PDF Summary:A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster

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Games and Reality

Games are obviously not reality—a game of Monopoly won’t cause you to lose your mortgage—but they do mirror reality. They are iconic depictions of patterns in the real world.

Games define formal systems that are cleaner than reality; they exclude noise, and thus the patterns of the game are readily absorbed.

However, games do teach aspects of understanding that carry over into reality, like how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine.

Games and Rigidity

Games that rigidly define rules and situations are more susceptible to mathematical analysis. The more rigidly constructed your game is, the more limited it will be. This is why a relatively simple game like Tic Tac Toe is more limited and less replayable than a complicated game like chess.

For games to be long-lasting and keep the attention of the player, they need to integrate less rigidity and more complexity. These may be math problems we don’t know the solution to, or more complex and unpredictable variables like human psychology or physics.

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• There is depth to the game, but this is below their level of interest.
• There seem to be no patterns whatsoever. A game that is too chaotic is unenjoyable.
• The game reveals its patterns too quickly or too slowly.
• The player masters the game entirely. There is nothing new to learn.
• The player cheats and finds a more direct path to the goal. This bypasses the patterns that the game asked the player to master.

It’s ok for games to become boring. Every game is destined to become boring.

• Humans are efficient problem solvers, and they want to reach the goal as expediently as possible, by making things predictable. Sometimes this involves cheating.

Once a game gets boring and doesn’t teach anything new, it needs to encourage you to move on. Games should not exist to fulfill power fantasies.

• Power fantasies provide comfort—you can exercise mastery with little risk, and get a break from a challenging life in reality.
• The risk here is that people get false positive feedback in a static world without improving or learning anything new. Given how rapidly the world is changing, this complacency is maladaptive.

Therefore, **as a game designer,...

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Likewise, there are plenty of skills that would be useful in the modern day that we haven’t naturally evolved. Games can teach these skills.

For example, the game Simcity teaches large-scale network building and resource management, in ways that cavemen wouldn’t have needed to be concerned with.

The author suggests these counterintuitive behaviors that would be useful in the modern day:

• Avoiding xenophobia—empathizing with people not in our in-group
• Questioning obedience to leaders
• Resolving problems without the use of force
• Understanding complex relationships, such as how peace treaties affect oil prices

Games for some of the examples above do exist, but they’re niche. Why are they less popular than the ones that teach obsolete skills? The author suggests that simpler games that don’t challenge us and require thought are more pleasant—they allow us to stay in the pleasant subconscious.

Lateral Thinking

Games may also teach lateral thinking, or finding alternative ways to reach the goal. This is sometimes known as cheating.

Circumventing rules has been useful in warfare, such as guerrilla ambushes during the Revolutionary War.

**In games, we...

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The holy grail is a game that provides never-ending challenges, requires a wide range of skills to succeed, and has a difficulty curve that perfectly adjusts to your skill level over time. This sounds a lot like life.

This is why many great games with enduring popularity are competitive head-to-head games. Having other opponents provides an infinite number of challenges.

Gameplay Paradigms

Games also feature gameplay paradigms, such as:

• Get to the other side
  • Examples: Frogger, Donkey Kong
• Visit every location and find secrets
  • This trains being thorough, having patience, and confronting the desire to proceed to the final goal
  • Examples: Pac-Man, Q-Bert
• Time limits
  • This trains the rote mastery of movements so it becomes subconscious.
  • Strategy games rarely have time limits because they’re not about automatic responses.
• Powerups
• Gamification is often layered on top of systems that lack the interpretability of a good game. A good reward structure does not make a good game.

Despite the vast number of game titles, new games typically improve only incrementally in the play space.

The author argues that...

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Games have historically been associated with males. This might be because it suited their brains, and games were designed by people with the same bias.

Female players tend to gravitate to games with more emphasis on relationships, narrative, and empathy. They tend to avoid games with complex abstract systems and spatial reasoning.

• Most popular among women are puzzle and parlor games.

As males age, they show hormonal shifts that bring them closer to women. Thus, you’d expect their play styles to shift over to be similar to women.

• As partial evidence, men convicted of violent crime show higher testosterone levels than nonviolent criminals. Likewise, men with lower testosterone might prefer games with less typically-male traits.

Research shows that girls who play “boys’ games” like sports tend to break out of traditional gender roles.

• In contrast, co-ed settings where boys and girls are together tend to further polarize the genders. Each gender is driven away from the areas they are supposed to be weaker in.

There Is No Universal Game

**Given all this variation between people’s preferences, it’s impossible for any single game to appeal to...

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Differences Between Games and Stories

Games feature stories, but the author argues that games and stories are different:

• Games tend to teach by direct experience. Stories teach vicariously through the experiences of others.
• Games objectify, quantify, and classify—they are rigid. Stories blur, deepen, and are good at empathy—they feel softer and more nuanced.
• Games are external—about people’s actions. Stories are internal—about people’s emotions and thoughts.
• Games generate player narratives. Stories provide a narrative to the audience.

Other points about stories:

• Some weaker games are more narrative than game. They’re the equivalent of asking the player to solve a crossword puzzle to turn the next page of the novel.
• Often games have stories that reflect the core themes of the game. Since many games tend to be about power and control, the stories tend to be juvenile.
• Often stories are merely used to give positive feedback to the player.

Games cannot convey the same breadth that literature can, but they provide greater richness, complexity, and interactivity.

Instead of trying to think about whether games can feature stories, invert the...