How to stage fun
With pacing, context, and a setup
As a game designer, your main responsibility is to satisfy the feelings and emotions of players; you must make sure the game is fun. Without it, it becomes challenging to validate your game towards players, let alone the market. In this article I explore where to start the journey, when you have found fun, and what you should do with it.
Contents
What is fun?
Characteristics of fun
Before you even attempt to pursue fun in your game, keep in mind there is no holy grail that guarantees fun when integrated into your game’s design. In the same vein, there is no right or wrong way to go about the search of it, as it is different to every designer and every product.
Fun is based on feelings that are:
- Personal: not everyone agrees the same thing to be fun. All you should care about is your target audience’s opinion. (unless you need investors)
- Situational: even if you do consider something to be fun, this might change depending on your mood, phase in life, amount of times you have played, etc.
If any of these is experienced without an emotional response, it is not valid as fun.
Genres
“But players like shooting, exploring, competing etc. Isn’t the presence of elements like these that make games fun?” While there are games with standardized forms of play (genres) that have proven time and again they attract a great audience, the mere presence of these mechanics do not guarantee fun. If that were the case, everyone aside from the targeted audience would enjoy the game for the same reasons.
Mechanics alone don’t always cut it
Consider any game, and purposely leave out context to break the mechanics down to their bare minimum.
Shooter games
Shooting
Align the center area of your screen with a target before you click a mouse-button to reduce points.
Bomb disarming
Stand near a specific object and hold down a key for a certain amount of seconds to change the object’s state.
Shrinking play area
An area where you will not lose points will reduce in size over time.
Exploration games
Gathering
Stand near an object and click a button to claim it.
Crafting
Click on several items in a grid and click a button to replace them with a new item in the grid.
Riding mounts
Hold a button and push the thumbstick into a desired direction to move your position in-game.
In doing so, you might notice two things:
- Fun is not solely based on mechanics.
- Fun thrives when a dynamic* emerges between the player’s behavior and the mechanics.
Realizing it is not the mechanics, but the emotional experience that comes from the dynamics is especially vital for games with new technologies (VR, AI, I’m looking at you). While people can easily see the “fun” of their unique features, it can be difficult to justify gimmicks over hours of gameplay. Hence, you need a good User Journey.
Thus, fun doesn’t just exist–it is staged.
mechanics + emergent behavior = where fun spawns
For example: Shooting to reduce points is meaningless. Yet if they are points of another that puts them out of the game, things suddenly become more interesting. Add to this the fact others can shoot you too. What emerges is a behavior in which both players are trying to dodge and shoot each other. This feels intense, suspenseful and challenging. When you are the last one standing, players feel satisfied and accomplished of their victory.
Definition of fun
You might have noticed how in an article about fun, I mention the words valuable, interesting, entertainment, etc. Let’s be honest, this does not necessarily come close to the definition of fun. In the same vein, there are endless debates on what defines the perception of fun, whether ‘interesting’ and ‘fun’ are separate things, and how emotions are even defined.
I don’t think the definition matters–even when incorporating fun in games is my very responsibility as a designer. Why? Because humans–especially distracted ones–are very bad at perceiving and interpreting their own emotions. (disclaimer: I am in my early twenties and may lack the life experience to support this). The most consistent descriptions of fun I’ve hear so far dance around the following words:
- Satisfying
- Interesting
- Engaging (to keep busy)
These experiences can be encountered outside of games as well.
On their own, they mean little.
One might say: “I read newspapers because they’re interesting, but not fun per se.” “I feel satisfied after cleaning my entire house, but cleaning itself wasn’t fun.” “Planning a conference for +999 visitors has me engaged, but it’s certainly not something I want to do several days on end.”
And yet, they can overlap or have far associations with fun.
For I believe fun is not established by a single thing. Rather, it is the continuous user journey of these three elements in a well-paced and varied manner. The means to do that, depends on your user journey.
'The definition of fun doesn't matter'
I have a game idea, but it isn't fun enough?
As mentioned before, fun is personal and situational. To this end, it is absolutely vital that you know your target audience through and through. Ultimately, they are the one’s the experience is aimed at.
Mechanic vs. interaction
Note here the difference between a mechanic and an interaction.
Interactions are the smallest actions between the player and the game: pressing a button, looking at an object, hearing sounds, etc.
Mechanics are consequences within a systen that are coupled to interactions: clicking fires a gun that deals damage, or initiates movement in a character.
Sources of fun
Consider two categories; inherent interest, and artificial fun.
Inherent interest
While fun is personal and situational, we designers have the luxury to pivot around interactions (NOT mechanics) which a wide range of users like doing or find interesting. These are often gimmicks, without too much context required.
I do not consider these actions as ‘play’ or fun. However, I believe simple interactions as these can make play occur, whatever the level of abstraction, relevance, or even the motivation it might have carried initially.
I believe interactions as these have lead to the entire pursuit of entertainment, in whatever form or shape it might take. Therefore, designers should certainly seek out these inherent forms in their search for a fun game. The more abstract, the better.
Artificial fun
Artificial fun relies on experiences of which their values are determined based on a context the user has agreed to.
Magic circle
Your strongest tool to achieve this is the magic circle, also known as ‘suspension of disbelief’. Once players have signed the implicit contract and fully accept their role and place in the game world, you gain partial control over their mindset—including preferences—to fufill said role.
Preferences by context
If I play as a mighty hunter who slays monsters the size of mountains, I’d be on the lookout for things that help me kill it. I couldn’t care less about assigning residential and commercial districts for each town I come across. If I play as a city planner however, I would be happy to have control of this.
Fantasy as context
This is because in each magic circle, players conform to a fantasy. This usually comes with a role: being a powerful hunter, a perfect city planner, a sharp detective, a strategic restaurant owner, etc. Certain things become more important for you. Again, mechanics don’t matter, it is the context that makes for value. On its own, these mechanics aren’t fun, but they become meaningful when they allow the player to experience the promised fantasy. If that fantasy is what the TA finds fun, then the mechanic has become the means to achieve a fun experience.
Fantasy
being a…
Mechanic
game-specific actions
Dynamic
thus, player behaviour
Fun
thus, the artificial fun
Powerful monster hunter
Killing: press a button near an object until points deplete
Fighting: Positioning for strikes, dodging attacks, setting up combos etc.
Hammer down on a huge beast with a disproportionately large weapon and flashy VFX.
Perfect city planner
Road building: select a button then drag and click a line in the game world.
Optimizing traffic flow: assigning roads by traffic type, adjusting priority lanes, moving popular areas.
Having transformed a city artery from being wrought with congestion to smooth and flowing.
Sharp detective
Gathering: stand near an object and click a button to claim it.
To consider clues, put criminals on the spot.
The anticipation from receiving an impossible case riddled with contradictions to unraveling it with your own smarts.
You’re the start of a music video
(Hi-fi rush)
x
x
Remember, fun is situational. If you create a situation that is specific to the role players have accepted, it becomes relevant in the kind of light you design it to be.
User preferences and optimal game context
Since fun is personal and situational, you are completely dependent on your Target Audience; everything I’ve mentioned before doesn’t matter if it isn’t aligned with your TA. Thus you must learn of their preferences, and what context makes them optimal.
Only then can you create with intent.
Only then can you design.
While I do not have a finite list of which preferences and context items you must discover, I can offer you my personal list as a starting point.
Remember, this list is what I found useful for my use cases. I implore you to explore, experiment, and create your own list that best suits you and your use case.
Once you have, I’d be very interested in seeing your version.
While there are many take-aways you might find from your user preferences and optimal game context research, let us focus on the attributes that are especially important to “making a game fun”.
For more information on the process of how to find answers to these questions, read my (not yet existing 🙈) blog on game pre-production.
Emotional compatibility
[insert docs]
Pacing
[insert docs]
Intensity
[insert docs]
[insert docs]
Your target audience is not the same as your true audience
As you expose your game to consumers, there will always be mixed responses. By then, it can be difficult to discern whether they are just your TA disliking your game, or those who the experience just isn’t aimed at. In reality, you will never have a 100% match between a user and your picture of the perfect one.
That said, one of my teachers used to say: “There is an audience for everything”. Meaning that, it is never a lost pursuit to connect your game to its target audience.
On the flipside, you might reconsider a new target audience, which is okay. A reason might be that your intended audience is hard to connect with, for which you might not have the resources to overcome.
The key take-away I’d like to give you, is that games are always fun and meaningful to someone. The trick is to find a balance between the audience you find, your own vision, and the resources you have. That which you prioritize shall differ per developer, and that is okay. 👌
How to map and plan emotional experiences
(consider moving this to a new page altogether.)
Mixing frameworks
Thanks to adjacent fields such as interaction design, psychology and writing, we can draw from their attempts, maps and models on how to structure and analyze game experiences for their emotional impact.
I have experimented—and still am—in combining and extracting elements from the following fields and models, to devise one that works for games.
Please notify me if you have found a better one, have your own, or have any other feedback.
Interaction design’s User Journey mapping.
Hunicke et al’s Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics framework.
Psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state, further applied to games by game designer Genova Chen.
The three-act-structure of screenwriting.
Plutchik’s wheel of emotions.
Why use a map?
Naturally, you must always let players have the final say in verifying how much, which parts, and why your game aligns with their definition of fun.
Use these maps to make a more informed decision for yourself, and to communicate with your teams from which emotions, story pacing and other attributes more you want to create your vision from.
Examples
For further reading
Let us learn from each other.
Jane McGonigal – Reality is broken
Genova Chen – speaks of flow state in games
Jesse Schell – The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman – Rules of play
Ralph Koster – The theory of fun
Donald Norman – The design of everyday things
Has a chapter on designing for emotions.Dan Saffer – Designing for interaction
Johan Huizinga – Homo Ludens
Roger Caillois – Man, Play and Games
*Hunicke et al – paper on Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics
Jenova Chen – thesis on flow in games
[Other people and models I mentioned in emotion mapping]
[that Frenchman with several forms of fun]
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