Theory of Fun for Game Design, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. The Problem with People

The holy grail of game system design is to make a game where the challenges are never ending, the skills required are varied, and the difficulty curve is perfect and adjusts itself to exactly our skill level. Someone did this already, though, and it’s not always fun. It’s called “life.” Maybe you’ve played it.

Designers often feel proudest of designing good abstract systems that have deep self-generating challenges—games like chess, go,* and Othello, and so on. Designing rule sets and making all the content is hard! That hasn’t stopped us from trying all sorts of tactics to make games self-refreshing:

• “Emergent behavior” is a common buzzword.* The goal is new patterns that emerge spontaneously out of the rules, allowing the player to do things that the designer did not foresee. (Players do things designers don’t expect all the time, but we don’t like to talk about it.) Emergence has proven a tough nut to crack in game design; it usually makes games easier, often by generating loopholes and exploits.

• We also hear a lot about storytelling. It’s easier to construct a story with multiple possible interpretations than it is to construct a game with the same characteristics. However, most games melded with stories tend to be Frankenstein monsters. Players tend to either skip the story or skip the game. Balancing the two so that they reinforce each other is ...