Finding the Fun

Games 2 of 3

First, let me make two claims about fun:

1. Accomplishing goals is fun.
2. Mastering a skill is fun.

On the first claim: a philosopher named Bernard Suits wrote a whole book working out what a game is, and landed on a line I love.

"Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978)

Voluntary and Unnecessary. For example, nobody needs you to lower a little ship onto a flat patch of digital ground. But choosing to try (at something pointless and hard) is a reliably fun thing to do.

On the second claim: game designer Raph Koster says fun is what learning feels like from the inside. Your brain catches onto a pattern it did not know before and pays you in delight. That is why a game is fun while you are getting good at it but can become boring once you have mastered it. Nothing left to learn? The fun drains out.

The opportunity for fun from a goal you chose, and a skill you build, is right below.

Here is a lunar lander. The goal is simple (and completely unnecessary): set the lander down gently on the pad. Gravity pulls down, your thruster pushes up, and the skill is a kind of pattern recognition: reading the momentum, seeing where the ship will be a second from now. Master that skill and you land safely.

There is a score, but this time it is yours alone. No leaderboard, nobody to beat but the last version of you. Which is the purest goal there is, imho. You set it, you chase it, you raise it.

Fuel 100%
Speed 0.0
Angle 0°
Best --
How it works: the pattern under the hood 
// The physics runs on real elapsed time (dt seconds per frame).
// This makes the game identical at 30fps or 120fps, on any device.
// This exact loop is reused in Missile Command (Part 3).

function gameLoop(timestamp) {
  var dt = (timestamp - lastTime) / 1000;  // seconds since last frame
  lastTime = timestamp;

  // 1. Gravity pulls down constantly: the pattern you must learn to fight
  lander.vy += GRAVITY * dt;

  // 2. Thrust pushes in the direction the lander is pointing
  if (thrusting && lander.fuel > 0) {
    lander.vx += Math.sin(lander.angle) * THRUST * dt;
    lander.vy -= Math.cos(lander.angle) * THRUST * dt;
    lander.fuel -= FUEL_BURN * dt;
  }

  // 3. Position integrates from velocity each frame (Euler integration)
  lander.x += lander.vx * dt;
  lander.y += lander.vy * dt;

  // 4. Check for landing or crash
  checkCollision();

  requestAnimationFrame(gameLoop);
}

// You are not flying where the ship is.
// You are flying where it will be.
// The whole skill is learning to think one second ahead.

// MISSILE COMMAND NOTE: swap GRAVITY direction, swap THRUST for
// ballistic acceleration, and this same loop drives rockets and bombs.

Did you feel it? The tension when you came in too fast, the flush of pride on a clean landing. That was both claims at once: you set yourself a pointless goal and volunteered to chase it, and as your brain learned the pattern, it rewarded you, so you kept going. Fun. You chose the goal. You earned the skill.

Now the quiet part.

All of it hangs on one word in Suits' line. Voluntary. The psychological levers that control us do not care whose hand is on them. Chasing a goal can feel good, even if someone else chose the goal for you. Your brain rewards you for building a skill, even if it wasn't a skill you wanted.

Now think about the last thing a screen taught you to master. Maybe the timing of a swipe. Maybe a silly dance you practiced until it played well for the camera. That fun can be completely real. A kid singing into their phone for their friends is having real fun, and there is nothing wrong with it.

The problem is who chose the goal. "Learn this dance, you'll love it" and "BE THE BIG WINNER ON OUR SLOT MACHINES TONIGHT!" arrive the same way, through the same screen, wrapped in the same delight. One of them is yours. The other was built to keep you pushing a button, over and over, long after the fun is gone. From the inside, in the moment, they can feel identical. And that is the ugly part: preying on your gift for fun is like preying on your capacity for charity. It is the ruination of something beautiful for another buck, or worse, another click.

This isn't the phone's fault, or the song's, or the kid's. It's that something else is deciding which goals get put in front of you, right down to the kind of fun you are allowed to have. Usually it's an algorithm, and it is optimizing for its goals, not yours. Fun was never the problem. Control is.

Here is what I want you to keep. Unlike the evolutionary drives from the last post, the ones you cannot switch off, goal setting and skill building are levers you can control. You can take your goals back. You can take your fun back. It starts with a question, asked out loud: did I pick this, or was it pushed onto me? That question is a small freedom, and we are going to do a lot more with it.

Next time, we stop asking who is in control. We start building the game.

matthewkmeyer.com / projects