Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

What’s Fun?

Fortunately, there is a lot of great research on the psychology of this kind of fun, and the results are rather consistent. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [Csi02], Mihály Csíkszentmihályi explains that people experience fun when they have a goal, a way of measuring progress toward that goal, constant feedback on their success, and skills that match the challenge, neither exceeding it nor falling short. He notes that “by far the overwhelming proportion of optimal experiences are reported to occur within sequences of activities that are goal-directed and bounded by rules—activities that require the investment of psychic energy, and that could not be done without the appropriate skills.”

Similarly, in his book ...