Masaya Matsuura’s foreword

As I’ve mentioned before, the Japanese edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design is out now. Masaya Matsuura was kind enough to write a foreword for this edition, and I thought I’d share it here. I met Matsuura-san for the first time at GDC this year, where we were the joint presenters of the “First Penguin Award” — Matsuura-san because he was last year’s winner, and myself because I do this online game thing sometimes, and the winner was Dr. Richard Bartle.

Now, I of course knew of Masaya’s work — when Parappa the Rapper came out, everyone in our family was hooked on it pretty hardcore. I had wanted to play VibRibbon, but it never came out in the US (alas! It’s a fantastic game, adding chording to the lexicon of rhythm games in a very unique way). With his company, Nanaon-sha, Masaya has pioneered the intersection of games and music, and most particularly, music through gameplay.

When I walked into the greenroom in which we would be held prisoner for hours on end, I didn’t know what to expect. I chatted for a bit with the other folks back there — namedrop alert! — Tommy Tallarico and Dave Perry and Kathy Schoback, I believe. And there was someone I thought was maybe my co-presenter, wearing knit cap, looking quite unsure of what was going on.

They handed us a truly terrible script to perform. And in between waiting, we tried chatting across the language barrier. Once we got onto the subject of music, it was all good. I had my laptop with me, and played him recordings of some of the instrumental guitar pieces I’ve done; a photo was snapped (by Kathy, I think) showing Masaya and his assistant Akiko both learning over my lap, ears to the tinny speakers.

We kept in touch afterwards, and they were kind enough to send me a copy of VibRibbon (hooray!), and even do an interview for HyperPS2 Magazine. We traded tips on books on cognition and how the brain works, a mutual interest. When the time came that O’Reilly in Japan asked me if I knew any developers in Japan who might be willing to do a foreword, he’s the one I thought of. You may have seen him around on the blog from time to time as well.

I hope to see him again at GDC this year, and maybe even tour him around San Diego afterwards. In the meantime, here’s the foreword he so kindly provided for the Japanese edition, and translated himself.

Endorsement by Masaya Matsuura

A game? It’s O.K. if it is “just fun”.

I assume this is the prevailing opinion among game fans.
“Just fun” is a bottleneck in the stable supply of commercial products.
Game creators to date adopted the method of “taking a wild guess and leaving everything to luck (p140)(note: this is not the original expression. This is the translation of the Japanese translation.)
I’m not the exception. (I wish I could say “ I wasn’t…”)
Needless to say, I made a lot of “wrong guesses” and as a result, some titles were called “Kuso-gae (shitty games)”.
If I wanted to clean my tarnished image, I should make efforts every day to find innovative idea that lead to “just fun”. Right?
Having said so, what exactly are “the efforts” to find innovative idea for “just fun”?
The one of the answers is this; “ Omoshiroi-no-game design”!
When I first saw Mr. RaphKoster, the book’s author, he had a face with a stubbly beard and wore glasses. It was hard to tell his nationality, age, occupation or anything at first glance. I even felt something fishy about him.
But then, he came up to me and said “ Are you Matsuura-san? I’m Raph Koster, I’m the one who go up on the stage with you to present this award tonight.”
It was then I felt something special about him, the “super” goodness of his character, which was totally opposite to my first impression.
At that time, we had “meaningful” small talks covering various topics.
This encounter gave me the opportunity to write this.

After reading Japanese version of the book, I reaffirmed the importance of this.
When it comes to the process of game creation, especially at the beginning of the process, it is difficult to share delusion of imagination with staff members.
By the time they all got the idea of the image, it is already at the end of production schedule.
That is why we often push ourselves to our limit and find it difficult to sustain.
What’s worse is, the end results could be a total commercial disaster.
It could be too wonderful(?) to remember.
Even in such a situation, we have to move on. And usually we don’t have enough time to learn from past failure.
If a game creator or designer is lucky enough to achieve commercial success, he or she may have the luxury of exploring the essence of “Fun”, as little as it may be.
Or, he or she may not even want to find the answer.
Due to various factors, drilling down on “Fun” was slow in progress.
The games already overtook the movies and the music in terms of expressions, size of industry and so on.
The effect they have on people is so large, games should not be treated too casually such things “to “kill time” or “ relieve stress”.
How we’re going to cope with concurrently growing( suppose to grow?)demand?
There are a pile of issues we need to address.
The goal of book is to clarify the challenging issue of “what is Fun”, which probably afford the demand that I mentioned before.
It is the very first and most aggressive book on Fun that covers a wide spectrum of areas such as recognition theory, gender understanding, learning patterns, chaos theory, graph theory, literature criticism and so forth. (p173)
IT is a thought-provoking book and I myself gained a new understanding by reading it.
I sincerely hope that many readers will gain benefits from this book.

I’ll work on getting this posted on the main Theory of Fun website too.