Theory of Fun for Game Design

why learning is so damn boring to so many people. It’s almost certainly because the method of transmission is wrong. We praise good teachers by saying that they “make learning fun.” Games are very good teachers...of something. The question is, what do they teach?

Either way, fun is defined as “a source of enjoyment.” This can happen via physical stimuli, aesthetic appreciation, or direct chemical manipulation.

Some writers on cognition describe the brain as functioning on three levels.*

This is the part of the brain that packages things up and chunks them. This part of how we think isn’t something we can access directly — it doesn’t use words.

Faces may be the best example. How many times have you seen faces in wood grain, in the patterns in plaster walls, or in the smudges on the sidewalk? A surprisingly large part of the human brain is devoted to seeing faces — when we look at a person’s face, a huge amount of brainpower is expended in interpreting it. When we’re not looking at someone

Practicing can keep a game fresh for a while, but in many cases we’ll say, “Eh, I get it, I don’t need to practice this task,” and we’ll move on.

The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant.

I don’t need a degree in automotive engineering to drive my car. I don’t even need to understand torque, wheels and how the brakes work. I don’t need to remember the ins and outs of the rules of grammar to speak grammatically in everyday conversation. I don’t need to know whether tic-tac-toe is NP-hard or NP-complete* to know that it’s a dumb game.

what a book will never be able to do is accelerate the grokking process to the degree that games do, because you cannot practice a pattern and run permutations on it with a book, and have the book respond with feedback.*