Fun and Accessibility

In this blog today I will be talking about what a fun game is and how a game is fun. Video games are for entertainment and learning purposes. With entertainment being half, if not all, of a game's purpose for existence, fun becomes a critical aspect of design for a game. Let's get into some more detail on fun in games.

What key elements would be used for seeing if a game is fun? Well, the dramatic elements that I talked about in my third lecture will be good to check if games are fun. More specifically, let's look at challenge, play, and story. These elements will emotionally hook your player's into your game and having a player immersed into your game will cause them to have fun.

When it comes to challenge, there are very important aspects the we need to know. First, reaching and exceeding goals is an important part of challenge. The way how a player can exceed goals is by giving them subgoals or bonus objectives to also complete while finishing the main goal. Competing against other opponents to give the player someone to compare themselves to is a natural challenge for players. Stretching a player's personal limits allows player's to challenge themselves. Exercising difficult skills gives the player the chance to master and display certain skillsets. Choice creates situations where players must weigh their choices and can be found as a challenge.

There are 7 natural types of play:

Living out fantasies
Social interaction
Exploration and discovery
Collection of things
Stimulation of senses and imagination
Self-expression and performance
Construction/Deconstruction

With each type of play in a game, there is more and more fun added to a game. Using StarCraft as an example, you can live out the fantasy of controlling a large army, you can socially interact with your team and opponent, explore the map and discover where your enemy is, collect minerals and gas, imagine being in this universe with alien races, being able to do what you want and seeing a performance report after, and finally being able to build and destroy what your opponent builds. Since StarCraft has all 7 types of play it makes the game very fun.

Continuing with StarCraft as our example, this game had one of the best stories actually winning best story award recently. Story is a powerful mechanism for engaging people's emotions. The story naturally tells the tales of a specific hero with their ups and downs in a critical time in their life. Within the story, there needs to be a created drama to make empathy. This makes the player have something to relate to as well.  The mechanic of story in StarCraft that takes their story one step above this is that it gives the player choices to how they want to go through the story. There is a choice in the order of the story. The incredible story on top of this mechanic gives StarCraft a very big fun factor for their game.

On the topic of decisions, let's briefly list and explain the types of decisions. There are 8 different types of decisions:

Hollow - no real consequences
Obvious - no real decision
Uninformed - an arbitrary choice
Informed - where the player has information
Dramatic - taps into a player's emotional state
Weighted - a balanced decision with consequences on both sides
Immediate - has an immediate impact
Long-Term - whose impact will be felt down the road

To end of this blog, I would like to discuss fun killers that need to be avoided. Excessive amounts of micromangement can kill the fun of a game. I have found this in StarCraft to be a fun killer at times but it is part of the challenge where it stretches the player's limits causing it to be fun. StarCraft stretches the player's limits just enough to not break it and kill the fun. Stagnation will also kill fun. Repetition, balance of power, and having a negative feedback loop will kill the fun in the game. I have also found that an insurmountable amount of obstacles will drain the fun out of games. Having arbitrary events will bring the fun down to a minimal. Finally, predictable paths will make the game boring from being to easy. Easy, boring games are not fun and should be avoided.