A Theroy Of Fun For Game Design

263 reviews 1 follower

August 31, 2011

Don't bother with this one. It's just $6 in the Kindle store, or else I wouldn't have even bought it, but I regret it now in any case. Luckily it's quite short, but even so I just skimmed a chapter or two.

To me, this is a collection of sometimes barely coherent stream-of-thought ramblings of a video-game executive, apparently about what makes games fun, though you'd barely know to read it. They don't really seem to have much purpose to it, except to draw attention to how educated and cultured the author is (he frequently makes comparisons to classical music and other "classical" forms of art, as if to say, hey look at me, I'm a man of the world). Also, the chapter titles often don't match the contents, like the one on ethics.

If there's a central theme to it, it's that fun means learning and then "grokking" (as in deeply internalizing) something new, though I'm not sure that revelation was worth the six bucks.

It looks like the author called up a couple of his contacts (all well known industry figures) and asked them to write a glowing cover blurb (or a foreword) to his book. Him being an important industry executive, they naturally obliged, though the generic tone of their recommendations should have been a giveaway. There's a lesson to be learned here about celebrity endorsements, kids.

gaming

kindle

non-fiction

133 reviews 26 followers

Edited April 4, 2019

Raph Koster, a rather celebrated game designer (and former creative head of Sony's game department), tries to explain just exactly what video games are, and in the process of doing this takes on what he feels are common misconceptions about video games.

Like McCloud, Koster feels like his medium of choice (of course, he obfuscates this point - but more on that later) is misunderstood, and that it deserves a cultural status akin to that of literature and art. To defend his position, he goes on in great detail about how video games function, and what they truly are about at their most basic level - learning patterns.

Koster claims that the fact that games are basically pattern learning machines (or pattern grokking as he might call it) is generally ignored by society, and that this is the main reason that games are misunderstood.

He goes on to rather bombastically propose that graphics (look and feel) of games are somewhat irrelevant to the actual game itself, and that this game aspect is basically just wrapping paper. It's the underlying mechanics that matter according to Koster, but the wrapping gets all the attention. He seems like a true purist in this sense, and his annoyance towards the trend of improving graphics rather than game mechanisms is very evident throughout the book.

To prove his point, Koster further claims that there only are a few different types of games (cartoon on page 71), and that newer games just build on existing creations and just add a few new elements (the cartoon on page 79 illustrates this point).

This generally is the crux of Koster's point, and he apparently really wants to reader to get this, so he continuously points it out throughout the book - which gets old really fast (cartoon on page 87, 127 and 167 to name a few). He desperately wants games to evolve beyond the focus on surface, and instead start to focus on the fundamental subjects the games revolve around.

But in order for games to evolve, they must first be understood, and Koster does a really good job in explaining how he believes games work. He claims that games provoke a very distinct chemical reaction in the brain when they are designed correctly, and introduces the concept of flow.

Flow is basically what happens when you are constantly tested at the reach of our abilities, thus being totally engaged for a longer period of time - games that are tailored perfectly to your skill set can accomplish this, but it's rather rare (I've had it happen to be a couple of times).

The most important thing Koster touches on however, is in my opinion how games can become educational tools. He claims that games are, in essence, about learning.

According to him, patterns occur constantly in our daily lives (exerting power, controlling territories etc.), and games are the ideal tool for learning how to function within the parameters of these patterns. Because games are at their most basic forms just patterns waiting to be absorbed, Koster claims that by fully engaging with a game we will absorb (learn) the pattern represented by the game - a notion I fully agree with.

Koster goes on in great detail about how the brain reacts to game stimuli, and how grokking patterns is the result of the brain chunking the information presented to us - basically automating it. This is, according to Koster, why it's so hard to make a well balanced game - consider the fact that we're constantly trying to master the patterns being presented to us, and when we do, the challenge suddenly becomes trivial. If the game doesn't present its patterns in new, intriguing ways we're destined to get bored with the game, which is a rather sad notion that leads Koster to conclude that no games are eternal (not yet, anyway).

Now that we have established a basic foundation of what games fundamentally represent, lets move on to another interesting aspect of games that Koster brings up: their ethical implications. This is an aspect of games where Koster and I gravely disagree, and I feel that his claim that the fiction surrounding a game is largely irrelevant to the effect games have on us is just plainly wrong. I can't help but get the feeling that several years of working as a game designer has led Koster to adopt a completely mechanical approach to games, which I feel becomes evident in his reasoning.

For instance, he describes a rather ethically reprehensible game called Deathrace to illustrate his point - that this game doesn't teach the players to run over pedestrians any more than Pac-Man teaches them to 'eat dots and be scared of ghosts'. Here I feel that Koster doesn't appreciate the power of context, and I think that this might be due to the fact that when he was enjoying games the most (probably in the early 90s/late 80s), games were just what he described: simple pattern learning machines.

Naturally, I do see his point that when you reduce games to their most basic form, this becomes evident once more, but in my opinion that's like comparing Drive (fantastic character-driven movie created in 2011) to Horse in Motion (arguably the first movie ever made, in 1878, showing a horse, moving). Just like movies have evolved from just being sequential images showing motion, games have evolved from being faces eating dots to complex, three-dimensional (pun intended) characters joined together in intriguing, multi-layered (often epic) stories. I feel that game mechanics work in addition (rather than orthogonal) to these concepts, to bring forward an even more profound user experience.

Of course, this brings up the interesting question about the ethical implications of games. If the fiction surrounding games have such an impact as I believe, wouldn't that mean that games like Grand Theft Auto are morally reprehensible?

Again, I believe the power of context comes into play. Just like comedies about teenagers getting killed (such as the magnificent Tucker and Dale vs Evil) are not morally reprehensible, neither are games like Grand Theft Auto.

Both of these two pieces of entertainment (for the lack of a better term) feature content that when displayed in a different context would be seen as devoid of morality, but for some reason we don't feel that way when Tucker accidentally kills a teenager in a wood cutting machine or when we run over a line of joggers to get 1000 bonus points. I believe that this is due to a agreement (of sorts) we unconsciously enter into when we engage with culture - for instance: Should I take a trip down to a museum featuring pieces of contemporary art, I might think to myself: "This is just a chair upside down, in any other context I would just flip it over and that would be that. However, since this is placed in a museum this is considered art, and I will interact with it as such."

Now, there are of course many other topics Koster brings up (such as where games should go to be (rightfully) considered as art, how people ruin games by trying to grok them, how different games appeal to different people and so on), but I feel I've discussed the most important arguments he brings to the table. I agree with much of what he says (specifically how games affect the brain and how games can be educational tools), but it's evident that he and I do not share a common view of what games are, and what they can achieve - and I haven't even begun talking about how much I disagree with his obnoxious matrix categorization of art, jeez.

non-fiction

90 reviews 119 followers

Edited June 7, 2017

Excellent start for someone who has no idea even where to start when it comes to game design. The style in witch this book is written is quite casual and it doesn't go too much into details (as I said, good for absolute beginners).

nonfiction

31 reviews 47 followers

Edited August 22, 2016

I found this book very inspiring and deep, especially the parts where the author tries to connect games and arts and fun. Some parts of the book are abstract and a little bit hard to grasp as the book includes many metaphors. Nevertheless, many paragraphs still give me goosebumps as they are so true and profound. The author has many strong arguments and also very has high ideals when it comes to game designing. A game is designed not only for entertainment, but also for educating and helping players overcome their weaknesses. He has inspired hopes in readers that one day, games will be no longer considered meaningless and trivial, but will join literature, music, dance and theatre as a form of "the arts".

My favourite quotes include:
1. Contrasting games and stories: "Games are good at objectification. Stories are good at empathy. Games are external – they are about people's actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal – they are about people's emotions and thoughts."

2. How players prefer to wander in their comfort zone: "Look at the games that offer the absolute greatest freedom possible within the scope of a game setting. In role-playing games there are few rules. The emphasis is on collaborative storytelling. You can construct your character any way you want, use any background, and take on any challenge you like. And yet, people choose the same characters to play, over and over.* I've got a friend who has played the big burly silent type in literally dozens of games over the decade I have known him. Never once has he been a vivacious small girl"- Players tend to choose the games they're already good at, will they one day go out of their zones to play the game concentrating on enhancing the skills they lack? If they do, they'll improve many skills and become a more rounded person.

3. People like to master and learn things in a safe and non-pressure environment, which is game: "That's what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning."

4. Brain needs stuffs (stories, information) to process all the time- notice how your mind never stops thinking and wandering from one place to another; however, it does not prefer challenging and complicated stuffs; it prefers familiar patterns: "Based on my reading, the human brain is mostly a voracious consumer of patterns, a soft pudgy gray Pac-Man of concepts. Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up."

5. And finally: "We often discuss the desire for games to be art- for them to be puzzles with more than one right answer, puzzles that lend themselves to interpretation." To become arts, a game must be thought-provoking, revelatory, forcing us to reexamine assumptions, forgiving and encouraging misinterpretation. What's left behind after you finish playing a game? Will the puzzle already stops bugging you once the boss's dead and the princess's in your arms?

academics

interaction-and-game-design

nonfiction

16 reviews 2 followers

December 26, 2008

If I ever teach a class on video games this will be the first book I add to the syllabus. A must-read for gamers, casual gamers and designers of interactive digital environments. More importantly, I think this book is a must-read for parents and teachers. Koster does a great job of explaining what it is about games that eat up so many hours of our kids' and students' lives.

edu-tech

51 reviews 279 followers

July 3, 2010

It's an incredibly insightful book, and genuinely useful for people trying to create games. Having said that, its basic premise is that all satisfying play is learning and I just don't buy that. The logic seems very flawed to me in this area. It seems to me quite plausible that play or certain kinds of games can be seen as highjacking the satisfaction that you would ideally be getting from an actual accomplishment in real-life, diverting your mastery and craft and intellectual stretching from things that would advance you or create some value into diversion. I'm not saying that is a bad thing—not everything in life is about productivity—but it isn't something Raph is prepared to engage with at all. Essentially, amid all the great insight, there is a nervousness and a defensiveness about the value of games. I think that's unnecessary and a shame, and it's the reason I wouldn't give it five stars.

February 9, 2007

This book is about what psychological elements of video games capture peoples attention. In particular which of these elements create a fun game.

Its very short and written in the format of a children's book with every other page being a full page cartoon of the concept discussed in the previous page. It is not a children's book since they discuss things like "grokking" and pattern recognition.

The author is one of the creative leads for Sony interactive entertainment, so you learn a bit about how designers create games and how they cater towards players by trying to put elements that have been psychologically tested to be "fun".

Good short collection of info for anyone interested in game design or social psychology.

7 reviews 2 followers

Edited February 6, 2017

Indispensable para entender por qué jugamos y la poderosa herramienta de comunicación y entretenimiento que son los videojuegos. No es un libro de game design que trate los aspectos formales del desarrollo de un juego, sino que se centra en cómo funcionamos al ser atravesados por el lenguaje de éstos. Llegó a mis manos con la etiqueta de ser "el understanding comics de los videojuegos", y este rotulo no le queda chico. Es un libro que invita a reflexionar y abre más interrogantes al terminarlo. Un must.

3 reviews

December 21, 2020

It was disappointing and frustrating experience. I think this book could be good, but author turned to much it in personal journal, full of stereotypical views. As women I think it hits twice strong. The Book shares wrong idea of women in games and discourage women in industry.

Author 1 book 19 followers

September 7, 2021

While many reviews call it simplistic, it's clear that Koster has spent a lot of time thinking about the topic—there are many references to be followed and explored, and I've lifted a couple of thoughts from the book that speak to me personally.

Yes, you probably can't use it as a step-by-step guide to make your game fun, but that is outside the book's goals.

My only peeve is that footnotes take up a whole quarter of the book (and they're all at the end) and you have to constantly flip back and forth while reading.

gamedev

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