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

Chapter 5: What Games Aren't

• People tend to dress up game systems with some fiction. Designers put artwork on them that is suggestive of some real-world context.
• The fiction serves two purposes: it trains you to see past it to the underlying problem, and it also trains you to recognize real-world situations where the problem might be lurking.
• Usually there are metaphors for what is going on in the game. While metaphors are fun to play with, players can basically ignore them.
• Since games are about teaching underlying patterns, they train players to ignore the fiction that wrap patterns.
• The commonest route these days for developing games involves grafting a history onto them. But most video game developers take a usually mediocre story and put little game obstacles all through it. It's as if we are requiring the player to solve a crossword puzzle in order to turn the page to get more of the novel.
• The stories that wrap up games are usually side dishes for the brain. For one thing, it's damn rare to see a game story written by an actual writter. For another, since games are generally about power, control, and other primitive things, the stories tend to be so as well. This means that they tend to be power fantasies. Story deserves better treatment than that.
• Games are not stories. It's interesting to make the comparison though:

1. Games tend to be experential teaching. Stories teach vicariously.
2. Games are good at objectification. Stories are good at empathy.
3. Games tend to quantize, reduce, and classify. Stories tend to blur, deepen, and make subtle distinctions.
4. Games are external - they are about people's actions. Stories - good ones anyway - are internal, they are about people's emotions and thoughts.

• Physical challenges alone aren't fun. The feeling of triumph when you break a personal record is.
• Throughout the book, fun is referred only as mentally mastering problems. Often, the problems mastered are aesthetic, physical, or social, so fun can appear in any of these settings.
• The brain rewards you for an autonomic response when they are given in the context of a mental challenge.
• Delight strides when we rocognize a pattern but are surprised by them. Unfortunately, it doesn't last. It's like the smile of a beautiful stranger in a starwell - it's fleeting. It cannot be otherwise - recognition is not an extended process.
• We find things beautiful when they are very close to our idealized image of what they should be but with an additional surprise wrinkle.
• Real fun comes always from challenges that are at the margin of our abilities.
• As we succeed in mastering paterns thrown at us, the brain gives us little jolts of pleasure. But if the flow of new patterns slows, then we wont't get the jolts and we'll start to feel boredom. If the flow of patterns increase beyond our abilities, then we won't get the jolts either, because we're not making progress.
• Meditation induces brainwaves that are similar to the ones of the flow state.
• Fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure.