How to arrange fun: staged vs. artificial ✏️

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Here are a few common mechanics for genres that are popular at this time of writing:

Shooter games:

• Shooting: Align the center area of your screen with a target before you click a mouse-button to reduce points.

• Bomb disarming – Counter-Strike series, Valorant: 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 – PUBG, Apex Legends: 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.

I’m purposely leaving out context here to break the mechanics down to their bare minimum. In doing so, you might notice two things:

• Fun is not based on mechanics.
• Fun is based on the emergent player behavior in response to mechanics.

Thus, fun doesn’t exist–it is staged.

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 pattern, there are endless debates on what defines the perception of fun, whether ‘interesting’ and ‘fun’ are separate things, and how emotions are even defined.

Personally, 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 over 300 visitors has me engaged, but it’s certainly not something I want to do several days on end.”

And yet, they can have overlap or 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.

Fun in games is about the user journey

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.

Inherent fun

As stated before, fun is personal and situational. Yet at times, we as designers have the luxury to pivot around interactions which (a wide range of) users already consider fun and interesting: gimmicks and trends.

Examples:

• Destruction of environment or life with the first weapon players receive. 
• Popping bubble wrap with your fingers.

Whatever the motivation might be, this can pose a form of fun. Important to note here is that this often concerns gimmicks; short and often fleeting moments where once experiences a form of satisfaction. One might even ask if it should be categorized as fun at all. The latter aside, inherent fun has lead to the entire pursuit of entertainment. Therefore, designers should certainly seek out these inherent forms in their search for a fun game.

What do I do with fun?

Now that you have found a certain form of fun–be it an assumption, a personal experience or observation based on thorough research–you want to incorporate it into your game.

It always starts with the game’s core experience; the main feeling your game is about, in a single sentence. If you are not sure what your game’s core experience is, if you have one, or how to find it, I recommend this article. 

Artificial fun

Your strongest weapon in game design is the magic circle. 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.

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.

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 the extra 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 is fun.

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:

• Give the monster hunter means to upgrade their gear, abilities to complete their monster hunter fantasy.
• Make for the possibility of congested roads with consequences that validate optimization of a city planner.
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I consider fun to consist of two parts: inherent fun and artificial fun.