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.
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Well, twenty-five years is a long time. Half a life, in fact!
Given that I actually started work on UO on September 1st 1995, it’s actually more than half. The fact that the game is still running is a testament to the devoted community and the ongoing maintenance over the years from countless people.
I note a lack of thinkpieces and articles, this time around. The fact of the matter is that the most frequently targeted gamer audience wasn’t born when UO came out. A lot of the folks streaming about games weren’t born yet either.
I saw a post on Reddit yesterday that asked “how come no other MMOs have done open world housing, besides ArcheAge?” Ah well….
In many ways the influence of UO is so pervasive that it isn’t visible. Whether it’s Runescape, Minecraft, Eve, DayZ or Neopets, those younger folks probably played something that was inspired by UO in some fashion, and don’t realize how big a shift from prior games it represented. These days, when people say they are sick of crafting being in everything — it makes me want to apologize a little bit. Won’t apologize for games that let you sit, decorate a house, or go fishing, though.
I’m running low on specific stories about UO and its development, so instead, I’ll just point back at older ones:
Read More “Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary”I just watched a couple of videos about sandbox vs themepark games (in particular one by NerdSlayer and another by Josh “Strife” Hayes)… One thing that struck me about the ways players often talk about this (because at this point the history is so old) is that people think of sandbox as the older version of MMOs, and themeparks as newer. But that’s not right – sandbox is not the older form.
Sandboxes are the evolution of themepark MMOs, not the antecedent.
Part of the reason why this isn’t clear is because most players today haven’t played what themeparks were originally, back on the text virtual worlds called MUDs that led directly to MMOs. Given that I suspect I am partly to blame for these two words having currency in the first place, I thought I’d put in my two cents.
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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