Any more corrections to A Theory of Fun?
Paraglyph Press is telling me that A Theory of Fun for Game Design may be going back for a third printing soon. In the second printing, we corrected a few errors and added in reader reactions at the back. I haven’t heard of any further errors in the book, so I figured, why not open-source the task of finding them?
So if you know of any factual errors or things that should be corrected, please post a comment here!
I read through your book and generally liked everything you had to say. There is one thing I would argue against though. Although I guess this wouldn’t qualify as a technical correction so much as a personal opinion, you might be interested in what I have to say regardless. Near the end of your book you describe what games are not, or at least what they are not required to include. Perhaps I am wrong, but I got the impression that you believed that games and stories should be separate entities. That is, a game is not required to have a plot, conflicts, the ability to draw emotion from the player, and so forth. While I believe you can make a perfectly good game without any sort of substantial story (Pac Man is a perfect example), I also believe that you can make a better game (better in terms of the social impact of the game) if you can integrate a story in a meaningful way. When I say meaningful here, I don’t mean include the story as some sort of extra decoration to drape over the gameplay elements (non-interactive cut-scenes are a perfect example of this). Rather, I pose this idea: what if storytelling or fictional elements were integrated as part of the gameplay? What if the pattern learning involved things like observing peoples emotions to predict their actions, or piecing together clues to determine a mystery? In essence, what if the pattern learning revolved around classic story-telling mechanisms? Of course, to have any sort of lasting appeal, this would required that stories be dynamically generated, or (in the case of a multiplayer game) generated via the actions of players. To generate a good dynamic storyline would take some sophisticated AI in a single player game I think, but as for a multiplayer game…I have been building one for the past two years, and I am playing with this concept. I guess time will tell if it works or not.
I agree that a game can be better if it succeeds in being both great in terms of gameplay and also great in all the other aspects — story, music, presentation, etc. I don’t believe that a game is at all required to do so to be great — Tetris comes to mind as the obvious example. I can’t think of anything that a story would add to Tetris, really. I can think of areas where it can be improved with other things, like presentation.