Fun seems like a pretty basic concept when you're talking about games, but it's not always clear that everybody is talking about the same thing when they use the word “fun”. For example, when you hear a good joke it's funny but is it fun or are those different things? In some cases it seems to me that different people may have incompatible ideas about what fun is, and that tends to get displayed in discussions about tabletop RPGs.
Some people believe that the experience of “fun” happens when your preferences are satisfied: there are some things that you like, and it's fun for you when you get those things. For example, most people like to win, so getting a victory in a game is fun. Or another example, most people like novel stimuli, so seeing the lights and hearing the bells in a pinball game is fun. Others argue that fun is more like a specific sensation: you experience it when you interact with systems in certain ways. You experience heat when you immerse your hand in hot water, analogously you experience fun when you immerse your mind in a game. For example, people can have fun playing a logistics organizing game like Factorio even though in a normal context organizing a factory would generally be considered work rather than fun. In this theory fun is one of multiple positive sensations: The delicious taste of good food is a positive experience, but it's not fun, it's something different.
Can rules get in the way of fun?
In discussing tabletop RPGs, some people subscribe to the theory that rules should not “get in the way” of fun, and that the ideal set of rules will recede into irrelevance so that fun can be the center of the activity. This is fundamentally a “preference satisfaction” sort of idea: people want something (maybe “a satisfying story”) so if you're ever in a situation where the rules say to do X but doing Y would result in giving someone what they want you should do Y so that they can have fun. But from the perspective of the system-sensation theory of fun the idea that rules can “get out of the way” seems as strange as thinking that your car can “get out of the way” of your driving: a game is largely made of rules, without the rules there's no game to engage with, so there's no sensation of fun, just like you can't drive without a car. (Now it's certainly possible for some games to not actually be fun when you use them, just like not all cars are drivable. And it's also true that not all parts of a system need to be formally-expressed rules).
Fudging dice rolls
One of the classic controversies in tabletop RPGs is whether a GM should “fudge” dice rolls by rolling behind a screen and lying about the results “for the good of the story”. The idea is that 1) people like to think they're manipulating complex rule mechanisms, and 2) people want the “right” results, so you square the circle by manipulating things under the hood so that people have the illusion that their manipulations led to the results and they get both things. It seems that there are two big problems with this. First, from the process-theory viewpoint, if the fun genuinely comes from meaningfully interacting with the system, then discovering that some of the mechanisms in the system don't actually work on the basis you thought they did will be deflating. Second, from the preference-satisfaction viewpoint, it assumes that the person doing the fudging has a good idea what the “right” results should be, even though it's really hard to tell what other people want (witness how stressful people find it to buy gifts for people, and how many social mechanisms we have in place to try to alleviate that, such as registries and wishlists on one side and the practice of training children to express gratitude whether they like a gift or not on the other).
Is there a preference-theory hiding in the process-theory?
Generally speaking I'm partial to the process-theory of fun. I think fun happens when you're making meaningful contributions to the game-state on a moment-to-moment basis (and I think this is true whether you're playing a board game like chess, where your contributions are the way you move your pieces, or an RPG where your contribution can be your character saying or doing something in the fictional world). If the system that I think I'm playing disappears out from under me (such as if I learn that the GM is fudging dice, or using a technique like “whatever solution to the mystery that the players guess is the correct one”) then my fun disappears, too. But isn't that saying that I have a preference for this particular metacognitive sensation and that it's only fun for me when I get hits of that sensation? Yeah, maybe. That's why I have trouble fully committing to the process theory.
Talking about "fun" is a complicated operation, because there are a myriad of kinds of fun, types of fun, processes which are fun, experiences which are fun, contexts which are fun – and all of these things may or may not actually touch one another in practice.
It's sort of like referring to "cancer" is a disease. It's really a whole plethora of diseases which manifest in a similar way. Likewise "fun".
So upfront, it's really difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a coherent theory of fun. Fun itself is incoherent. For the same reason, it is almost impossible and might actually be impossible to come up with a coherent analysis of what they singular person finds as fun. We can definitely chart trends, and we can make a statistical yes based on previous interactions – but I might just as readily find a particular episode of South Park to be disappointing and have a great time watching Love Actually, even though both of those things would be historical anomalies.
So the underlying question becomes even more problematic for answering.
Now, you go a little bit Sid Meyer when you talk about your version of the process theory of fun. "Making meaningful contributions to the game state on a moment to moment basis" is quite close to the original "making meaningful decisions on a regular basis," so I think we can conflate them. But if we are going to talk about fun, we probably should recognize that the context can and often is a lot broader and a wider understanding is going to help us – even if our particular interest is in game design and game theory.
See, here's the thing – I can certainly conceive of situations in which the system that I think I'm playing disappears out from under me and things remain fine, but most of them hinge on setting assumptions before the game. And that introduces another layer of meta-reference: that understanding the expectations that the players come to the table with is absolutely key to maximizing your chance of providing fun.
If everyone comes to the table knowing that the GM is probably going to fudge dice, then expectation is set. The fun at the table is going to emerge from either the knowledge of that, which some people are into, or other things at the table. You can certainly come to the table knowing that the entire mechanical system that you expected to use is going to fall away at some point in turn into something else.
If we come away with anything, it's that we should be aware of expectations and setting them because that is our first chance, as people who facilitate games, to prepare people for fun. It's just like any other performance or production: you can subvert the audiences expectations but you can't deny them or they will reject the entire effort.
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My ideas are certainly informed by the Sid Meier quote, yes. I'm not opposed to looking at things in a broader context. It's not obvious to me that broadening the context changes the question. Do you have a basis for believing that there are lots of different kinds of fun?
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Aside from watching more than a handful of people, a few decades of running games at various conventions, engaging in social activity with other human beings (or at least beings which pretended to be human beings), and my own lived experience?
No, nothing in particular.
We can observe that there are lots of different kinds of fun. At least if we accept the reports of others about their personal experience. After all, if there was only one kind of fun it would be relatively easy to optimize specifically to target it. There would certainly not be room in the RPG industry for the likes of Grey Ranks, Microscope, and Pathfinder all at the same time. In fact, we would have no need of RPGs, TV shows, movies, and baseball as separate entities – because as they would only provide one kind of fun, one of those, diverse as they are, would be optimum at generating and providing it.
So up front, much like gravity, that there are multiple kinds of fun is largely self-evident.
If there are, in fact, multiple kinds of fun – then we have to accept that optimizing to produce one type can often involve a trade-off in others. That means choosing an audience, which is something that a lot of RPG designers are very loath to do, and when they do, they often end up isolating themselves from any potential crossover by denigrating other kinds and sources of fun. (The poster boy for that kind of behavior is Ron Edwards, but the general antipathy in the RPG community for those who "enjoy sports" is pretty toxic that way, too.)
Broadening the context means that we can be informed by different dynamics than what we are trained to expect. Often the results of violating those assumptions are the discovery of an entirely new kind of fun that we didn't expect that we could deliver – and for me, at least, there's fun in that.
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I wasn't trying to by snarky or dismissive with my question.
How? What's the method? How do you tell if a person is experiencing type A or type B fun? I'm not asking rhetorically. Are there multiple types of happiness? Multiple types of anger? How do you determine when a thing has "multiple types" and when it doesn't?
I don't follow this argument at all. There's room in the food industry for lots of sweet-tasting things, even though sweetness seems to be a pretty basic sensation whose mechanisms can be studied.
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I've always assumed that if I can observe multiple instances of a thing and tell that they are different, they are – in fact – different. Maybe I am too much an essentialist there, but it seems to me that if you are going to start doubting the evidence of your ability to differentiate emotional reactions, you have a lot bigger problem than trying to determine what is fun.
And, yes, I am both being snarky and communicating what I intend.
If you want to keep going down that road of questioning, you have essentially decided that communication is impossible. If we cannot accept, axiomaticly, that someone else who is reporting their perceptual difference in the world is not reporting something which is evidential, talking is done. If your position requires that you question all sensory input and all interpretations thereof, including your own, why does anyone need to talk to you?
Again, both snarky and truthful. Philosophy is fun, but at some point you have to shift to engineering if you care about achieving anything.
And yet, you would be wrong. While "sweetness" is a pretty basic sensation, we have scientific research which differentiates types, kinds, and intensities of "sweetness," with multiple mechanisms, in fact. Not all sweetness is the same, and not all sweetness comes from the same places, and not all sweetness is experienced the same way, which for someone who is trying to engineer food has a differentiatable set of experiences with a multitude of means to achieve different kinds.
And this all loops around to my original example: cancer. If you are a doctor and trying to treat a cancerous growth, it does you no good to say "well, this is cancer." What kind of cancer? How does that kind of cancer respond to different stimuli? How likely is it to kill the patient? How soon? If ever? Sure, you can say "you got cancer," but when you can plainly differentiate based on a multitude of traits and mechanisms – you'd be an idiot to try to work with those traits and mechanisms while simultaneously denying that they can be detected.
So, yes – I suppose we could sit down and try to draw up a temporary, rough, quantified and qualified architecture of types of fun, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that they don't exist and frankly I don't have time to do that sort of thing – I have games to build, games to run, people to entertain.
We know that it's different. We can see it. If we want to formalize it, that's one thing – but if we want to use it, a formalization is certainly not necessary. We do have to recognize the possibility of differentiation, however.
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It is quite refreshing to have a professional point of view on this matter. I liked the post quite a lot, as a fellow RPG player.
Of course, I believe a lot of elements factor in when we discuss about what's "fun" in a RPG session. I guess, as a player, I agree with your conclusions about fudging dice rolls (I know one of the GMs I've played with has done it during our first adventure, but it was justifiable since we were playing in a ruthless setting and most of the players were new at the experience). But a lot can be told about the players themselves, sometimes doing stupid stuff in the game can result in having a lot of fun but ultimately breaking the immersion, sometimes there's too many "shy" players and they end up having no contribution to the game (and therefore, no fun, because I firmly believe that winning by merit of someone else is not really fun to begin with). Rules can get in the way of the experience if the GM is not really capable of including them seamlessly in the session, I think, but they are the basis for every game out there.
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I don't quite get the dichotomy.
"Some people believe that the experience of “fun” happens when your preferences are satisfied: there are some things that you like, and it's fun for you when you get those things."
"Others argue that fun is more like a specific sensation: you experience it when you interact with systems in certain ways...you experience fun when you immerse your mind in a game."
It feels like I enjoy interacting with systems (and people) in certain ways and when my preference for doing so is satisfied, I experience fun.
Totally an aside: playing Factorio is way more fun that working the (wildly more complicated) analog in real life. I wonder to what extent games are inherently simple (but not too). I bet we have a zone of ideal complexity or something and may real-world problems are off-the scale complicated and that's why they're work. (I write software to help planners in an electronics plant juggle workflow resources, etc.)
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I'm not sure it's exactly a dichotomy (I actually called it one in an earlier draft of the post, but softened it to incompatible). I think it's maybe a bit more analogous to the tensions between deontological and consequentialist views of how morality works.
Yes, I think this is similar to what I was trying to say in my last paragraph. Maybe at some level a process view "is" a preference-satisfaction view. However, I also wonder whether that zoom-in can be reductive. Someone might say "You're not really seeing the color blue, you're just reacting to the blue-receptors in your retinas sending signals to your brain." The second part is true, but I don't know if that means you're not "really" seeing the color, that may just be the mechanism by which we see color.
On the fun/work thing, my theory is that it's not fundamentally a complexity issue, but related to the context. For example, I get the impression that some Venture Capitalists find investing in startups and shepherding them along to be fun and somewhat gamelike, but if you were a regular person plowing your life savings into a startup you probably have too much on the line for it to feel playful. So it's fundamentally the same activity, but potentially experienced differently.
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