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?

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.
  

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

Chapter 1 - Why Write This Book?

• Many believe that language is built into the brain and that there's something in our wiring that guides us inexorably toward language.

• Why there are games fun and other games boring? Why do some games start getting boring after a while, and other games stay fun for a long time?

• People are pattern matching machines.