Theory of Fun for Game Design [Paperback]

What does he say? Well -games are fun, and fun is learning,but gamers would rather win than learn. Games are a medium, any medium can be used to create 'Art' - but only if you try. And by the end of the book, you'll want to go out and design games that will change the world :)

If you've ever thought seriously about games (and I don't just means computer games) and then this book will strike a chord. Both a deconstruction and a call to arms, I loved this book, and am going to try and persuade my friends in the games industry, or want to be in the industry to read it.

The book covers a little bit of cognitive theory explained in the simplest way. It's all very elegant in it's complete lack of elegance and finess. It's short - and if you read a book once in a while you'll finish it in one or two days. And you'll want to read it again, and buy a copy for everyone of your friends. I ended up buying three of them and giving them away, the only other book I've done that with is Nietzches - Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

It gave me a much sharper understanding of defining the border between core and "dress-up". What is important in a design/application/game - what is the gameplay and what is just fancy graphics.

I can recommend it to anyone with a flair for philosophy and playfulness.

I just gave my last copy away - got to go get another one.

The book essentially uses all its pages to explain that fun arises out of a player "grokking" (i.e. understanding) a pattern. When they know the pattern too well, they become bored. When they can't get the pattern at all, they become frustrated. The challenge in game design is to continually provide new patterns to learn, and ones that aren't too hard. If you provide easy patterns, you should move on to a new pattern quickly.

The book itself is an easy, and fun, read and does well on the coffee table despite the soft cover binding, but it fails to deliver any specific knowledge on how to progress from "make patterns the player can learn" to "this is how you do it in a game".

Instead it becomes somewhat preachy and argues that game designers ought to design the next "Mona Lisa" game or the next "Lolita" game ... which I suppose should be taken to mean a game that challenges and grows the player instead of just running the same old "open door, kill enemy" pattern. True as this might be, the blame for bland game designs ought to be put at the door of risk-averse publishers, not designers lack of imagination.

In conclusion, the book offers some insight, but it is in no way a cookbook on how to design fun and it fails to deliver anything to the almost academic debate on what "fun" is. The reader, then, should decide if that should be considered a plus or negative.