Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster Page B

brains that makes us enjoy learning new things, we might be more like the sharks and ants of the world.

    So how does it feel? Well, the moment a lot of players like to cite is “being in the zone.” If you get academic about it, you might reference Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow.” This is the state you enter when you are experiencing absolute concentration on a task. When you’re in absolute control, the challenges that come at you are met precisely by your skills. Lazzaro called this “hard fun,” and it’s the state from which you are most likely to emerge feeling either frustration or triumph.
    Flow doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it feels pretty darn wonderful. The problem is that precisely matching challenges to capability is incredibly hard. For one thing, the brain is churning away and might make a cognitive leap at any moment, rendering the rest of the challenge trivial. For another, whatever is presenting the challenges doesn’t necessarily have any sense of the level of understanding possessed by the player.
    As we succeed in mastering patterns thrown at us, the brain gives us little jolts of pleasure. But if the flow of new patterns slows, then we won’t get the jolts and we’ll start to feel boredom. If the flow of new patterns increases beyond our ability to resolve them, we won’t get the jolts either because we’re not making progress.
    When there’s flow, players usually say afterward, “That was a lot of fun.” When there isn’t flow, they might say “that was fun” somewhat less emphatically. The absence of flow doesn’t preclude fun—it just means that instead of a steady drip-drip-drip of endorphins, you’re getting occasional bits. And in fact, there can be flow that isn’t fun—meditation induces similar brain waves, for example.
    So fun isn’t flow. You can find flow in countless activities, but they aren’t all fun. Most of the cases where we typically cite flow relate to exercising mastery, not learning.
    To recap the preceding pages: Games aren’t stories. Games aren’t about beauty or delight. Games aren’t about jockeying for social status. They stand, in their own right, as something incredibly valuable. Fun is about learning in a context where there is no pressure, and that is why games matter.

Chapter 6. Different Fun for Different Folks
    We all know that people learn at different rates and in different ways. Research has shown that people’s learning patterns are with them at birth. Some people visualize things when they think of them; others are more verbal. Some people employ logic readily; others rely on leaps of intuition. We’re all familiar with the bell curve distribution of IQ—and we’re also familiar with the fact that IQ tests do not measure all forms of intelligence. Howard Gardner said there were in fact seven forms:
    Linguistic
Logical-mathematical
Bodily-kinesthetic
Spatial
Musical
Interpersonal
Intrapersonal (internally directed, self-motivated)
    There aren’t really standardized tests for these other types of intelligences. Certainly, the list suggests right off the bat that these different people will be interested in different sorts of games because of their natural talents. Keep in mind that people are not likely to tackle patterns and puzzles that appear as noise to them; they’ll likely select problems that they think they have a chance at solving. Hence the folks with bodily-kinesthetic intelligence will gravitate toward sports, whereas the linguistic folks may end up with crossword puzzles or Scrabble .

    In recent years, much study has been centered on gender differences. It has finally become acceptable to discuss this topic without accusations of sexism. It’s important to realize that in all cases, we’re speaking in generalities, of averages. On average, females tend to have greater trouble with certain types of spatial perception—for example, visualizing the cross section of an arbitrary shape that