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

Chapter 3: What Games Are

• A "magic-circle" that is disconnected from reality;
• Choice, Rule, and Confront;
• Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life. They are in the same order as learning to drive a car, or picking up the mandolim, or learning your multiplication tables.
• The only difference between games and real life is that the stakes are lower with games.
• Games serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools.
• Play a goal-oriented game involves simply recognizing a particular sort of pattern; playing make-believe is recognizing another one. Both deservely belong in the same category of iconified representations of human experience that we can practice with and learn patterns from.
• Books will never be able to accelerate the groking process to the degree that games do, because you cannot practice a pattern and run permutions on it with a book.
• Games are puzzles - they are abouth cognition and learn to analyze patterns. Games that fails to exercise the brain becomes boring.
• Extremely formal games have few variables. To make games more long-lasting, they need to integrate more variables (and less predictable ones) such as human psychology, physics, and so on.
• When you are playing a game it exercises your brain, but you'll only play it until you master the pattern. When a game stops teaching us, we feel bored;
• Games grow boring when they fail to unfold new niceties in the puzzles they present.
• The brain doesn't necessarily craves for new experiences - it just craves for new data. A new experience may force a whole new system on the brain, and often the brain doesn't like that. It's disruptive.

Way of Boredom

1. The player might grok that there is a ton of depth to the possible permutations in a game but conclude that these permutations are below their level of interest.
2. The player can't see the pattern (noise).
3. Slow variations in patterns.
4. The game might also unveil the variations too quickly, which then leads to players losing control of the patterns and giving up because it looks noisy. "This got too hard too fast!" they will say.
5. When the game ends for the first time.

The definition of a good game is therefore "one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing."

Games are very good teachers...of something. The question is, what do they teach?