Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and many other writers worked with the idea that characters are unknowable. Books like
Jacob’s Room
and
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
play with the established notions of self and work toward a realization that other people are essentially unknowable. However, they also propose an alternate notion of knowability: that of “negative space,” whereby a form is understood and its nature grasped by observing the perturbations around it. The term is from the world of pictorial art, which provides many useful insights when discussing the problem of mimesis.
    All of these are organized around the same principles; that of negative space, that of embellishing the space around a central theme, of observing perturbations and reflections. There was a zeitgeist, it is true, but there was also conscious borrowing from art form to art form, and it occurs in large part because no art form stands alone; they bleed into one another.
    Can you make an Impressionist game? A game where the formal system conveys the following?
    The object you seek to understand is not visible or depicted.
Negative space is more important than shape.
Repetition with variation is central to understanding.
    The answer is, of course you can. It’s called Minesweeper .

    In the end, the endeavor that games engage in is not at all dissimilar to the endeavors of any other art form. The principal difference is not the fact that they consist of formal systems. Look at the following lists:
    Meter, rhyme, spondee, slant rhyme, onomatopoeia, caesura, iamb, trochee, pentameter, rondel, sonnet, verse
Phoneme, sentence, accent, fricative, word, clause, object, subject, punctuation, case, pluperfect, tense
Meter, fermata, key, note, tempo, coloratura, orchestration, arrangement, scale, mode
Color, line, weight, balance, compound, multiply, additive, refraction, closure, model, still life, perspective
Rule, level, score, opponent, boss, life, power-up, pick-up, bonus round, icon, unit, counter, board
    Let’s not kid ourselves—the sonnet is caged about with as many formal systems as a game is.
    If anything, the great irony about games, put in context with other media, is that they may afford less scope to the designer, who has less freedom to impose, less freedom to propagandize. Games are not good at conveying specifics, only generalities. It is easy to make a game that tells you that small groups can prevail over large ones, or the converse. And that may be a valuable and deeply personal statement to make. It’s a lot harder to make a game that conveys the specific struggle of a group of World War II soldiers to rescue one other man from behind enemy lines, as the film Saving Private Ryan does. The designer who wants to use game design as an expressive medium must be like the painter and the musician and the writer, in that they must learn what the strengths of the medium are, and what messages are best conveyed by it.

Chapter 10. The Ethics of Entertainment
    Nobody actually interacts with games on an abstract level exclusively. You don’t play the abstract diagrams of games that I have drawn on the facing pages; you play the ones that have little spaceships and laser bolts and things that go Boom. The core of gameplay may be about the emotion I am terming “fun,” the emotion that is about learning puzzles and mastering responses to situations, but this doesn’t mean that the other sorts of things we lump under fun do not contribute to the overall experience.
    People like playing go using well-burnished beads on a wooden board and they like buying Lord of the Rings chess sets and glass Chinese checkers sets. The aesthetic experience of playing these games matters. When you pick up a well-carved wooden game piece, you respond to it in terms of aesthetic appreciation—one of the other forms of enjoyment. When you play table tennis against an opponent, you feel visceral sensations as you stretch your arm to the limit and smash