Raph Koster's Response to the "Fun" Definitions Video Essay (Patreon)

The video on what "Fun" means to game designers got a lovely direct response from Raph Koster himself (author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design) so I'm posting that here for folks who engage more with the Patreon and Discord than directly with the YouTube comments section.

"A bit of trivia: my original title was "A Theory of Fun: Why Games Matter." The publisher changed it. :)

FWIW, I personally think about this in this way: Most lists of "types of fun" are actually lists of "types of problem spaces to master." There's loads of ways to clump problem types -- you mention Caillois, and other taxonomies. (You missed Nicole Lazzarro's four types, which are similar to Caillois but use modern terms! And are based on actual psych experiments!) Some problem types are about your body, others about your perception, others are math, some are about other people, etc etc.

Pretty much all the problem types are going to need a similar list of ingredients to actually end up fun: clarity of problem, multiple ways to approach the problem, decent feedback when you take actions, etc. That part is generally common across all of them.

NO problem will be fun for everybody. That's where motivations comes in. That's just a mapping of problem types to people.

There are some lists which include things that are not related to mastering problems. You mentioned surprise being fun. But surprise and delight don't really work the same way as problem types do. Usually, they're part of the juice, not the problem. Any problem type can be made delightful, or surprising.

And you can have delightful or surprising things without having a problem behind them. Making a game solely about juice is almost always doomed because juiciness wears off with exposure, unless you are making truly chance driven games (which trick your brain into thinking there's a real problem there).

That's why I used a narrow definition of "fun" in the book -- to try to break apart that blob into smaller parts that were useful. The moment the book came out, though, your critique emerged -- one academic said "you should have just called it 'kfun'" which i suppose is fair! :D...game formalism has the challenge that an awful lot of words we use every day, even in doing craft work, are terrible as craft terms because they are very fuzzy. I often point out that there are two very different types of loop that people often confuse -- the HCI loop or learning loop, and the loop a given verb or set of verbs has within a game's systemic economy. Saying "the core loop of the game" is fraught right there!

In the case of "fun" the problem is that pretty much every synonym is just as fuzzy.

For conflicts over "game" and inclusivity I started using "ludic artifact" when I needed to be precise, but it's... ugh. :D But it's useful in very specific situations. Games have a lot of fuzzy boundaries around them, and these days there are a lot of interactive entertainment products that bear no resemblance to "a game system."

This video prompted me to a blog post which maybe I will make a video for..."

I hope you've all had a good start to November, and good luck working on your ludic artifacts!