Chris Crawford on Game Design

Chapter 6. Interactivity

Every language has its own special words, words that express an idea better than any other word in any other language. There really isn't any other word in the world that quite expresses the idea of the English word “fun.” There are plenty of words for “humorous” or “enjoyable” or “playful,” but nothing that quite catches the combination of informality, enjoyment, and near-vulgarity that our word “fun” connotes. We have shamelessly stolen such words from other languages. “Taboo,” for example, is stolen from a Polynesian word; can you think of any other word that really captures the idea of that word? There are gobs of words we have stolen from European languages: entrepreneur, manana, schadenfreude, presto. But there's ...