Theory of Fun for Game Design (12 page)

When a player cheats in a game, they are choosing a battlefield that is broader in context than the game itself.

Cheating is a sign that the player is in fact grokking the game. From a strict evolutionary point of view, cheating is a winning strategy. Duelists who shoot first while their opponent is still pacing off are far more likely to reproduce.

There’s a good reason why we instinctively and jealously preserve the notions of sportsmanship and fair play. If the lesson taught by a particular game comes up in the real world, the cheat may not work. Cheating may not prepare us correctly. This is why kicking an opponent during a soccer match is considered poor form. Whatever soccer’s underlying mechanics are teaching us, kicking an opponent is outside its formal framework.

Players and designers often make the distinction between “cheating” and “exploiting a loophole.” They always struggle to define this, but it boils down to whether or not the extraneous action is one that resides within the magic circle of the game’s framework or not. Unsurprisingly, exploiters are often the
most
expert players of a game. They see the places where the rules don’t quite jibe. This is also why they often think that it’s unfair when sticklers for the rules tell them that what they did is not allowed. Their logic goes something like “if the game permits it, then it’s legal.”

But the game is usually intended to put players through a particular challenge, and while a bad design may allow the player to circumvent the challenge, we resent it
because
it’s circumvention. It’s not exactly evidence of mastery of a technique to solve the problem. Often games are trying to teach techniques, they don’t merely give players goals and tell them to solve them any way they please.

We can rectify this to a degree via good game design (and even better, we can make games that don’t prescribe solutions—that’s a rather limited game, and it severely undermines what games are about). But in the end, we’re fighting a losing battle against a natural human tendency: to get better at things.

Consider the oddity of games that intentionally create situations that we have long since moved past in the real world: games about fighting wars with bayonets, games about sailing ships, or games about an artisan-based economy. We’ve advanced in technology, and we have cruise missiles, aircraft carriers, and factories now.

Games, however, do not permit progress. Games do not permit innovation. They present a pattern. Innovating out of a pattern is by definition outside the magic circle. You don’t get to change the physics of a game.

Human beings are
all
about progress. We like life to be easier. We’re lazy that way. We like to find ways to avoid work. We like to find ways to keep from doing something over and over. We dislike tedium, sure, but the fact is that we crave
predictability
. Our whole life is built on it. Unpredictable things are stuff like drive-by shootings, lightning bolts that fry us, smallpox, food poisoning—unpredictable things can
kill
us! We tend to avoid them. We instead prefer sensible shoes, pasteurized milk, vaccines, lightning rods, and laws. These things aren’t perfect, but they do significantly reduce the odds of unpredictable things happening to us.

And since we dislike tedium, we’ll allow unpredictability, but only inside the confines of predictable boxes, like games or TV shows. Unpredictability means new patterns to learn, therefore unpredictability is fun. So we like it, for enjoyment (and therefore, for learning). But the stakes are too high for us to want that sort of unpredictability under normal circumstances. That’s what games are for in the first place—to package up the unpredictable and the learning experience into a space and time where there is no risk.

The natural instinct of a game player is to make the game more predictable because then they are more likely to win.

This leads to behaviors like “bottom-feeding,” where a player will intentionally take on weaker opponents under the sensible logic that a bunch of sure wins is a better strategy than gambling it all on an iffy winner-take-all battle. Players running an easy level two hundred times to build up enough lives so that they can cruise through the rest of the game with little risk is the equivalent of stockpiling food for winter: it’s just
the smart thing to do
.

This is what games are
for
. They teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. Phrased another way,
the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun
. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.

So players often intentionally suck the fun out of a game in hopes they can learn something new (in other words, find something fun) once they complete the task. They’ll do it because they perceive it (correctly) as the optimal strategy for getting ahead. They’ll do it because they see others doing it, and it’s outright unnatural for a human being to see another human being succeeding at something and not want to compete.

All of this happens because the human mind is goal driven. We make pious statements like “it’s the journey, not the destination,” but that’s mostly wishful thinking. The rainbow is pretty and all, and we may well enjoy gazing at it, but while you were gazing, lost in a reverie, someone else went and dug up the pot of gold at the end of it.

Rewards are one of the key components of a successful game activity; if there isn’t a quantifiable advantage to doing something, the brain will often discard it out of hand. What are the other fundamental components of a game element, the atoms of games, so to speak? Game designer Ben Cousins calls these “ludemes,” the basic units of gameplay. We’ve talked about several of them, such as “visit everywhere” and “get to the other side.” There are many left to discover, we hope. In the end, though, they are almost always made up of the same elementary particles.

Successful games tend to incorporate the following elements:

A game having all of these elements hits the right cognitive buttons to be fun. If a game involves no preparation, we say it relies on chance. If there’s no sense of space, we call it trivial. If there’s no core mechanic, there’s no game at all. If there’s no range of challenges, we exhaust it quickly. If there’s no multiple choices to make, it’s simplistic. And if skill isn’t required, it’s tedious.

There are also some features that should be present to make the experience a learning experience: