Lukáš Pelant, 471 607
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
a book review or something like that
Before the begining of this semster, I decided to attend GDI classes just because I thought it would be
fun to spend some time with guys from faculty of informatics as I have been studying psychology for
the last 6 years, which means the last time I have seen a man as a classmate was during high school.
But I got sucked into reality of game design and I am not sure if I will ever be able to return back to
being normal. Have I finished my masters thesis for which I have last 4 months left? No, but I 3D printed
4 alternative versions of „Settlers of Catan“, started 2 „Dungeons & Dragons“ campaigns for my friends,
spent two weeks by updating the html videogame I made for the homework, designed and tested 2 of
my own board games which I once forced my friends to play about 48 hours straight and am now forcing
those 2 guys I am in GDI group with to actually release the game we made for the class. If I fail to finish
my masters, I will tell my parents that ZZ is responsible for that.
As I enjoyed all the time I spent with games, I felt like reading 800 pages about games while I should
be studying new international mental disease classification would be a lot, so I skimmed through all of
the book suggestions and figured this one woud be the easiest. You writing „too easy“ next to it helped
quite a lot, humans tend to be very lazy as it is pointed out in the book multiple times and indeed, I am
very human. I also felt that if I will have to read more about social psychology, linguistics, Mike
Csikszentmihalyi or „the basics of cognition“, I will jump out of the window and this book felt very
human. I still had to read about „flow“ again and got striked with the definition of cognition about three
times, but that is still good compared to those unholy semantic and cognition filter studies we have to
read in psychology classes.
As a language module I am not fully capable to give thorough review … Ok, sorry, I just had to get all
the jokes out of my system. The actual review is going to start now, this was just my way of saying:
Thanks, I had a lot of fun and actually learned a lot. I never realised how much are board games actually
my passion until now.
Raph Koster is a funny guy and one can see (read) that he loves games with his whole heart. The book
is short, but full of really good points I actually used during the process of adjusting my game. Each
chapter is usually a bit of philosophing and applying discovered on gaming and the state of „having
fun“.
The very first observation in the book was about how kids are attracted to games and I realised that
unless the game is too complicated or focused on adults, kids are the best testers. So I invited some
older kids from the summer camp I organize and tried the games I have been working on with them
and I realised that the first one is too complicated, second one is too boring and the last one is too
ridiculous. They heleped me a lot and just this one thing was valuable enough for the book to be worth
reading. And that was page 3.
There are many Yoda-like wisdoms and many casual notes that hit me. One of them was: „Games that
are too hard kind of bore me, and games that are too easy also kind of bore me.“ That led to two things:
I decided to reduce the number of rules in all the games I was working on and I finally uninstalled Dark
Souls, because I realized I hate it. Another thing that touched me was how Koster described people as
„pattern making machines“. I felt that in my bones as I remembered the time when I discovered fractals
and decided to study the heck out of them which resulted in me taking gestalt psychology courses and
almost becoming insine while discovering all the pie and phi related geometrical patterns around us. I
also thought a lot about how I find hexagonal grids so satisfying in games, so I 3D printed a grid with
400 hex pieces and started experimenting with different patterns and I learned two things: Simple
patterns work better for games and I probably could have just printed 40 pieces instead of 400 and it
would have been enough. But really, I am familiar with my megalomanic tendencies, but I trully learned
that it is better to use simple concept and smaller amount of everything and work on perfecting the
formula, rather then trying to go big in every direction. It also seems important to look at my games as
a cluster of patterns and search for the balance between variability and graspability.
Koster then wrote about „chunking“ which is the process I am very familiar with from the perspective
of cognitive sciences and I decided to apply the rule of 5 ± 2 on all of my games. I checked even the
more complex board games I have, like Civilization or Terraforming mars and I realised that they also
follow this rule – use 3 to 7, ideally 5 basic rules and make them work very well. Then I tried to play
„The War of the Ring“ and confirmed that it is not fun to study rules for 4 hours before the actual
begining of the game.
Another good point was reading about how games are just like puzzles to solve. I started to think about
all my games as puzzles, where each decision needs to „click“ and wrong choices must be punished to
throw you back a little, but not make you unable to solve the puzzle. That brought me to balancing our
game for the class and we had to rewrite some movement rules as sometimes the game was too harsh
on the player. We also cut out some content as it was just extra seasoning but did not add to solving
the puzzle – finishing the game.
The part of the book about dopamine and endorphine rushes was optimistic. I wrote many papers
about videogame addictions and I figured that the people that created lootbox systems and „something
rush or clash games“ know very well about the exact way our dopamine system works and they should
not. I work mostly as a child psychologist and those things are simply too addictive for kids to resist. I
feel like game designers should know about endocrine systems, but not to use that for making games
more addictive, but for being ethical and making them adequate. It is very easy to make something so
catchy that you can’t stop, when you understand dopamine cycles, adrenaline and cortizol rushes,
endorphine uptakes and serotonine pathmaking, but it does not mean one should just do it.
The author uses the word „grok throghout the book, which means „completly understand the game in
a way that the observer becomes the part of the observed“. I feel like that is what happened to me
with „hearthstone“. I mastered it, loved it and even got paid a lot by playing, but after some time I had
to stop playing because it felt like an infinite loop with all the new additions and it took too much of
my time. But it was amazing fun. I like it when I can „grook“ the game. Not just win, but explore every
detail and break it to understand the very core under the surface. I want all the secrets, I want all the
extra tasks, then I want to find all the bugs and then I want to say: „Yeah, that was fun, time to move
on“. Because I want the experience to finish. I am not 20 anymore and my time is precious. And I
realized that I don’t want to play infinite games anymore. And that stupid word „grok“ actually helped
me a lot. I want to make games that are easy to learn, hard to master, but actually „grokable“ in some
adequate time, so people can move on.
If I had to describe all the wisdom obtained from the book, this paper would be too long, so I am going
to skip a lot, but another thing that felt important was the chapter about the fact that playing is not
childish, it is the best instrument to learn something. And I work as a preventist and teambuilding lector,
so games are thing I use the most in my work. But I feel like I use „the best games“ only with kids and I
reduced the „playtime“ while working with adults. The book made me realise that I might start using
more psychological games even with adults. In the book there was this sentence: „Games almost always
teach us tools for being the top monkey“. And I realised the beauty behind those psychological games
I use is that they are not „top-mokey“ or competition oriented, they are very specific and are used
almost exclusively by psychologists and summer camp and teambuilding animators to induce
contemplation on some topic or make people work as a team and I always used those proven ones, but
it might be a good time to create my own ones. I even started to think about about using games as a
part of therapy. But I will take this thought somewhere else. This topic brought one more quest: Think
about a new game concept that in its core is not about aiming, territory, timing, projecting power or
hunting. Still makes my gears turning.
A lot of book is about how we „dress our game“. The basic mechanics are what the game really is, but
the appeal often comes from the aesthetics. I relized that I recycle the topics I like. The same way I
played only mage in those 7456 RPGs I use similiar fantasy settings for all my games. The quest is to
think outside the box and try to come up with some new aesthetics and maybe even leave my beloved
hexes. But on the other hand, I would like to work on what I love and it is a nice to picture to create my
own „board game wrold“ with many games in one expanding fantasy reality once. But it seems
important to balance my own OCD and what is generally appealing, because I want to make games for
others, not just myself.
I also liked to read about different ways we can think about fun: sense-leasure, make-believe, drama,
obstacle, disovery and so on. I agree with the author – fun is mastering the problem mentally. There
are other things that are also fun, but this is what I enjoy. This is how I enjoy games – by understanding
them, this is why I enjoy psychology – I can understand a bit more about people, myslef included and
this is why I love being a student in general, I just love figuring out how stuff work. It seems crucial to
understand how am I going to make people have fun. Although it comes naturally, it seems important
to stop and think about the exact „fun elements“ of my game, so I can identify the „blind spots of
boredom“ or low flow.
I believe that the book might be too easy for someone experienced in the game design, but I have
discovered many pillars on which I can build my games on, like I should always incorporate those
elements:
- Players need to have some options for preparation that affect their odds of success.
- There must be a feeling of space in which players create relationships between each other and
between them and the game itself.
- A core mechanic is usually small, but elegant rule.
- I have to think about the range of a challeneges and how they change within the rules. And I
need to consider necessary skills for players to suceed.
- The range of abilities needs to be high enough to be fun, but small enough to not get
overwhelmed. (I just rembered WoW in its prime.)
- The results of encounters should not be completely predictable.
- High-level players can’t be able to feed on inexperienced players.
- Failure must have a cost
- There must be anough different ways to „solve the puzzle“.
This is now my checklist for making games.
One of the last good reminders from the book: People are lazy. (I am a human and can confirm.) I have
to work with that, so things need to be challenging to be exciting, but not too challenging or people
will be too lazy to solve the problem. It seems obvious but my megalomanic me needed a reminder
that that 400 hex board game for six players with building your kingdom and armies and learning spells
and conquering borders and fighting monsters was a little bit too much for a board game. But I was
asble to break it down and now I have enough material for at least 3 other games.
That’s it. Is this a good book? I am no critic, but I sure enjoyed it. I guess that most of the information
are obvious to someone working in the field, but for me as a psychologis and a beginner in game design,
it was fresh and good food for thoughts. And there is a lot of funny cartoons which is a big plus. But
really, the author knos what he writes about and goes to the point after short philosophical windows.
I got a lot of value from reading it and I was able to make my games much better in quite a short time
thanks to it.