Game Fun

Another article about fun, this time you can view it here  Fun is apparently another word for learning... and as we currently know things hat are fun, this article focuses on why those aspects are fun.

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The part of the article lists and describes types of fun.

• Sensation. Games can engage the senses directly. Consider the audio and video “eye candy” of video games; the tactile feel of the wooden roads and houses in Settlers of Catan; or the physical movement involved in playing sports, Dance Dance Revolution, or any game on the NintendoWii. Sensation includes physical movement (good for building muscle) and looking at and hearing things that are interesting (good for detecting opportunities or dangers).

• Fantasy. Games can provide a make-believe world (some might cynically call it “escapism”) that is more interesting than the real world. Fantasy allows the kind of “what-if” scenario part of our brain to get stronger, allowing us to come up with novel ideas.

• Narrative. As we mentioned earlier in passing, games can involve stories, either of the embedded kind that designers put there, or the emergent kind that are created through player action. Narrative is useful for passing on vital information and experience to others in your group, increasing the chance that all of you will survive.

• Challenge. Some games, particularly retro-arcade games, professional sports, and some highly competitive board games like Chess and Go, derive their fun largely from the thrill of competition. Even single-player games like Minesweeper or activities like mountain climbing are fun mainly from overcoming a difficult challenge. Challenge is a convenient way for different humans to show dominance over one another in a relatively safe way – “I can throw this rock further than you” is more useful than “let’s fight to the death” if you’re trying to build a colony.

• Fellowship. Many games have a highly social component to them. I think it is this alone that allows many American board games like Monopoly to continue to sell many copies per year, in spite of the uninteresting decisions and dull mechanics. It is not the game, but the social interaction with family, that people remember fondly from their childhood. Fellowship opens up the possibility of new food sources (a single one of us might get killed hunting a large beast, but a group of us together can take it down). It’s also rather hard to pass on your genetic material to the next generation if you’re alone.

• Discovery. This is rare in board games, but can be found in exploration-type games like Tikal and Entdecker. It is more commonly found in adventure and role-playing video games, particularly games in the Zeldaand Metroid series. Discovery is what makes us want to explore our nearby territory. The more territory we know, the more potential places for us to find food and shelter.

• Expression. By this, I think the MDA authors mean the ability to express yourself through gameplay. Examples include games like Charades orPoker where the way that you act is at least as important as what other actions you take within a game; Dungeons & Dragons where the character you create is largely an expression of your own personal idea; or open-world and sim video games like The Sims or Grand Theft Auto orOblivion or Fable, which are largely concerned with giving the player the tools needed to create their own custom experience. Expression probably comes from the same part of us that is hardwired to communicate through language. Language, and communication in general, are pretty useful.

• Submission. A name that often has my students chuckling with their dirty minds, but the intent is games as an ongoing hobby rather than an isolated event. Consider the metagame and the tournament scene inMagic: the Gathering, the demands of a guild to show up at regular meetings in World of Warcraft, or even the ritualized play of games at a weekly boardgame or tabletop-roleplaying group.

But that's not all types of fun, and even author agrees that his list is incomplete, so they decided to expand it based upon what cavemen found useful... because that means we will find it fun? Yeah...

• Collection. This is the “gathering” part of hunting-and-gathering, so you would expect it to be fun. And it is. When I was a kid, before video games became ubiquitous, the world’s most popular hobby was stamp collecting. In many board games you collect resources or tokens. Trading Card Game players collect cards. In the video game world, we’ve been collecting things since Mario first started collecting coins.
• Spatial Reasoning. Primitive humans needed to figure out spatial relationships in order to build useful tools (for example, if you want to find a big stick to make a crude ladder or bridge, you need to be able to estimate length; if you want to stick two pieces of wood together, you need to be able to figure out how to make them fit). Many games make use of spatial relationships, from Tetris to Pente.
• Advancement. I see this as kind of a meta-skill, the skill of learning new skills, which is obviously useful to a primitive human that needs to learn a lot of skills. We see this formalized in games all the time, from the overt Experience Points and Levels to finding new items or buying new weapons that give us better stats or new capabilities.
• Finding Shortcuts. Finding novel, undiscovered ways to work around problems in ways that take less effort than normal helped primitive humans to conserve their energy; in that sense, laziness can be a virtue. Ironically, in games, this often takes the form of deliberate rule-breaking and cheating.
• Griefing. Like other forms of competition, putting other people down is a way to show dominance and superiority over your peers.

But there is another list! This one is about player types. 

• Achievers find it enjoyable to gain power, level up, and generally to “win” the game (to the extent that an ongoing, never-ending game can be “won”).
• Explorers want to explore the world, build mental maps of the different areas in their heads, and generally figure out what is in their surroundings.
• Socializers use the game as a social medium. They play for the interaction with other players. The gameplay systems are just a convenient excuse to get together and play with friends.
• Killers (today we call them “griefers”) derive their fun from ruining other people’s fun.

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And based on all those lists, I started wondering... which types of fun I like and which type of player am I? So. I definitely like a good mix of fantasy, narrative, discovery and fellowship. I also like the idea of collecting things and advancing with my game. and when it comes to player types... I would imagine, I'm an explorer with a little bit of socializer,