A Theory of Fun for Game Design - Page 2

Sounds good to me. He suggests that just as kids use patterns to learn, we all essentially learn through repetition: our brains are constantly striving to find the pattern in what we're doing. He spends a fair amount of time discussing how the brain works, how it processes information, and how it reacts to noise – i.e., "any pattern we don't understand."

Essentially, games provide us with patterns or puzzles to solve. They may teach skills related to survival, but they are all about the pattern (though he says that "Many things we have fun at doing are in fact training us to be better cavemen"). Koster struggles with the fact that so many modern games feature what he calls "antiquated survival skills" such as swordsmanship or the like. For those of us living in our modern cocoon, the lure of something new, or foreign, is quite beguiling – and those sorts of games can provide that desired counterpoint. Candidly, I'd have to say that his proposed game of "Custody Battle 3" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Age of Empires 3," even if it might teach "survival skills" more applicable to modern culture.

I was very intrigued by his exploration of the whole mental process associated with game playing. It really helped to see games as essentially a series of similar patterns turned or shifted slightly into a new shape or form. And I was also very interested in his acknowledgement of the complexity surrounding game content (which might more properly be regarded as the "dressing" of the underlying conceptual play involved). At one point, he writes:

I don't think debates about the suitability of violence in the media will disappear. Much evidence shows that media have some effect on how we act. If media didn't have an effect, we wouldn't spend so much effort on using at as teaching tools. But evidence also shows that media aren't mind-control devices (of course they aren't, or else we'd all behave like the people we read about in the children's stories we read in elementary school."

According to Koster, the principle reason game designers and games reject the idea that games are necessarily "damaging" to children is that on a conceptual level a game isn't "about" the "dressing," whether it takes the form of running over pedestrians or eating little dots. On the most basic level, games are about an abstract process of effort and reward – the true underpinnings may be very different than the metaphors used in the game's imagery. As Koster puts it, "Deathrace does not teach you to run over pedestrians any more than Pac-Man teaches you to eat dots and be scared of ghosts."

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

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