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One of the classic introductory game design books (Theory Of Fun For Game Design by Raph Koster [0]) attempts to tackle the question of what fun is, and what a game is. It's a breezy read, with every second page an illustration. (Especially the chapter Different Fun For Different Folks is really close to what the original post is about.) It's tricky to define when you get in the weeds.

Here's a snippet from the book:

> Many simple things can be made complex when you dig into them, but having fun is something so fundamental that surely we can find a more basic concept?

> I found my answer in reading about how the brain works. 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.

I do think that Uplink has some super tasty patterns in there, which is exactly what the author is talking about when he's talking about the feeling of noticing how much better you've gotten when you start the game over. Of course, fun isn't a binary classification, and there's definitely a bunch games that are very heavy on the 'juice-factor' and other such things in an attempt to bump up the fun.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/theoryoffunforgamedesign2ndediti...

3 comments

I'm pretty sure the theory of flow and how dopamine and the brain works completely explains what makes video games fun. In short, to make a video game fun it needs to balance a person's flow state (particularly in regards to learning). The difficulty lies in that a person learns and therefore their skill improves over time, and so this "curve" needs changing to compensate to keep them in the state of flow, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn't alienate unskilled newcomers and provides something truly "new" to learn. This is why you see some games that are either super difficult or complicated, which appeal to a small subset of gamers, but not to the masses, and vice versa.

> the feeling of noticing how much better you've gotten when you start the game over.

There's nothing like your second playthrough of a game like Factorio, Cities Skylines, Stellaris, etc. All of the experience and knowledge you've gained feels like a superpower when you start fresh.

Are there any games that aren't pattern-based, in some sense?

I'm struggling to think of any examples that are arguably random.

Maybe Minecraft and other sandbox games?

Although I'm sure that with enough abstraction you could find a pattern, but that's true for everything.

Slot machines?

I think part of a useful line between “game” and “not game” whether the player can make decisions that influence the outcome.

Candyland, chutes and ladders, Life. All games, all have no player agency (Life does have one decision iirc).

At a slightly-less-elementary level: Monopoly. Lots of decisions, but a lot of them are kinda "fake" - very rarely do you want to decline to buy that property you just landed on. And the game is often effectively over even before any trading or such. The pattern is little more than "land on the right spots, don't land on the wrong spots have other people land on the wrong spots, win."

Games with fewer meaningful choices and less exploitable patterns tend to be games that game enthusiasts move away from pretty quickly.

But they stay interesting as casual diversions or ways to spend time with kids for people who are less-game-oriented.

So I think there's two types of ways games are fun, and the latter one is simply "something to do together with friends and family" where the game itself is a diversion, not the primary enjoyment source.

I was also going to add monopoly, but wanted to avoid the potential of dispute. Even though really monopoly is just rolling dice.

Monopoly is an excellent example!

And outlined features probably align to the original creative intent of demonstrating "monopolies suck and are unfair."

If you think about it... lack thereof probably being why it's still such a popular game.

Yes! I don’t think the addition of graphics makes an rng a game in any meaningful sense, despite what Milton Bradley says on the box. Maybe an activity?

Monopoly I think doesn’t quite fit with those others. Seems to me there’s a difference between the optimal choice being too obvious (monopoly) and no choice at all except whether to pull the lever again or walk away with whatever shred of your dignity remains (Candyland, slots)