What makes a game fun (or not fun)?

A very good question indeed, and if anyone can come up with a way of reliably generating fun experiences for the general populace I'm fairly sure they'll make a fortune.

However, some guidelines that might help in the quest of making fun games rather than bland systems of interacting mathematical rules: While the site's angled more towards videogames than boardgames, Gamasutra has an article on Fourteen forms of fun some of which should be able to be applied to board games (Unless we're making a dvd as a component, we don't really have a way of getting pretty vistas as players enter new areas, though...), and Raph Koster has written at length about what fun is (although last I checked his website he seems more interested in figuring out how the heck you could notate games than distilling fun, but he notes in his book A Theory Of Fun For Game Design humans like most mammals are hardwired to learn through play, and therefore 'learning' is fun (weather that be learning that you can jump onto turtles to turn them over then use them as a weapon in Mario, or something with more real world practicality... Chess is fundamentally lessons about territory control, etc), and notes that human beings are pattern matching machines (to the point that we pattern match about pattern matching), that , and that based on the popularity of hopscotch and skip-rope through the ages and the popularity of the platform genre, that there seems to be something humans find fundamentally fun about jumping over things. He also makes such useful (?) remarks that the chemicals released into the brain when discovering something new, eating chocolate and having an orgasm are the same, just in different quantities, iirc.

In my experience - interaction with other players and the game, weather cooperative or competitive, and involvement, in whatever form that might take, are where fun comes from. Snakes and ladders isn't fun because there's neither. Ludo isn't fun because the amount of player interaction and my involvement with the game isn't sufficient to last the multiple hours the game takes (...Or does it only take half an hour and feel like several hours?). Also, optimal strategies can destroy fun - Tic Tac Toe isn't fun because there's a way of winning/drawing with certainty. This only applies when the game-space is sufficiently limited for the players to know them, however, and as such both Chess and Go are fun despite the fact that there probably are optimum strategies in both. It also seems that all fun game design comes down to Interesting Decisions/Agonising Choices at a fundamental level - A fun game will have choices which matter, and which there is no obvious optimal, but which you'll figure out if you made the right one fairly quickly... A bad game will be lacking in some way, shape or form in that. Either not providing a decision (Snakes and ladders), making it obvious which one is the right one (Tic Tac Toe) or not providing you with feedback on how good your choice was so as to make the choice feel less than relevent (Can't think of any examples of that one right now)

Story arcs in games in mechanical (rather than thematic) terms can be considered to be various stages (or acts) of a narrative in the abstract, can't it? The early game, the midgame and the end game of chess, for example, having very different feels, despite no formal change, and somewhat approximate to a three act structure. The early game has the two armies deploying, sizing each other out. The midgame is a climatic battle of wits as a finite amount of resources dwindle towards zero, the meat of the performance, where literature would reveal all the plot twists and turns, build on them, and have interesting things happen to the characters to make their journeys harder. And the end game is the execution of the winning moves after one side has the apparent upper hand, in literature the climatic battle and concluding epilogue.

...Strangely, monopoly could be considered to have a story arc in mechanical terms as well. Early game where properties get bought, mid game where lots of property trades take place and properties get developed, and the end game where one or two players proceed to bleed the others dry, and eventually someone comes out victorious (and everyone else has fallen asleep several hours prior). Technically, the elements of this story arc are the same as that of chess (set up, main meat where the game is won or lost beyond something weird happening in the last stage, victory) - the difference comes from the lengths applied to each phase (monopoly has a far too long end game, and perhaps the blend from early game to mid game is too gradual) when looked at from an arc perspective, which is, perhaps, just as big a problem as the more obvious mechanical issues (too much positive feedback, too much luck, too few choices, etc)

What I think I'm saying is that having a story arc (and while I'm focussing mechanically rather than thematically in my examples, I think it applies to both) is not a way of guaranteeing fun if the balance of the elements of the story arc is wrong.

I'm not really experienced, but I would stick to what you know. Imagine yourself as a comedic artist & what would muse your payfield.

Some times ago, I proposed a theory where games were not made of 2 aspect : theme and mechanics, but rather 3 aspects: theme, mechanic, feeling-experience.

Sombody post a blog post about a list of "experience" you could encounter in a game. I lost the link so if somebody could resend it, it could be interesting.

For example, customizing your mecha and your magic deck is one of the listed experience that you can have in a game.

Now my triangular theory could have the following relationship:

The theme explains the existence of the mechanic
The mechanic generate a certain feeling/experience
the theme requires a certain feeling experience.

For example, if you want ot make an horror theme game, you might want the players to experience tension. So you could use for example a time limit mechanic to stimulate this feeling.

Now, I think the fun aspect of the game is pretty close to the feeling/experience aspect of the game. So develloping this aspect could indicates what makes the game fun.

Also, one things you can do is determine what does the players need to think about during their turn. It could help you determine if what they need to do is fun, still we don't get amused by all the same thing. For example in Twilight Imperium 3, there is too much ressource management on my point of view. I would have found other aspects of the game like war, technology and diplomacy more fun if there was more time placed on these. But other players might like having a lot of ressource management.

To make a comparison with the 14 pleasures post, here what could be some board game relations:

Beauty : Components of the game

Immersion: Making sure that the players fully incarnate the role of somebody in a specific situation. Like if it could be actually lived for real.

Intellectual Problem Solving: Classic game mechanics where you must find the optimal choice ( really common)

Competition: Only a few people can win a certain goal, so people compete for it.

Social Interaction: Trading and negociating.

Comedy: Theme that could parody stuff. Munchkin is the best example.

Thrill of Danger: This one is hard because you cannot actually die or get injuries by playing a game. It could probably apply to games where somethings happen outside the game like in elixir. Or maybe playing strip poker.

Physical Activity: Hard to match to a board game.

Love: Also hard to match to a board game. Besides maybe erotic board games.

Creation: Customizing deck in magic could be a good example. By checking at "advancement and completion" I thnk creation could mean more creating your own magic cards for example.

Power: Being able to influence the course or the outcome of the game is where power lies. The more control you have over the game, the more power you have.

Discovery: Exploration, treasure hunting, could be somebody that looks close.

Advancement and Completion: Building a colony in puerto rico could be the best examples. You build something toward a goal and you always advance forward.

Application of an Ability: Maybe for dexterity game or question game. Test your knowledge or your skills.

One of my friends ues the term "anecdotal moments" as an interesting identifier for fun within a game. After the game, do you talk about the subtle strategies you employed or how you could have used the mechanics to best effect? Or do you talk about the moment when (as happened to me once!) you rolled 15 dice needing merely to score more than 17, and failed... Because those are the events that will live with you (and everyone else who was in that game) in a a way that parlaying a corn shipping strategy to victory simply won't...

Cool thread. Nice to know that I had an intuitive understanding of these principles when designing my first game.

What I find most fun in games is reward for effort.

In poker, "bad beat" stories are memorable, but for most other games it's the other way around for me.

For my opinion the game strategies and the different situation of the game evolving makes a game fun, for do that a game need a good mechanism. In Magic The Gathering you have to combine the power of the card, the exiting thing are the deckbulding and try the deck with other players (now the game became very commercial and it's based just for collecting card, because they create a very strong card who's powerful alone and the games lose the synergy effect). A not fun games is an expectable devolptment, where you can't create different strategy of winnig, or
if the game topical is based just in luck. I haven't a lot of experience, but I think a very good game (and funny to) need:
- simple rules: if you need a long time to learn a game that became boring, or having lot rules so you can forget easly
- good strategy factor and unexpectable devolpment: you have always a different kind of the game, so you can't use the same strategy, but you have to elaborate different ones.