The Counterintuitive Secret to Fun
In this video, game designer Ian Bogost delivers a brief and succinct perspective on the counterintuitive secret to fun.
Key Quotes
Most of this short 10 minute talk was clippable, but we've put a few favorites below:
0:30 - "Games are perhaps the only medium daft enough to measure their aesthetic value with a nebulous concept like fun. As a result, games tend to be seen as a form of black magic. We know they have a power over people, but we can't quite characterize that power which makes us desperate to control it."
1:26 - "We've misunderstood fun to mean something like enjoyment without effort, and that's why every activity now has someone trying to gamify it."
3:08 - "Games and fun are not connected because games are intrinsically enjoyable; rather, games are fun because they are experiences we encounter through play. And play is the act of manipulating something that doesn't dictate all of its capacities, but that does limit many of them."
6:30 - "When you think about it, a job is made fun not by turning it into a game, but by deeply and deliberately pursuing it as a job. Jobs are fun when their work is meaningful, when their activities matter, when the act of conducting them can be done over and over again with increased adeptness. So, fun can't be added to something, no more than chocolate turns broccoli into dessert. But, you can design and use things with enough resistance to allow this capacity for play, and every now and then, they reward you for doing so."
9:00 - "Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something that offers enough freedom of movement, enough play, that such attention matters. And even seemingly stupid, boring activities can be fun in the process—maybe especially stupid, boring activities can be. Feeling that you are having fun at something is a sign that you've given it respect. When we fail to have fun, we fail to design for it too, because we don't take things seriously enough, not because we take them too seriously."
10:05 - "Fun isn't a kind of pleasure, at least not a direct kind of pleasure. Fun is giving respect to something that doesn't deserve it, becoming infatuated with something for which infatuation seems impossible, just by working it carefully and deliberately over time, in the hopes that it might someday blush before you and reveal its secrets."