My GDC 2024 talk Revisiting Fun: 20 Years of a Theory of Fun is now posted here. [Edit: GDC has posted the video up for free on the GDCVault.]
Once again, I had a lot of fun drawing cartoon heads of lots of people who feature in the talk.
The talk really is a direct sequel to the one from a decade ago, Ten Years Later. Unlike last time, there is no updated edition just yet, though I was asked by lots of people if there was!
Continue reading »This paper on “Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play” is very worth a read if you are interested in the frontiers of figuring out what “fun” is. Luckily for me, it doesn’t say I’ve been on the wrong track for decades.
It does raise interesting questions given its framework — I’d love to see slot machines explained — though there is some stuff on affect that likely ties in. It also teases out some of why I have never felt comfortable with the “flow = fun” equation.
/
Another interesting intersection with other material would be motivations (a la Bartle/Quantic Foundry) and personal goal-setting. Players DO grind, after all, as they optimize, and tho the paper mentions people don’t get stuck in “popping bubble wrap,” they do for a lot longer than one would expect.
Continue reading »
I have to post this here for posterity even though I already tweeted it yesterday. Anyone better at 2048 than I who can post the full list of everyone in it? I’ll update the post with the details. 🙂 See below!
2048: Game Design Theory Edition. Made by Brian Upton.
I can’t get higher than Eric Zimmerman… my daughter saw Frank Lantz though.
Edit: the full list, as provided by commenters:
The debates about “what is a game” happened between multiple overlapping circles that have very little to do with one another… “Games” is never going to fall into one bucket or critical lens… We enrich ourselves and our mutual understanding not by claiming pre-eminence of one circle, but by learning to move between them.
As regular readers know, I have been involved in a lot of discussions about “formalism” in games over the last few years. This talk was an attempt to reset the conversation with insights into “formalism in the real world” as Brendan Keogh put it on Twitter, a look into the ways in which looking at the formal structure of games is able to help out and illuminate all sorts of games criticism. Including “softer” or more humanistic approaches, such as historiography, study of play, and cultural studies approaches.To that end, I deployed a set of analogies from other media: fine art, and poetry, and music, to help draw connections between the ways formal approaches and even notation are used in these other fields, and how we might use them in ours.
My talk is below the fold (hover over the slides for the notes text), and for the full transcript plus a link to the video, go here.
There were many other talks I highly recommend… the entire Twitch stream is available (see that same link) and lasts 8 hours!
Here are the slides for the design track keynote I gave yesterday.
And here they are as a PDF. Edit: thanks to Alexandre Houdent for providing a version of the PDF that works on all OSes…
Among the topics: a recap of Theory of Fun, discussion of what I would change about it today, and all the thoughts it led me to: game grammar, games as art, games as math, the ethics of games, gamification, etc. With a dash of Classical philosophy.
I had the shakes bad before I started… but it felt like it came together in the end.
Apologies to anyone whose face I rendered unrecognizable. And the unlabelled woman is Jane McGonigal.
The press coverage so far:
A challenge for you all: can you name all these people without peeking at the slides? Continue reading »
