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!
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The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid.
I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter.
All three of these are more correctly called puzzles, of course. The main difference between a game and a puzzle is that a puzzle has one real solution, an optimal way through the challenge. In a game, finding an optimal way through the challenge is known as a degenerate strategy or even “solving the game” if you’re a mathematician. This means that really, puzzles and games are terms that are matters of degree, not kind.
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.
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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.
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Today, at the kind invitation of Joe Osborn, I gave a talk for one of the workshops at AAAI-18, one on Knowledge Extraction from Games. I was pretty intimidated about talking at all; any time I stand up in front of people who really know algorithms, systems, or math, I feel like an utter dilettante who is bound to say foolish things. I had been noodling around with some notes around the broad topics of depth and indeterminacy, centered around the idea of games as ternary output machines, so I sent them to him, and he talked me into getting in front of an audience with them.
Along the way, I stumbled into formalizing many of the “game grammar” ideas into an actual Backus-Naur Form grammar. This is something that was mentioned to me casually on Facebook, and which I was aware of from long ago classes on programming, in the context of parsers… but which I hadn’t ever seriously considered as an approach to the more humanities-driven process i was going through with game grammar work. Grammar was just a metaphor! Continue reading »
Five years ago, I was asked to put together a list of the best articles on the website. I did, and it’s been linked as “recommended posts” up on the menu under the Blog section for a few years now.
Just the other day, I was asked by Jordan Amaro (@JordanAMAR0) whether I was ever going to update it. Probably at some point, but in the meantime here’s a list of the ones I think are best from the last five years.
Looking over the list, the things that jump out at me are: a lot more posts about the game business and trends, about general topics like creativity, and about the intersection of the virtual with the real — the way tropes from online worlds are impinging upon our daily lives. I also note quite a lot of looking backward in these: game histories, postmortems, etc. Of course, this was also the period that encompassed the Great Formalism Wars of 2012, which seem overblown given hindsight. And lastly… despite my feeling I am hardly posting anything, this is a pretty nice list for five years!
