eTech 2007: Session: The Core of Fun

Raph Koster President of Areae, Inc. presents The Core of Fun. "Areae, Inc. is a company dedicated to taking the tired old virtual world and making it into something fresh and new." (book) How Magic Works. Things that work are often structured. When something works, it works at many levels. Visual things are made of visual compositions. That's Deep structure. Games are made out of games. Shows Frogger, which consists itself of many games, hopping, crossing the road, crossing the river, etc. Games are designed to ekove FUN. Fun is a chemical response, comes from the same place as chocolate and orgasms. Mastering the way the model "input and reaction" works is what gives us the drug of "fun". There are 4 types of fun: Hard, Easy, Visceral, Social. Emphasis on social fun but most games focus on hard fun, leaving the others behind. Hard fun is about solving problems. Quotes Chris Crawford about Interactivity. Nested choices: Let's go to Amazon. Endless chain of operations to buy a book and not much feedback. Goes on to the magic ingredients:

• Where
• When
• How
• What
• With
• For
• Few
• Phooey

Also, enumerates the recipes for games, which may easily be applicable to anything on the Web:

• The core VERB has to be repeatable.
• Something that requires SKILL.
• Something that can handle Statistical Variation
• Something that is COMPETITIVE
• Everything you did before must matter
• Whatever the opponent last did to you should matter too
• You must able to PREPARE for the encounter, in different WAYS.
• The same challenge in different locales should be a fresh SCENARIO.
• The TERRITORY and TOPOLOGY should affect the outcome
• The same VERB must be applicable to many different CHALLENGES
• You should present users with lots of kinds of Nails.
• There are lost of kinds of hammers
• Users should be able to solve the challenge with their choice of tools.
• And you should reward them with different FEEDBACK for it.

A statistical interlude: All of the above are quantifiable. You can arrive at a rating for every challenge. Variable feedback keep things lively. Usually the best feedback is a greater challenger presented by the opponent. Sometimes its pleasant SURPRISE. Either way, it has to be HIGHLY VISIBLE (on feedback). BOTTOMFEEDING is bad for fun. In other words low-risk activity for high reward is bad for fun. You need to driver users to challenges at the edge of ability (even if all it costs you is TIME).