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Hi Monty,

This reminds me of something I’ve just read in a book. It talked about how many years ago some of the first chemists thought there were 4 elements; water, fire, earth and wind. And that everything could be broken down into these basic elements. After many years they discovered in fact there were more like 100 odd and the workings of which they still don’t really understand today.

What I’m trying to say, in a round about way, is that people try as hard as the possibly can to ’summarise’ a very complex phenomena with a very basic and often unusable rule.

In short, write this one off as one for the lame.

You should try reading ‘the collapse of chaos’ by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. It talks about this human tendancy to turn complexity into simplicity.

Rod.

green_rod@hotmail.com

PS At least one other person agrees with you:
http://www.justso.org/php/review_closeup.php?review_id=101

In all fairness to the guy who wrote the analysis, it was an interesting scientific attempt. I’d even maybe say a lot of it is even correct from a text book point of view.

But so what if fun can be analyzed?

It doesn’t scare me to know corporate marketing cocks can catergorise what makes up an important human emotion. I don’t think just because someone can catergorise what makes a game fun means they have struck upon a magic formula that will then guarantee a hit with people world wide. All it means is they know of the tools that are used by the respected developers in creating a great game.

Just because one knows of every paint brush and colour name on an artist’s palette doesn’t mean they can paint a masterpiece. That takes something far deeper than learnt information. That takes imagination and talent. At the end of the day the guy who wrote 14 forms of fun is simply an art critic - let’s see what he can actually paint himself. Then we’ll see how far his catergories get him.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” - Albert Einstein

Cheers

Doug

This notion that the analysis of games is worthless — let alone the domain of inhuman reductionists — is both pompous and misguided.

Are you seriously suggesting that ‘fun’ is so ephemeral, so fragile, so exalted a concept that mere discussion of it will somehow corrupt or diminish it? Do you set fun above and beyond other aspects of the human condition? Should philosophers and psychologists stop delving into the nature of perception, emotion, cognition and action, lest they somehow strip us of our souls?

Clearly not. That’d be stupid.

Examination and investigation into the nature of play and games is essential if this medium/craft is to develop. People like Doug Church, Raph Koster and Wil Wright (to name but a few) ask the questions (and offer the answers) which continue to push the boundaries of what games can do and mean. We need to encourage and nurture such inquiry, not belittle or demonize it as the work of some marketing drone or Henry Ford wannabe.

This does not mean accepting any fanatic’s rantings as the gospel truth, but engaging in open and critical discussion, so that we avoid the hackneyed and lazy conjecture which currently dominates most game design discussions . . . but that is a topic for another time and place.

Yes, this particular article is guilty of many failings. Most fundamental of all is the classic misconception that ‘fun’ is in some way a useful keystone by which to judge or develop quality play experiences. And even if we ignore this fractured foundation, we’re left with a taxonomy that is weak, and a framework for understanding fun that is — to put it gently — unhelpful.

So yes, this particular article offers little insight into game design, but the intent is not evil, and to attempt it was not wrong.

Decrying any such examination of the medium is.

I’m not sure if you meant to, but you actually set up a straw man here - meaning you refuted an argument I wasn’t making. My point wasn’t that the analysis of games is worthless, but that the deconstruction of “fun” into an arbitary list of elements is absurd (I mean that technically, not as an insult). I wasn’t saying “fun” could be diminished by attempting to anyalyse what it is scientifically. I was making the point that as soon as you attempt to do that you are no longer studing “fun” because it can’t be reduced to a formula - there are some things you just can’t shoe horn into the scientific method. All you have done is create a construct and name it “fun”, and by doing so smudge the meaning of the word.

You cannot change the nature of “fun” or other human experiences by studying them. Trying to force them into a list of elements means you end up discussing something else. It reminds me of the joke about a young boy who is searching under a streetlight for a coin he lost. When asked where he lost it, he points into the darkness “over there”. “Then why aren’t you looking over there?” “The light’s better here”.

As I said, it’s the idea that something like “fun” can be systemised that I object to. That way of thinking is indicative of a great deal that is wrong with our modern culture IMHO. That was the basis of modernism, and that argument was lost over 100 years ago (hence post-modernism).

In retrospect, I think I may have overstated, and I implied antagonism toward the author that I didn’t mean. I understand what he was trying to do, but I still say it was (and is) misguided. It’s the assumptions behind the exercise that I’m challenging.

It would be unhelpful for us to descend into a he-said-she-said spat, but re-reading your original editorial, I can’t help but feel the straw man was waving in the cornfield before my arrival on the scene.

Still, I have to admit to now being unclear on the distinction you’re making: Is it that the study of games is possible and even acceptable, but the study of fun is not?

I would still disagree with this notion, but it would be impractical (and possibly offensive) for me to go into details without some confirmation that you are making this distinction.

I look forward to it.

I thought a lot about what I can say to you in response that I haven’t already said, but I can feel the discussion quickly slipping into intellectualism and pedantics. I actually typed up a big response earlier and lost it to a system crash, perhaps fortunately. I can’t explain my position any better than I have, and it’s okay that you disagree. I think I understand your point and I’ve thought about it, but - and we could argue about it for pages - I still hold to mine. In the end it’s a difference of views that goes much deeper than games, and this probably isn’t the forum for a discussion of the history of philosophy :)