Theory of Fun for Game Design, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. What Games Teach Us

Formal training isn’t really required to become a game designer. Most of the game designers working professionally today are self-taught. That is changing rapidly as university programs for game designers crop up all around the country and the world.*

I went to school to be a writer, mostly. I believe really passionately in the importance of writing and the incredible power of fiction. We learn through stories; we become who we are through stories.

My thinking about what fun is led me to similar conclusions about games. I can’t deny, however, that stories and games teach really different things, in very different ways. Game systems (as opposed to the visuals and presentation of a given game) don’t usually have a moral. They don’t usually have a theme in the sense that a novel has a theme.

The population that uses games as learning tools the most effectively is the young. Certainly folks in every generation keep playing games into old age (pinochle,* anyone?), but as we get older we view those people more as the exception, though this is changing as digital gaming continues to rise in popularity. Games are viewed as frivolity. In the Bible in 1 Corinthians, we are told, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”* But children speak honestly—sometimes too much ...