Theory of Fun for Game Design

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.

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?

The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant.

games serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools. It’s one thing to read in a book that “the map is not the territory”* and another to have your armies rolled over by your opponent in a game. When the latter happens because your map didn’t adequately reflect what was going on, you’re gonna get the point even if the actual armies aren’t m

Games that fail to exercise the brain become boring.

The brain is actively hiding the real world from us.

The last kind of thinking is not thinking. When you stick your finger in fire, you snatch it back before your brain has time to think about it (seriously, it’s been measured).*

Fun is just another word for learning.* Games teach you how aspects of reality work, how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine.

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