Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun — What a Game Still Has to Teach You

We look for fun in films, books, play and the people we spend time with. We can tell when a particular thing is fun for us.

It is harder to say what fun itself is or why it shows up in one moment and disappears in another.

A Game Designer Takes Up the Question

Raph Koster wrote about it after years of making games. He was creative lead on Ultima Online and later served as chief creative officer at Sony Online Entertainment, where he had also led design on Star Wars Galaxies.

Koster comes out of the same generation of game design as Richard Garriott, Sid Meier, Bill Roper and John Carmack. His experience building online worlds gives him a particular view of how people learn the rules of a place.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design

In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Koster combines what he noticed as a designer with ideas about learning and cognition. He asks what is happening when a player calls a game fun.

The book offers a theory rather than a settled definition. It gets at the idea from a number of directions before you feel you have hold of it.

It begins with what the mind does when it encounters a pattern.

A Mind Looking for Patterns

Koster pictures a Pac-Man-like mind gobbling up concepts. A game serves up patterns in a particularly inviting form. The mind filters out what seems irrelevant, picks up more than we are consciously aware of and groups experience into meaningful chunks.

Noise feels like a stream of patterns we cannot make sense of. Recognising one changes the experience. Once you hear it, you can take pleasure in hearing it again.

Koster calls this kind of intuitive understanding “grokking.” Knowing a pattern well enough to act on it can feel a little like muscle memory.

The book describes three ways of processing experience:

1. Deliberate reasoning, which follows a logical sequence and can take time even when we’re good at it
2. Associative thought, which links things that first appear unrelated and draws on intuition
3. Practised movements and automatic responses, which can occur before conscious deliberation

What Is a Game?

Games give Koster a way to make the question of fun concrete. There is something in them that a player can spend time learning.

He treats a game as a puzzle to be worked out. He compares picking up the rules to learning to drive, play the mandolin or recall multiplication tables.

This is why Koster sees games as effective learning tools. They let us notice, test and recognise patterns through practice.

What Is Fun?

The book also wanders through possible associations of the word “fun” with older words for foolishness or enjoyment, before returning to the pleasure of play.

Koster connects that pleasure to the feeling of solving something: a small reward when a task that used to be difficult comes within reach.

In this account, fun grows out of mastery, and mastery comes from understanding. Solving the puzzle is part of what makes the game worth playing.

When Play Turns into Boredom

Koster argues that boredom arrives when a game appears to have run out of things worth learning.

A challenge can be too simple to engage you. It can also be so difficult that you can’t detect a pattern at all. A game that presents variations too slowly can have much the same effect.

The good game, in Koster’s account, has taught the player what it had to teach by the time they put it down. It uses play as another form of instruction.

Different People Find Different Things Fun

Koster is interested in the pleasure of learning without pressure. People take that pleasure from different activities. He turns to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences as one way to think about the differences.

Gardner’s Original Seven Categories

1. Linguistic
2. Logical and mathematical
3. Bodily and kinaesthetic
4. Spatial
5. Musical
6. Interpersonal
7. Intrapersonal

Koster uses Gardner’s framework to ask why different players respond to different challenges. He also entertains the idea that games can give people practice in areas where they are less comfortable.

The book also refers to Simon Baron-Cohen’s distinction between systemising and empathising, an example of how it searches for explanations of different learning preferences.

Those broad categories offer little basis for predicting how a particular player, or all players of one gender, will learn.

A single game is unlikely to meet every preference. Designing it requires choosing what kind of player and challenge you have in mind.

What Should a Designer Think About?

Koster’s professional experience is especially apparent when the book asks what makes a game work. He offers a set of questions a designer can ask about a challenge.

1. Preparation — choices that can affect the odds before the player begins
2. Space — the layout and the relationships among players
3. A clear core structure — a working set of rules
4. A series of challenges, tasks or quests
5. Abilities the player can bring to the contest, from weapons to tactics
6. The skill required to use those abilities

A missing element gives the designer somewhere to look. Once those pieces are in place, the book asks how they work in play:

1. Does the challenge reward preparation?
2. Can different approaches succeed?
3. Does the environment affect what the player has to do?
4. Are the rules of the challenge clear?
5. Can those rules produce different kinds of challenges?
6. Can a player bring several abilities to bear?
7. Do harder challenges require players to combine abilities?
8. Does using an ability involve skill? If not, does it function as a basic move, like moving a piece in checkers?
9. Are there stages of success before the player clears the challenge?
10. Can advanced players be kept from repeatedly profiting from trivial challenges?
11. Does a failure leave the player wanting to try again?

What a Game Teaches

The book begins with a question about fun and ends up asking what games are good at.

In Koster’s view, a good game leaves the player with something they can do or see that they couldn’t before. That gives the enjoyment a source you can look for in the rules.

It is worth reading if you are interested in designing games and want to ask what your game still has to teach.

Book Information

A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Author

Raph Koster

Publication

25 March 2017 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9791160501315

View the book on YES24

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