Some of my favorite games didn’t keep me playing so much for the interactive experience as for the experience proper: in Aquaria I really liked just swimming around and exploring all the passages of the underwater world, seeing what there was to see. In Shadow of the Colossus, just riding around on Agro was a surreal and rich experience. I want to make games like that.

The other thing I love (more than ‘fun’) is storytelling. I await the game that will bring tears to my eyes. More than that I’d like to make one myself.

But I still expect I’ll be working towards compelling gameplay as I do so. Sinner I am. Must that interfere with these other goals?

@Grapefrukt
Definitely, oh to be young again.

@Dan
I couldn’t agree more with The Fun Theory, I think that’s dead on. I never saw the point of exercising for exercising’s sake, and instead played sports/games for that.

That said, I think Fun makes the most sense when applied to those mundane tasks, no? It certainly works for the mundane task that is WoW. But isn’t there more to life than making something more compelling through Fun? While I think you’re probably right, I feel that when Fun is paramount, people will almost always focus on “gaming” the game that surrounds the activity you’re enveloping in Fun.

Take for instance an adventure game. The underlying story could be a really interesting take on Nazi controlled France with a lot of different perspectives from all sides of the conflict, but in the end the thing the player cares MOST about is how this pipe fits into this crank to make the music box play the right song so the door opens. After all, that’s our medium, the interactive player actions. It’s not the cutscenes and the wall-of-text journals, but what the player DOES that’s most important.

Gravitation, a simple game with a simple set of rules managed to impact me to the point that I was still thinking about it over a year afterward. Not thinking about it in the sense that, “oh that’s an awesome game! So many design lessons there!” but within the context of my own life, what the relationship between work and society meant to me and how I could change to right that.

You can argue Gravitation is Fun, or at least has some in there, but it certainly wasn’t designed with that in mind. Without that game, I wouldn’t have been as aware of the disconnection between inspiration and hard-work within my own life. So perhaps this still is Play, but it’s a different way of looking at it, like the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead of using Play to make the dull interesting, Rohrer uses Play to make the complicated simple. That’s a mark of outstanding art in my opinion.

Both sides are not mutually exclusive, and games that manage to fuse both types through gameplay elegantly will be the finest video games known to man.

[ As for your challenge:
I honestly don't think Gray has one iota of Fun in it. Play it here: http://intuitiongames.com/gray ]

However, my philosophy is that there’s always ways to make these strange tasks in our new environment appealing and even fun, if only slightly adapted to better jive with our ancient instincts. This is a great set of studies of exactly that:
http://www.thefuntheory.com

(I suppose the book
http://www.theoryoffun.com
is all about this too – I typed the wrong URL in first ;)

So, my revised and updated conclusion from the last comment might be that perhaps there’s a place for games that bridge this gap between the typically boring/tedious/unpleasant tasks we’re faced with in our modern lives, and what we actually find to be fun. Mint.com is almost an example of this applied to personal finances. It’s almost to the point of being fun to set up and monitor budgets in their slick interface. It’s like playing the game of life in the 21st century!

Ok, that’s all you get of my wee-hour ramblings for now! :)

Not knowing what you’re doing is a blessing, but once you loose that the picnic is over. I guess it’s a bit like the dreaded second record for bands in a way.

(under “Can effective workouts be fun?”)

A bit of elaboration on what I wrote there:

I believe we’re slaves to our evolutionary heritage. The circuits in our brain are still set up to pursue the behaviors and stimuli which were important to us during our (pre-civilization) development as a species. Specifically, what’s important to an individual is first survival, and then replication. How to best achieve those two primary objectives has changed dramatically in the last few thousand years, but our wiring has not kept up with that change. No wonder grinding (read “foraging”) to level up (become more powerful and ‘alpha’) are so compelling in WoW, and porn is the biggest business on the internet – they’re tickling our instincts to be compelled (obsessed?) with these kinds of activities and rewards.

“Play” is the word closest associated with fun. Play is super important to survival in both young humans and other animals; it’s literally practice to learn skills that WERE vital to survive long enough to replicate back in Africa. And that’s exactly why playing games that tickle/exercise these (often obsolete) circuits in our heads are described as being fun, even if they’re a total waste of time in our modern society (again, think WoW).

So, with this (broader?) definition of fun, I disagree that it’s is a dead horse as far as game development goes. Show me a game that truly isn’t fun, and I’ll show you a game not worth playing/experiencing.

- D

Mabey games are just what fun is.

What about adventure games (all about story) and casual games (zero need and thus rarely any story) versus shooters (Carmack quote applies)?

I haven’t put a ton of thought into this, but I think you muddied the issue a bit. Let’s continue with the Movie corollary:

We strive to make ‘Good’ games, just like people try to make ‘Good’ movies. We have Fun, Serious, Porno, Sex, Comedy, Adventure, and Action games, just like there are equivalent movies.

Making a ‘Fun’ game says, to me, that you’re trying to get that critical review where the pull-line is simply “Fun!” on your software box. You don’t want that on your porn, you don’t want that on your serious stuff, heck – you probably don’t want it on half your action games.

At the same time, any movie – of any genre – could be said to be “fun” if it has a dash of comedy in it.

I don’t think we’re all chasing fun. We’re all chasing “Good” in whatever our niche is, and that definition will change from niche to niche… From audience to audience.. and from developer to developer.

More specifically, I’d say all devs are looking to make non-boring/engaging games, using their respective talents.

Regardless, I think this whole issue is like defining “love” and what exactly a “relationship” entails. :)