A Theory of Fun for Game Design - by Raph Koster (Summary - PII)

Chapter 2: How the Brain Works

Definitions of Game word:

1. A rule-based formal system with a variable and a quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values. The player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.
2. A subset of entertaining limited to conflit.
3. A series of meaningful choices.
4. Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings: one or more casually linked series of challenges in a simulated environment;
5. A system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.
   

• The human brain is a most voracious consumer of patterns. Games are just exceptionally tasty pattern to eat up.
• The brain is hardwired for facial recognition, just as it's hardwired for language, because faces and language are incredibly important to how human society works.
• Assumptions is what the brain is best at.
• In fact, we tend to see patterns were there aren't any.
• The brain is good at cutting the irrelevant.
• But the brain notice a lot more than we think he does.
• The brain is actively hiding the real world from us. In fact, seeing what actually is there with our conscious mind is really hard to do, and most people never learn how to do it.
• When we grasp a pattern, we usually get bored with it, and iconify it.
• We rarely look at the real world; we instead recognize something we have chunked, and leave it at that - for example, we can drive barely seeing the road.
• If we are able to divide a paiting into boxes of different proportions, we'll usually think the paint is pretier than if we couldn't.
• Excess -> chaos -> noise -> ugliness.
• Noise is any pattern we don't understand.
  
• Music is ordered sound and silence.
• There's really next to nothing in the visible universe that is patternless. If we perceive something as noise, it's most likely a failure in ourselves, not a failure in the universe.
• Once we see a pattern we delight in tracing it and in seeing it reocur. We call this practicing, and the more we do it, the less we have to think about what we're doing.
  
• Conscious thought (1st level) -> mathematical level.
• Interrogative, associative, and intuitive thoughs (2nd level) -> Link things that doesn't make much sense. Doesn't use words. It's frequently wrong. Builds approximation of reality.
• Usually, we make whole sets of decisions instinctively.
• Building up a library is also what we call practice. Studies have shown that you don't even have to do something physically in order to grasp it. You can just think about doing it and it'll get you much of the way there.
• When our brain is really into practicing something, we'll dream about it. This is the intuitive part of the brain burning nerval pathways into our brain.
• So, basically it'a fun to exercise our brain.