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Hi all! Today I have a post by Selene Tan on Types of Fun! Selene is a game designer who is always up for a design competition, and writes about games and GMing. This post is about types of fun – the ways we enjoy games – using a variety of existing theory and talking about how we can understand those things in our own experiences. Selene said she loves “interacting with dynamic systems that produce unexpected and inspiring outcomes, and it’s even better with friends!” So let’s see what she has to say!
I ask that you remember the requests I put forth about treating my writers with respect and understand that a lot of game design theory is still growing, so definitions can be a little fluid.
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A collection of materials for a game of Roar of Alliance (Game and photo by John Sheldon.) during play. |
Whether you call it “fun,” “enjoyment,” or “involvement”: when you’re playing the right game, there’s something that makes you want to play it, and keep playing. But not all games are fun in the same way.
- how applicable it is to the kinds of games I want to classify. If there are a lot of experiences not covered by the scheme, some of the types are unused, or most experiences go under one type, the scheme is a bad fit.
- how easy it is to remember. If there are too many categories, or the names are confusing, it’s hard to remember the scheme.
- how easy it is to apply. The categories should clearly describe what experiences belong to them, and most experiences should clearly belong to one or two categories, without confusion.
Schemes of Fun
8 Kinds of Fun
- Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure. e.g. playing with miniatures and detailed terrain, background music, or props; drawing; manipulating dice.
- Fantasy: Game as make-believe. e.g. exploring a world from the point of view of a character. This is the most “RPG-y” kind of fun.
- Narrative: Game as unfolding story. e.g. playing through a story with cool set-piece encounters, crafting a story together with other players.
- Challenge: Game as obstacle course. e.g. dungeon crawls or combat-focused games, any encounter where the point is for players to overcome it with skill.
- Fellowship: Game as social framework. Playing as an excuse to hang out with friends. e.g. Kaleidoscope, where you “remember” (invent) a movie with friends and discuss it.
- Discovery: Game as uncharted territory. e.g. sandbox games, hex crawls, and dungeon crawls.
- Expression: Game as soap box or self-discovery. e.g. drawing your character or other game elements, creating detailed characters.
- Submission: Game as mindless pastime. In RPGs, this is usually combined with Fellowship. e.g. Kick-in-the-door play where the goal is to defeat baddies without thinking too hard.
Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivations
Another scheme is Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivations. It classifies reasons that people play games, where each reason is a type of fun. There are two schemes, one for video games and one for board games. The video games scheme has 12 motivations in 6 groups, while the board games scheme has 11 motivations in 4 groups.
- Action, containing excitement and destruction, e.g. fast-paced combat like Savage Worlds, or causing mayhem in towns.
- Social, containing competition and community, e.g. combat in Agon, where whoever deals the killing blow gets more Glory; most D&D play where the party works together; or D&D Adventurer’s League play, where you’re part of a larger community.
- Mastery, containing challenge and strategy, e.g. dungeons, combat, and character build optimization.
- Achievement, containing completion and power, e.g leveling up, stomping enemies, and completing quests.
- Creativity, containing discovery and design, e.g. hexcrawls and sandboxes, creating characters, or coming up with unusual uses for items and spells.
- Immersion, containing fantasy and story, e.g. speaking and playing in character, following elaborate pre-planned plots, or playing dynamic characters that create emergent plots.
Threefold Model and GNS
Other Schemes
Using Schemes
Make a list of all the things you like and dislike when playing RPGs.
Then play an RPG session with that list in mind. Afterwards, write down a new list of things you liked and disliked from that session. If you won’t get to play for a while, make a list from your most recent session, but it’s best to do this while it’s fresh in your mind.
Pick a scheme and classify your list items. For each like, write down the type of fun. For each dislike, write down the type of fun it interferes with, and if applicable, the type of fun it promotes. Don’t worry about forcing things to fit: it’s okay to have some lone items. But if there are a lot, you might want to pick a different classification scheme!
For example:
I like to play characters that help people. (Fantasy, Expression)
I dislike games where everyone plays backstabbing schemers who are out to get each other. (Inteferes with: Fellowship, Submission. Promotes: Challenge, Expression.)
You’ll see trends arise from the lists. Some categories will have more items than others, and some reasons will keep showing up.
The categories that keep showing up in your likes are the types of fun you enjoy the most. You have the most experience playing and creating that type of fun, and the strongest intuition for them. You’ll also find complements: groups of types that keep showing up together, or types that show up occasionally on your list of likes but not in your dislikes. The types that show up on your dislikes list interfere with or detract from the types you enjoy.
When you’re designing a game or wrestling with a mechanic, ask yourself what types of fun you’re aiming for. If the mechanic doesn’t seem to be working, is it encouraging a different type of fun than the one you’re aiming for? Is it related to a fun that interferes with your goal? If you have a design that feels like it’s missing something, try adding one of the complementary fun types.
If you want to read more about classifying and analyzing fun, here are some resources:
- Natural Funativity, Noah Falstein
- Game Design Concepts 8: Kinds of Fun, Kinds of Players, Ian Schreiber (I recommend the whole course if you want a structured way to learn game design.)
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster (book)
- Motivations of Play, Nick Yee (Quantic Foundry cofounder)
- MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research, Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek (Academic paper, it’s a little dry)
- Aesthetics of Play – Redefining Genres in Gaming, James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, Shannon Meissner (video)
- Unit 3: Play from Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (book)
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