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A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Raph Koster)

Thinking is mostly memory, pattern-matching against past experiences.
page: 22
The brain is actively hiding the real world from us. Seeing what is actually there with our conscious mind is really hard to do, and most people never learn how to do it.
page: 18
tags: perception consciousness
The essence of much of art is forcing us to see things as they are rather than as we assume them to be.
page: 22
Noise is any pattern we don't understand. There's really next to nothing in the visible universe that is patternless. If we perceive something as noise, it's most likely a failure in ourselves, not a failure in the universe.
page: 24
Talks about the three levels of learning: conscious thought (logic, analysis, data), chunking (building approximations of reality), muscle memory (which is really autonomic nervous system reactions).
page: 28
The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games.
page: 34
Games are a formal system, already abstracted and iconic, and ready for our brains to absorb without having to turn messy reality into patterns first.
page: 36
The map is not the territory.
page: 36
Books can't do as good a job at teaching as games can, because you cannot practice a pattern and run permutations on it with a book, and have the book respond with feedback.
page: 36
The house the cheese the rat the cat the dog chased caught ate lay in was built by Jack.
page: 38
tags: writing
If you keep playing games, you'll eventually grok wide swaths of their possibility space. In this sense, they are disposable, and boredom is inevitable.
page: 38
Boredom is the opposite of learning. When a game stops teaching us, we feel bored. Boredom is the brain casting about for new information. It is the feeling we get when there are no new visible patterns to absorb. This includes patterns that go over our heads.
page: 42
Games have to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of deprivation and overload, of excessive order and excessive chaos, of silence and noise.
page: 42
tags: games overload
The definition of a good game is one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.
page: 46
Games are teachers. Fun is just another word for learning. Games teach you how aspects of reality work, how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine. Learning is boring to so many people because the method of transmission is wrong.
page: 46
We learn through stories; we become who we are through stories.
page: 48
tags: stories
As we grow up, we don't actually put away the notion of "having fun." We just migrate it to other contexts. There are games all around us, we just don't call them that.
page: 50
tags: fun games
A reward structure alone does not a good game make.
page: 50
Exploring a possibility space is the only way to learn about it. Most games repeatedly throw evolving spaces at you so that you can explore the recurrence of symbols within them. A modern video game will give you tools to navigate a complicated space, and when you finish, the game will give you another space, and another, and another.
page: 56
Many of the things we have fun doing are in fact training us to be better cavemen.
page: 60
Farming simulator games are really just games about running a business, and not about learning how to actually grow food.
page: 62
Most games revolve around skill sets like resource allocation, force projection, and territory control.
page: 62
Games do very well at action verbs: controlling, projecting, surrounding, matching, remembering, counting, and so on.
page: 64
It's worth asking ourselves what skills are more commonly needed today. Games should be evolving toward teaching us those skills.
page: 66
tags: skills games education
Humans are tribal creatures. We not only fall readily into groups run by outsize personalities, but we'll often subsume our better judgment in doing so.
page: 68
Why are the most popular games the ones that teach obsolete skills (judging trajectory, recognizing danger patterns, running fast and hitting things), while the more sophisticated ones that teach subtler skills tend to reach smaller markets? Because it's easier, and allows us to stay in the unconscious thought/autonomic nervous system reaction mode, and avoid logical, conscious thought.
page: 72
Games typically look different because of their __content__ not their underlying lessons.
page: 76
Take a stagnated genre, like 2D shooters (centipede, robotron, defender, galaga) and find a new dimension to add to the gameplay.
page: 78
tags: game design
The fiction of word problems in math trains us to see past the story to the underlying math problem, and trains us to recognize real-world situations where that math problem might be lurking. A game is similar: you don't see the abstraction directly; there is misdirection; there are metaphors. Games and word problems train us to ignore the fiction wrapping the pattern.
page: 80
Non-gamers decrying games as too violent. But Deathrace does not teach you to run over pedestrians any more than Pac-Man teaches you to eat dots and be scared of ghosts. This is because gamers' brains see past the dressings and metaphors to the real lesson being taught by the game; they ignore the context. The context may be reprehensible, or not the best setting or staging for the game, but it's also not what the game is really about.
page: 84
Instead of dressing up a complex abstraction, we just sprinkle game obstacles throughout a mediocre narrative, forcing the player to perform certain actions to see more of the novel. This can be entertaining, and reach a larger audience of 'non- or casual gamers', but it overshadows and diminishes the learning we get from game systems. The stories for power-centric games (shooters) are generally power fantasies, which is pretty juvenile.
page: 86
Games are not stories, though players can create stories from them.
page: 88
Stories are one of humanity's chief teaching tools. Play is the other. Lecturing runs a distant third.
page: 88
tags: teaching stories learning
The eight types of fun per game designer Marc LeBlanc: sense-pleasure, make-believe, drama, obstacle, social framework, discovery, self-discovery and expression, and surrender.
page: 90
Positive emotions surrounding interpersonal interactions: schadenfreude, fiero, naches, kvell.
page: 92
Doing things for fun that don't help us grow is aesthetic appreciation. Delight, awe, mystery, harmony. Like fun, it's about patterns, but the different is that aesthetics is about __recognizing__ patterns, not learning new ones. For example: delight is when we recognize a pattern but are surprised by it, like the Statue of Liberty at the end of the Plant of the Apes.
page: 94
Fun is contextual. The reasons why we are engaging in an activity matter a lot. School is not fun because we take it seriously. It's not practice, and the conseqeunces (your grades, social status) are real.
page: 96
A shark only gets feedback for eating. Monkeys get feedback for helping others (naches and kvell), pushing the boundaries of their knowledge (fun), and strengthening their social networks and building communities and families that work together to improve everyone's lot (grooming, pairing, and feeding others).
page: 96
As we succeed in mastering patterns thrown at us, the brain gives us little jolts of pleasure. But if the flow of new patterns slows, then we won't get the jolts, and we'll start to feel boredom. If the flow of new patterns increases beyond our ability to resolve them, we won't get the jolts either because we're not making progress.
page: 98
tags: flow
Most of the cases where we typically cite flow relate to exercising mastery, not learning. Fun happens when we bump into and over the top edge of flow, and sometimes we need a little help (from such as the game system).
page: 98
Games are deliberate practice machines.
page: 100
Games as meditation (the repetitive behavior bit, which in meditation is a focus, mantra, or breathing pattern).
page: 100
Fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure from consequence.
page: 100
Seven forms of intelligence: Linguistic, Musical, Logical-mathematical, Interpersonal, Bodily-kinesthetic, Intrapersonal, Spatial.
page: 102
Not all people like all games equally because people are intelligent in different ways, and will tend to gravitate toward problems they think they have a chance at solving.
page: 102
The variation between individuals of either sex is greater than the difference between the sexes, but the differences are real. However, many of these differences are disappearing over time, which suggests that they are cultural rather than biological.
page: 104
Research shows that if people who have trouble with spatial rotation tests are given a video game that encourages them to practice rotation objects and matching particular configurations in 3D, not only will they master the spatial perception necessary, but the results will be permanent.
page: 104
tags: learning
"Centipede (78): One of the most charming shoot-'em-ups ever made, Centipede was notable for its extension of several key concepts from earlier games. It permitted full planar movement within a restricted area at the bottom of the screen, allowing enemies to inhabit the space behind the player. It made use of the same sort of barriers that space invaders had, only it characterized them as mushrooms and spread them across the entire screen. It had a wide assortment of enemies, some of which marched down the screen and some of which were dive-bombers. Finally, the control mechanism was a trackball, which gave players control over acceleration rather than just linear movement speed, employed by joystick-controlled shooters."
page: 253
Simon Baron-Cohen concluded that there are "systematizing brains" and "empathizing brains". Extreme systematizing brains are autistic and ones just slightly less so are Asperger's. Males are more likely to fall into these categories.
page: 104
The difficulty ramp is almost certain to be wrong for many people, and the basic premises are likely to be uninteresting or too difficult for large segments of the population.
page: 106
If people are to achieve their maximum potential, they need to do the hard work of playing games they don't get, the games that don't appeal to their natures. Taking these on may serve as the nurture part of the equation, counterbalancing the brains that they were born with or culturally trained to have.
page: 110
Once players look at a game and ascertain the pattern and the ultimate goal, they'll try to find the optimal path to getting there. This includes cheating, which isn't wrong, and is actually a sign of lateral thinking, also known as cunning, and is a skill that makes them more likely to survive. Knowing how to exploit a game and successfully doing so is a sign that the player fully groks the game.
page: 114
tags: lying cheating survival
Loophole: game system allows it, not violating the magic circle. Cheating: external techniques, hacking, modding, etc. Both can be considered poor form as they both allow the player to circumvent the skill or lesson the game is trying to convey.
page: 116
Humans like things that significantly reduce the odds of unpredictable things happening to them. But we also dislike tedium, so we allow unpredictable things inside the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows or books. The purpose of games is to package up the unpredictable and the learning experience into a space and time where there is no risk.
page: 118
tags: predictability tedium risk experience
Games teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. Phrased another way, the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.
page: 120
Successful games tend to incorporate the following elements: preparation, a sense of space, a solid core mechanic, a range of challenges, a range of abilities required to solve the encounter, skill required in using the abilities. They also: have a variable feedback system, deal with the Mastery Problem (bottom-feeding too easy encounters must not be too rewarding, but inexperienced players will be unable to get the most out of the game), and failure must have a cost greater than just the opportunity cost.
page: 122
Competition/head-to-head games are the easiest way to constantly provide a new flow of challenges and content.
page: 126
Mastery problem: competitive game-playing tends to squeeze out the people who most need to learn the skills it provides, because they aren't up to the competition and are eliminated in their first match. So people tend to prefer games that take no skill. Not requiring skill from a player should be considered a cardinal sin in game design. It also can't require too much skill, since players are always trying to reduce the difficulty of a task, and the easiest way to do that is to not play.
page: 126
The glory of learning and its fundamental problem: once you learn something, it's over. You don't get to learn it again.
page: 128
Humanity is engaged in a grand project of self-understanding, and most of the tools we have used in the past were imprecise at best. Over time we have developed better tools in the quest to understand ourselves better.
page: 176
Much of our view of the world is shaped by our perceptions and the way we filter information as it reaches us. Clarifying our understanding of that filter is reshaping our relationship to the world.
page: 178
tags: filter worldview perception
The obstacles to making games--trellises--that shape players in ways we choose are not mechanical ones. The primary obstacle is a state of mind. It’s an attitude. It’s a worldview. Fundamentally, it is intent.
page: 184