Ralph Koster’s A Theory of Fun
One thing I can truly appreciate in Ralph Koster’s A Theory of Fun is that games “are exercises for our brains [and] Games that fail to exercise the brain become boring” (pg 37). I truly believe this. I have played many games, including sports games and action games. No matter what the case, if there is not something new that can happen then you become bored with the game.
He then goes on to say that ”games are disposable, and boredom is inevitable” (Koster, pg 37). This statement I do not entirely believe in. Not all games end up being boring, which you can especially see in MMOs like World of Warcraft. The ability of game designers to add new experiences into the game causes the online population to grow. Online games like this can keep adapting and adding new elements, thus I do not see players getting bored with this gameplay.
Gameplay to me becomes more fun when you start to master certain areas and become better than the others that you play. When you do this you feel as though you have achieved something. Koster talks about learning within games being a “drug” that makes us happy (pg. 40). I relate this to the times that I would play Halo. As I learned new ways to play the game and got better than my opponents I became happier with the game, and thus learning was my drug.
Koster describes games as having these four characteristics (pg. 76):
* They present us with models of real things-often highly abstracted.
* They are generally quantified or even quantied models.
* They primarily teach us things that we can absorb into the unconscious as opposed to things designed to be tackled by the conscious, logical mind.
* They mostly teach us things that are fairly primitive behaviors, but they dont have to.
I agree with these points although one type of game that i believe doesn’t fall into these characteristics is certain board games and card games. For instance poker requires a lot of active thought. On top of that watching other players in the game helps us find tendencies about their gameplay, which is not a very primitive behavior.
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Eventually this might happen. I feel that MMO’s are changing so frequently that users will never “grok” the game. They might decide that they have grown out of the game, but to me no one can ever fully master the game or find/complete everything in the game.