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

Chapter 8: The Problem With People

• The holy grail of game design is to make a game where the challenges are never-eding, the skills required are varied and the difficulty curve is perfect and adjust itself to exactly our skill level. Someone did this already, though, and it's not always fun. It's called "life".

Try to design abstract systems that have deep self-generating challenges.

Emergent Behavior -> New patterns that emerge spontaneously out of the rules. Emergence has proven a tough nut to crack in games, it usually makes games easier, often generating loopholes and exploits.

Storytelling -> Most games melded with stories tend to be Frankstein monsters. Most players tend to skip the story or skip the game.

Placing Players Hand-to-Hand -> Other players are an endless source of new content. But players hate to lose, so if you fail to match them up with an opponent who is very precisely at their skill level, they'll quit.

Using Players to Generate Content -> Many games expect players to supply the challenge in various ways, raging from making maps for a shooter game to contributing characters in a role-playing game.

• If something has worked for us before, we'll tend to do it again. We're really very resistant to learning.
• We're conservative at heart, and we grow more as we age.

Features that make the experience a learning experience:

- Greater skill in completing the challenge should lead to better rewards;

- High-level players can't get big benefits from easy encounters or they will bottom-feed, and the inexpert players will be unable to get the most out of the game;

- Failure must have a cost.

• Most long-lasting games in the past have been competitive because they lead to an endless supply of similar yet slightly varied puzzles.
• If we come across a problem we've had encountered in the past, our first approach is to try the solution that has worked before, even if the circunstances aren't exactly the same.
• Sticking to one solution is not a survival trait anymore. The world is changing very fast and we interact with more kinds of people than ever before. The real value now lies in a wide range of experiences and in understanding a wide range of points of view. Closed-mindedness is actively dangerous to our society because it leads to misapprehension. And misapprehension leads to misunderstanding, which leads to offense, which leads to violence.
• Engaging in an activity that you had fully mastered, being in the zone, feeling the flow, can be a heady experience. And no one can deny the positive effects of meditation. If gamers find themselves in tune with a game, they may play it for longer than they need to in order to master it, because being in the zone feels good.
• Games must encourage the player to move on.
• Every once in a while games come along that appeal to the masses, and thank goodness. Because priesthoods are a perversion of what games are about. The worst possible fate for games would be for games to become niche, something played by only a few elite who have the training to do so. It was bad for sports, it was bad for music, it was bad for writing, and it would be bad for games as well.
• The most creative and fertile game designers working today tend to be the ones who make a point of not focusing too much on other games for inspiration.
• It's critical that games should be placed in context wih the rest of human's society endeavors.