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 first thing you notice when you pick up A Theory of Fun is that there is a sharp division to it: the left-hand pages are text and the right-hand pages are pictures, with very little overlap. You are going to prefer one of these to the other - I guarantee it. What's more, in reading the book you'll get an inkling of why; it operates at many more levels than its cheerful veneer would suggest.

The basic premise is that games are important. They're important because the brain is a highly efficient machine for recognising patterns, delivering pleasure when you learn new patterns. Games provide a context for recognising patterns where there is no external pressure to do so; this is what people call "fun".

The argument develops that games are also an art form. If people are learning things from playing them, then those who create games in some way determine what is learned. However, although many game designers do have an implicit understanding of what they're designing, few (if any) have an explicit enough understanding to reason about the design process itself. To be able to discuss what is in effect an internalised process, they need a theory of game design; that is what this book aims to deliver.

It actually does reasonably well in this regard. The test of a theory is its ability to be used predictively, and although A Theory of Fun doesn't come up with a bounded set of rules that can be applied to determine whether any given game will be fun, it does have a non-exhaustive set that can be applied to determine if a game isn't fun. Fail even one of these rules, and your game is looking bad.

The scholarship behind the formulation of these rules, by the way, is considerable; it's one of the glories of A Theory of Fun that its results seem to effortlessly derived. I put this down to its being a book by a game-designer; the crafting of its structure is just so elegant. All is there that is needed to be there, yet with imaginative doors that open wider when you push them with thought. Whatever your game design experience, it will appear just right for you; that's the skill of a first class game-designer at work. Knowing this, at times it's breath-taking.

This is a fun book, with a fun message.

Play games: go grok yourself.

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.