often after exertion or peril, and type three is 'fun gone wrong', something meant to be fun that isn't. The video notes type three can still matter in rage games and horror games.

Why does the video recommend design pillars?

Design pillars are foundational concepts that define what a game is about and how it should make players feel. The video uses an interior designer analogy to show how a pillar like 'sophisticated' can guide every decision. They help designers make consistent, intentional choices.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

What is fun? Where does it come from? Why do blondes have more of it? Biology can explain to us how and why we've evolved to seek dopamine, but that kind of scientific thinking can only get us part of the way to understanding the role of fun in game design. Engaging and grappling

Speaker A

with the concept of fun is essential to what game designers do. But when we use the term on its own without any qualifiers, it often just leads to confusion. Human beings are a diverse bunch and we don't all enjoy quite the same things. In this video, I will explore a bunch

Speaker A

of different definitions and uses of the word bun and think about what each one practically means for us as game designers. And along the way, I'll probably say the word fun so much that it loses all meaning. Fun fun funny fun. Is this hat fun? Is that fun? A big wheel? I don't know.

Speaker A

If you've ever looked for a book on fun by an actual game developer, then chances are you've already encountered Raph Koster's theory of fun for game design. This is a book which came out originally in 2004, authored by someone who had then been a professional game designer for at

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least a decade. At the time of writing, Koster's most notable work had been on Ultima online, which is a sort of Runescape, for really old people. The titular theory in Koster's book, is that humans experience fun as a reward for learning and practicing new skills. Fun is the

Speaker A

emotional name we give to the sensation of dopamine. We've evolved this kind of reward system which is there to encourage us to behave in ways which make us more likely to survive and thrive in the big bad world. This is what's at work every time we exercise

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curiosity or take on a challenge. In the olden days, we would have had to strategize and plan ahead in order to well not die. And that's why nowadays we play thinky games like this, this, and this. We might also need to react quickly to danger or go and look for berries. And that's

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why nowadays we play games based on reaction and situational awareness like this, this, and this. To this day, games are usually still about the thinky skills like strategy, puzzles, and navigation, social skills like cooperation and bluffing, or reactions and situational awareness.

Speaker A

All of this makes perfect sense, and Costa leaves open the idea that in our current world, there might be new problems worth exploring rather than just making video games that are so clearly tailored towards the evolutionary needs of this handsome chap. There's nothing wrong with this

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definition of fun, and I think for the more hard science among you, it will probably do. It's very common to hear people in the games industry talk about reward loops involving dopamine. But where I think this book falls down is in the second part of the title. We get quite a solid idea of what

Speaker A

fun is, but we don't necessarily get a sense of how you functionalize that as a game designer into making games which are fun. And the thing that I dislike most about Costa's book is just how dismissive it is of types of pleasure that we get from games which don't directly relate to learning

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a new skill. And this includes things like the enjoyment that you might get from being surprised by something or being scared by something or something comedic happening. There's also the problem of general usage when you take a word with a very broad way that it is used in everyday

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life and try to make a very specific academic or craft-based meaning for it, which then is so far removed from how most people use it that it may as well be a different word. You know, if you're going to use the word fun exclusively to refer to dopamine, then you might as well just use the

Speaker A

term dopamine in the first place. I know a lot of you do anyway. You can't help yourself, you little science nerds. Other ways that we can think about fun tend to focus less on identifying specifically what fun is and more on differentiating between types of fun. Thinking of fun in terms of a

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taxonomy has a lot more applications for game development because if we're able to correctly identify the type of fun a game is meant to contain or produce, then we can start to make design decisions which are more likely to intrigue and engage the players of the specific game we're

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making or fans of a specific genre. No game is for everyone and it might be that a mechanic which is really fun in one context is just downright boring or annoying in another. And in the back end of

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this video, I'm going to talk about a process for identifying specific types of fun you want your game to contain or produce and then using those as pillars for the overall design. I would encourage you to think of fun more in terms of a varied and diverse set of things. kind of like

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different flavors or ingredients in a cuisine or notes in a musical scale or colors in a palette.

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[Music] Our first taxonomy of fun was a little triplet coined by geologist and mountaineer Dr.

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to Raina Newbury back in 1985, just 3 years after the release of ET for the Atari 2600, a game which to this day is still broadly considered to be the best computer game ever developed. Newbury's three types of fun include two which are fun, and confusingly,

Speaker A

one which isn't. Type one fun is enjoyable when you do it, like eating a meal or playing on your Atari 2600. It's the definition of fun we'd normally associate with simple terms like pleasure and enjoyment. Type two fun is fun that feels fun to remember because of the associated feelings of

Speaker A

achievement, but might not have been fun while you were doing it. It usually involves some degree of exertion or peril, either physical or or mental, like climbing a mountain or performing in front of people. This is the type of fun that maps more clearly onto that evolutionary model of

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why we experience fun. Type three fun is a sort of sarcastic, darkly humorous term for things which are probably meant to be fun but end up not being. It's fun gone wrong. At first glance, type 3 fun doesn't seem all that relevant to game design until you start thinking about

Speaker A

things like rage games, which are designed to be deliberately frustrating. Extreme horror games, which often give us situations we never want to be in again, and experimental games, which are genuinely physically painful to play, like the 2001 Pain Station, which was

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developed by, you guessed it, art students in, you guessed it, Germany. Oh my god, it's fire.

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Michael Rucker, author of The Fun Habit, notes that type three seems out of place in a taxonomy of fun because, well, it's not really fun. But then he quickly goes on to describe how one person's type two could be another person's type three, there are those among us who will

Speaker A

never try surfing because we just see it as too dangerous and don't want to drown. Just like there are people that really love Dark Souls and there are other people that look at the amount of grueling failure and repetition involved in those games and think that's just not for me.

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Now, Rucker isn't a game designer, but he does kind of expand on the evolutionary theory of fun that we get in Costa's book, focusing on things we do as a community, which end up feeling fun, which again might not be fun at the time because they're grueling or exhausting or

Speaker A

scary or whatever. A big part of the fun of games is bonding by either playing them with other people, watching other people play them, or talking about them after we've played them.

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So whether you're berating your housemates for their poor culinary performance in Overcooked, memeing all over the floor in Elder Ring, or co-authoring a massive wiki about some obscure survival crafting game, you're doing something pro-social. And this means that the

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drugstore of your brain is once again open for business and has more to offer you than just dopamine. Games are also a site of social interaction, whether direct or indirect, and that can make things that are ostensibly not very fun feel enjoyable and meaningful. [Music]

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This book from 1961 is considered a foundational text in game studies despite it being a field which didn't really fully start to emerge until the late 1990s. also not very gender inclusive, but that's because in the 1960s we hadn't made any games for women yet. Game studies is a branch of

Speaker A

academia mostly aligned with the humanities and concerned with games, play, and players. Here are Cowis's four types of play. He doesn't call them fun because he was a French intellectual and therefore didn't know the meaning of the word, but they might as well be that. They are broad

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categories of play and they give us a sense of the diversity of enjoyment that humans seem to get out of playing games. Aegon refers to games of competition and skill. Aliyah refers to games of luck and chance. Mimikree is where games offer us an opportunity for role-playing and pretending.

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And illinx is a fancy word for vertigo, which refers to the pleasure we get from whooshy, dizzying things like roller coasters and dancing and getting drunk and falling over. They're still kind of compelling categories. If anything, they just go to illustrate how complex and rich the

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video games we play today are. Consider the differences between a turn-based role playing game or an action RPG. In both types of game, we're enjoying the mimicry of taking on the role of a character and inhabiting a fictional world. That is the mimicry element, and it's what makes

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it a role- playinging game. But in an action RPG, the Aegon element of trying to beat the game is more related to vertigo of like moving the camera around and manipulating a character in real time.

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Whereas in a regular RPG, the skills involved are more to do with strategy and planning. And ills refers to things like moving the camera around and being dazzled by VFX, which can occur in both types of games. The simpler games that we had before computers were invented were often based on

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a single simple type of play. Nowadays, we're used to having video games which tick multiple boxes for the types of pleasure that they produce. Even a digital card game like Hearthstone has its fair share of things whooing and flying around the screen. So, it's less a question

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of which type of play are we experiencing and more the ratios that are at work in each game.

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Now, we don't need to use the specific archaic terms that cowwir uses. Absolutely not encouraging you to do that. But conceptually, it's still useful to think through. Again, what I'm getting at here is that it's good to think of fun as a bunch of different things because fun is diverse.

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[Music] When I was at school and we studied cooking, we used to do taste testing using spiderraphs which looked a bit like this. You would have all these different axes and you would map out things like salt, sweetness, umami, bitterness. And this would give you a pseudo objective way of comparing two

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different meals or two different iterations of the same meal. And I think what I'm trying to encourage here is a similar way of thinking about games and fun. A game usually can't push in every direction at once. And you can make a game with any combination of thrilling gambles,

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meticulous strategy, lightning quick reactions, and deep roleplay. But making a game that has all of those things going at once and does them well is really, really hard. You probably could make a game that does all of those things, but it would be horrifically expensive to include all of

Speaker A

the relevant features and polish. And as indie developers, that's kind of your niche. Instead of making a big bloated thing that needs to appeal to half a million people to sell enough copies to keep the studio a float, you can make something with a much narrower and more focused appeal. And

Speaker A

that's what you should do. That's what successful developers do. You might have heard of player psychometrics. And these are models that look at the tastes and motivations of different players, usually within the same game. One of the most famous sets of player psychometric profiles

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comes from Richard Bartle's work in online multiplayer games in the mid90s. Battle types include achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. All of which are types that are still relevant to most multiplayer games today. MMOs and big openw world singleplayer games are examples of

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game types which can offer a lot of flexibility in the types of players that they attract and appeal to. But as small-time indie developers, we often have to be more focused. Maybe the game you're making is just for socializers and achievers. Maybe it's just for killers and explorers. Or

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maybe it's even more focused on just one of those types of motivation. The psychometric angle again points us in the direction of thinking of fun not as a single thing but as a set of possible elements. Any type of enjoyment that a player can derive from a game's design,

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i.e. from the game's interactivity is a type of fun. Some types of fun seem to go well together and some not so well, just like ingredients in cookery or colors in a palette in art.

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When we view fun as a varied and diverse thing, this is not necessarily at odds with dopamine, our caveman brain drug reward for doing something good. It just takes the emphasis off of explaining why humans do fun things in general, and more onto how we might make games which are fun in a

Speaker A

specific way, which is really important if you want to make a game that anyone ever wants to play. Whether we're learning reaction or strategy skills required to win a competition, learning how to judge odds in a gambling game, or acclimatizing to role- playinging as a particular character,

Speaker A

there's still some sort of system at work, some rules to learn, and a feeling of satisfaction as we navigate and improve at these activities. Even in a game of mimicry, where the roleplay and the story elements are the strongest part, we're still practicing skills like judgment. The

Speaker A

enjoyment I get from a game like Disco Allesium or a visual novel largely comes from judging characters and situations. Not something that we normally associate with skill-based video games, but a skill nonetheless. Dopamine. [Music] There may be some scientific merit to a narrow

Speaker A

definition of fun. If we're trying to understand play in the context of biology or sociology or child development, but it doesn't really help us to design for that, we probably need to go wider identifying and acknowledging lots of different types of fun so that we're able to hone in on

Speaker A

which type we are aiming for when we create a game ourselves. It's often better to have a big bag of tools that you don't need than to show up to every job with just a hammer. even if you do

Speaker A

usually end up using the hammer. The 14 forms of fun actually originate from a 2001 article on gamedeveloper.com by French Canadian designer and programmer Pierre Andre Garner. For Garner, fun was a quality which exists in any activity that we find fundamentally entertaining.

Speaker A

Application of an ability. Advancement. Beauty. Creation. Comedy. Competition. Discovery. [Music] Immersion. Intellectual problem solving. Love. Physical activity. Power.

Speaker A

social interaction, thrill of danger. Now, some of these are self-explanatory while others are maybe a bit less obvious. I'm not going to go into every form of fun in detail. You can look at how they're defined in the article and you can disagree with those definitions,

Speaker A

and I'll also post some other resources which add even more forms of fun. The point I want to make here is lists like this have much more application to real game design because they help us to focus on the qualities of games and what makes one game different from another

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because that is a central design question for every game you make. Why would someone play the game I'm making rather than something that already exists that is quite similar to it? Game design requires emotional literacy. We need to be able to play a game, see how it makes us feel,

Speaker A

and then look at the set of mechanics, systems, and the theme and artwork layered on those things to be able to reverse engineer the game and understand why it made us feel that way.

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Now in the last section of this video I am going to talk about how to use the 14 forms of fun or any other list of types of fun as design pillars. But in order to do that first we need to talk a

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little bit about what design pillars are and what they're not. Design pillars are a set of concepts which hold up a design. The point of design pillars is to provide a foundation for what the game or experience is about and how it's meant to make players feel. To put this into practice,

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you would pick two or three terms describing the type of fun you want players of your game to have.

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Then, as you develop the game, you weigh up every decision you make in relation to whether it fits with these pillars. It's not just some kind of wafty thing of writing a game design document and saying this game is about beauty and sadness. It is about giving you a set idea of what you should

Speaker A

and shouldn't include in your game. If you've decided that you're making a game that is meant to be about creation and beauty and players building something lovely that they're proud of, then why are you putting so many puzzles in? Design pillars help a game to feel focused on a particular type

Speaker A

of experience, but they also help you to make practical decisions about what to implement and what not to implement. Design pillars are used in various disciplines outside of games like marketing, branding, architecture, product design. And the important thing to understand is that they

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are fundamentally about the end users emotions and experience. This is an area where design pillars are often mistaught in game development courses. The design pillars for your video game should not be things like the game genre or its art style. Terms like third person shooter or low poly

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3D. Those are not design pillars. They're simply descriptions of a camera controller configuration and how things look on a screen. Design pillars are meant to describe how the end user of a product should feel and what they should be made to think about as they engage with it. Let's say

Speaker A

that instead of working on games, you're now an interior designer. You might have a design pillar like sophisticated. This might be something you've chosen on your own or it could be something that's come from your client. The goal of this design is to make a sophisticated feeling space which makes

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people feel sophisticated upon entering it. You would then go off and explore specific styles like the art deco of 1920s New York or 17th century French maximalism as different ways of achieving that feeling of sophistication. Likewise, someone who designs kids playgrounds as part of a wildlife

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park. They might make this tople decision that it should be rustic and timeless and not too modern.

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And that would lead to practical decisions to use materials and processes which help to create that feeling. The point of having design pillars is to nail down the intention of the design early on, how it's supposed to make people feel so that you can make something which serves

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its audience well. They also make it much easier to make decisions mid development because you can more easily throw away certain ideas which don't support the core design pillars. This is why if your game development is very mooddriven, like you're making a cozy game or a horror game,

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it's sometimes easier to make decisions about what to include and what not to include because you're already focused on players emotions. If you were designing a drinking bottle, you wouldn't use must hold liquid as a design pillar. That's just a given of what a bottle is in the first place.

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Just like jumping and avoiding danger are given elements of making a platformer game. That's just part of the original brief your boss gives you when they ask you to produce a design.

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Today we're going to design a new bottle or car or platformer game. The overall form, eg a thing which carries liquid, a four-w wheeled vehicle, or a side view game where you jump over holes are top level constraints of the design, but they are not the design itself.

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Sometimes game design pillars are to do with a narrative theme instead. For example, in the 2018 God of War, the three pillars were exploration, combat, and the father-son dynamic. Boy, whatever you think about God of War, this leads to a tight focused game where the gameplay elements

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of exploration and combat are always working to strengthen the narrative theme of father and son bonding. Sometimes design pillars are broad statements about how a game should be designed.

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For example, when frictional games were working on indie horror soma, they had game pillars like everything is story and trust the player. Now, those don't directly map onto our 14 forms of fun, but you can already see how they relate to ideas of fun like immersion and intellectual problem

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solving. Those pillars ensured that S's puzzles exist naturally within the game story and don't feel like contrived escape room gimmicks. And it also makes sense that a game that was so heavily about atmosphere, environment, and uncovering what happened here would have design pillars which is

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so strongly focused on delivering a particular type of environmental storytelling and puzzles. Design pillars are a really helpful way of making sure that you understand what you're trying to make. If used properly, they can save you a lot of time making decisions because you're

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not constantly changing the basic idea of the thing or what it's meant to achieve. Sometimes the pillars we use in design are a little bit more complicated than a single word label for a type of fun. But that doesn't mean that those are not a good place to start. The forms of fun aren't

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the only possible game design pillars, but they provide a very good start for thinking about it.

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If you can pick two or three of them to orient your current game project around, it will make all future decision making easier because you can evaluate every gameplay decision, every art decision based on whether it aligns with those chosen experience-based pillars. Sometimes the

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genre we picks our design pillars for us. A horror game is going to naturally lead more towards immersion and the thrill of danger. But even in that instance, thinking these things through more openly and explicitly can help you to develop a more nuanced perspective on the game you're making

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and the balance of appeals. If you're making a horror game, what is the particular flavor of horror you're doing and how does it differ from other types of horror? How much peril is there in your horror game? Is it mostly about combat and hiding? Or are there large portions of the game

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that are more about being immersed in a particular atmosphere and navigating the environment? And if you're anything like me, you probably want to go more down the God of War route where you have a couple of pillars that are to do with gameplay and interactivity and one that is more thematic

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and story related. I personally can't stay inspired to work on a game unless at least one of my design pillars is something a bit more heavy and thematic, even if it's just something in the background of the world building. Kind of like how Binding of Isaac is thematically about religious

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family trauma. After all, we all know that indie games are all secretly about depression.

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Designing a game is mostly about caring what the player is doing. the interactivity, the fun, and often it's also about thinking about what you're trying to make the player think about and feel, the themes. And if you can care about both of those things and put thought into those things,

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you'll already be off to a better start than 90% of the folks releasing games on Steam every day.

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There's an introduction to a bunch of different ways of defining fun in game design or choosing not to define it because it's actually more useful to focus on taxonomy rather than definition. Fun is the term we use to define how it feels to learn and master systems and mechanics. But there are

Speaker A

lots of different types of fun which appeal to different player psychologies. It's often not that helpful to think of fun as a single thing. Although that's a perspective that is encouraged when we think of fun purely in terms of dopamine. It's probably better to think of fun as a pool of

Speaker A

elements with varying degrees of complimentariness like ingredients in a cuisine, colors in a pallet or notes in a musical scale. There are probably more than one, three or 14 forms of fun. Like I said, the map is not the territory. The point is to think about the overall feeling a game

Speaker A

is giving us so that we can then understand how the elements work together to get us there. So, whatever game you're working on now, take a look at the 14 forms of fun and some of the other resources that I've left in the description of this video, are there two or three which are

Speaker A

dominant in the game that you're currently making? If there are five or six, which seem to be more important than the others? Are there any forms of fun that seem to be fighting for priority in your game? And if they are, is that a problem? Or is it leading you somewhere interesting? If you've been

Speaker A

making games for a long time and you think about your entire career as a designer and developer, are there forms of fun you naturally lean towards and ones that you avoid? Some of you might even come to the realization that you have been trying to force yourself to work in genres

Speaker A

that you fundamentally don't understand the appeal of to make forms of fun that you don't understand and that you don't personally think are fun. You wouldn't be the first

Topics:game designfundopaminetaxonomy of fundesign pillarsRaph Kosterplayer experiencegame theorysocial playmimicry

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