Theory of Fun for Game Design

As we learn more patterns, more novelty is needed to make a game attractive.

The definition of a good game is therefore “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.”

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.

Boredom is the opposite of learning.

Classifying, collating, and exercising power over the contents of a space is one of the fundamental lessons of all kinds of gameplay.

Game theory is about how competitors make optimal choices, and it’s mostly used in politics and economics, where it is frequently proven wrong.

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.

Thinking is, in fact, mostly memory, pattern-matching against past experiences.

feelings is at that moment of triumph when we learn something or master a task.