theory of fun

Games That Aren’t Really Games…Should We Be Concerned? is an article on the Game Informer website (and maybe the mag too, for all I know) that explores the area of games that aren’t really games, such as the recently released Wii Music.

Curiously enough, the article leads off by using A Theory of Fun to try to figure out what a game is. 🙂 They arrived at this definition:

…for our purposes we needed something solid, and settled on several qualifications mentioned in his book. Ultimately, we chose the most important elements and decided that games are formal systems with rules that require choices, are competitive, have explicit goals and quantifiable outcomes. There…that is a little easier to swallow isn’t it?

They note that I myself think many of the distinctions are sort of irrelevant. Why? Let’s say that you have a game with a quantifiable outcome — Quake, perhaps. Now strip all semblance of score or feedback from it, but still track that stuff internally. What you have left is an activity wherein you shoot, but cannot tell if you hit; and if you hit, you cannot tell if you are doing better than other players. Read More “Game Informer on “Impostor” games”

Dan Cook continues to outpace me on game grammar work, now with a delicious set of slides on applying skill atoms to application design. I already mailed it to several folks here in the office.

Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides.

I just saw that a book was released the other day that teaches people how to use GoogleDocs. The more complexity that you add, the closer you get to something like Word. When we add ‘features’ we hurt learnability and end up turning off users.

Hacks:

• Segmenting features by user skill level,
• Layering less commonly used or expert features so they are out of the way.
• Creating a unifying UI metaphor that lets users understand new tools more easily.
• Elegant information architecture and clean visual design.