So, how can fun be hard? Well, as I talked about challenges,
problem solving, mastery, completion, overcoming obstacles, all of these things
are fun in their own rite. So, we think of those things as fun,
because the fun represents accomplishment.
It represents overcoming something. And that's what makes the activity fun,
if we're able to reach that plateau. So, second category is hard fun.
Third category is people fun. Guess I'm drawing the other one, so I'm
drawing easy, as well. The fun of interacting with others.
The fun of working together on a team. The fun of socializing, fun that requires
other people. Now, that could wind up being hard fun or
easy fun as well, but this differentiates out the aspect of that fun that comes
from the social interaction. And finally, there is what she calls
serious fun. Well, fun can be hard.
How can fun be serious? I thought serious was the opposite of
fun, not really. First of all, some kinds of fun tie into
serious real objectives. So, I talked about the fun of giving to
others. There's a fun in doing things that are
meaningful. There's a fun in doing things that are
good for the planet, good for your family, good for your community.
There's also a fun in doing things that have meaning for you.
So, you recall that when I talked about some of the aspects of games.
The magic circle and so forth. Part of what makes something game-like,
is that some objective that has no real outside purpose, has a purpose within the
game and it becomes engaging, because in the game that's meaningful to you.
So, this relates to fun, as well. In particular, when we're talking about
things like collections, pulling together something, getting a whole bunch of
badges to unlock some sort of award. It's fun because, it's meaningful in some
serious way, for you at that time. It may not be something that someone else
finds fun or meaningful, but for you there is some objective involved, some
meaning involved, and so Lazzaro would call that serious fun.
Four different kinds of fun. All different and not necessarily
mutually exclusive. So, the same game may be one or more of
these things. The point is when we think about fun, we
can't limit ourselves to just focusing on one aspect or another.
If we think that fun is just something easy and casual, we'll miss the
opportunity to engage people and make things fun using some of these other
categories. Now, other game designers that come up
with their own frameworks. One of them that's fairly well known is
from a game designer named Mark LeBlanc. Who developed a framework that I'll talk
about a little bit later for conceptualizing games.
And as part of that, he came up with eight different kinds of fun.
Slightly different template than what Lazzaro talked about.
I won't go into these in detail. But just to get you thinking about
different ways to structure thinking about fun.
LeBlanc talks about the eight as sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge,
fellowship, discovery, expression, and submission.
That last one submission is just the casual kind of fun, just something as a
pastime. And if you really want to dig into what
fun means for game design, I recommend a book to you by Raph Koster, A Theory of
Fun for Game Design. A classic book, talking about how game
designers can think about fun and apply it.
It's very conversational, gets you thinking.
So, if you're looking for something else to dig deeper, that would be a good place
to go. Alright, so some take a ways.
What do we learn from this extended discussion about fun?
Three things that I would have you take away from this.
The first is should go without saying, fun doesn't just happen, it has to be
designed. I'm going to talk later in the course
about design frameworks for gamification. And it's really important to understand
that fun is not just something that's out there in the world, sometimes things just
happen to be fun. But if we're talking about making
something game like, about motivating people to go and use less electricity, or
to go and spend more time on your website, or to go and work together on a
team to solve a problem on a project at work.
We have to build systems that are expressly designed to unlock these
different aspects of fun. Second is, fun isn't always easy.
Fun isn't always simple, fun isn't always a purely happy positive experience, fun
can be hard. Fun can be challenging, fun can be
serious. And we tend to ignore that when we're
thinking about fun, we shouldn't when we're designing gamified systems.
Finally, there are different kinds of fun.
Whether you take Lazzaro's four or LeBlanc's eight, or some other template.
The point is, fun is a very nuanced concept.
And we should look to exploit as many kinds of fun as possible.
It's not always the right answer, or the best answer to focus in on one kind of
fun, because we're missing opportunities to make things fun in different ways.
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
