Fun is the sensation that results from an edifying story, work that pays off, time spent honing a skill one desires. To be more general, fun is the feeling of proven advancement. Fun is not only the desire of our leisure, but a status indicator for our health. We are meant to live in fun. And in so doing, we are meant to be perpetually advancing ourselves. The origin of the word school (scholē) originated as leisure time for the ancient Greek. The word we associate with learning now, is what happened when people were free to pursue their unique ambitions and make their mark on the world as they felt compelled. If fun is the feeling of advancement, then things which are fun must on some abstract level teach us how to advance. “Play is the highest form of research” -Albert Einstein. Games, therefore, are significant teachers, and as I will argue, encourage a broader psychology toward progress.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga examines the nature of romantic relationships as play. To him, the tension, mystery, and gradual discovery of one another bears all the formal similarities of a game. Something so central to our nature settled within the framework of voluntarily playing a game highlights the core importance of fun in orienting our lives. We observe such phenomena in nature as well. Beyond mating, our pets and most animals are known to play. Cats emulate hunting for a sense of fun long before they hunt for real, and a house cat enjoys the hunting game despite never hunting. Birds have competitive exhibitions flaunting their feathers and singing in competition. This shows us that play, and competition precede culture.
The concept of fun, therefore, seems intrinsically connected to developmental psychology. Children gravitate toward more and more complex puzzles as they grow. The demand on the puzzles to exhibit newfound complexity then, is always present. Therefore, the games which challenge us in ways we deem fun vary with age, with our predisposition, and with our familiarity with the game. As Raph Koster puts it: “Games are patterns to eat up and our brains are voracious consumers of patterns”. A pattern is figuratively consumed, or eaten, when the lessons within have been learned so that there is little more to discover. A game that is well understood runs the risk of becoming boring when there are no more lessons to be taught, and a new game is sought out to continue satiating our curiosities about the mechanics of our world. Alternatively, we will see experts in a game, for whom the game does not become boring, and the challenges become mastered to newfound degrees. Examples of the latter include speedrunning, or even the casual return to a well-beloved game. Raph Koster describes some of this motivation as possibly due to exterior factors such as reminiscence, or a return to a comfort in proficiency without the mental cost of new breakthroughs, citing Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state. While not contradicting Csikszentmihalyi, I question whether this motivation is truly a departure from learning on behalf of comfort and posit instead that it is a desire to hone a lesson, to meditate on the lesson, and to elevate it, to cherish it and desire more of the skill associated. One might immediately turn to the first-person shooter as the example of unproductive fixation, devoid of learning, idling in a flow state. Yet even here, there is a notion of standing amidst one’s peers in skill, and rigorous training of reaction and anticipation to behaviours of an opposing team. It is not unlike a game of football in terms of strategy. Whether one should devote their time to becoming a proficient player is entirely aside, but the educational value of such a puzzle is nonetheless training the mind in a skill. If learning to play the guitar was a game, you might say I beat the game when I learned to play each chord or learned to come up with the notes based on where it is in the scale. But this example highlights the fragility of the argument, since there is an indefinite amount of mastery to be had past the basic formula of guitar. It is an avenue toward fun, and an entire field of innovation.
This brings us to the subject of how we choose what we play at. The opinion that some games are more educational is more of an argument about whether the skills taught by the games are useful. By virtue of the fact a game is fun, it proves that it possesses a rich enough possibility space for the player to unpredictably navigate and continually develop procedures and heuristics to thrive. In this sense every game which has not been trivialized is educational, and if it has been trivialized it is boring. Yet not all education is necessarily the subject perceived as relevant by another. Studies have begun to link numerous aspects of personality to preference in genre. This would connect the affinity for different intelligences across personalities to a predisposition for enjoyment of different types of game. The extravert is likelier to value games of cooperation and competition based on their intrinsic value of engaging with others for example. The study of relationships between the Big Five personality traits and genres continues to elaborate on these underlying values.
Games are a unique communicative media in that the player generates the narrative. In film, the narrative is curated and constant, in music, it is hardwired into our responses in mood to the composition and influenced by lyrics; yet in games, the narrative takes a backseat. It presents a world of discovery and allows players to interact freely. The story of a game is the experience of a tight match hard won, or an exceptional and surprising outcome and how it was handled.
Games which superimpose narrative elements become more akin to novels or movies, as any narratives imposed by the game’s exposition reduce the possibility space of the player to form their own. Games such as Uncharted, for example, are near perfectly linear narratives, which engage the player in a series of shooting and puzzle minigames rather than by forging the narrative. Games like this are typically played once, like a novel is read once, then are exhausted of new dilemmas. A game like The Witcher 3 on the other hand, is so widely acclaimed because it finds a solution to this. Despite being a narrative heavy game, its dedication to allow the player a multiplying set of meaningful decisions make it able to be explored several times over, and still surprise the player. The first time through is merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of how one might juggle the intense dilemmas for a better outcome. Perhaps the second time through they gather evidence they missed and come to a different conclusion of fault for a crime, or they opt to help the rebels even in a rather bloodthirsty plot, and hope the world is better for it than what happened last time. Perhaps you are left with an item or relationship which comes in handy in unexpected ways down the line. The game even accommodates taking the items you have accrued into your next playthrough from the last one, encouraging deep traversals of the narrative web. The skills of foresight, discernment, and conscience are always invoked, and the player can express themselves in the direction they take the narrative.
Jordan Peterson makes the comparison of a mind when consuming a narrative to a large language model (LLM). The LLM has an innumerable amount of stored data which tracks an arbitrary correlation between highly abstract subjects. When the LLM is asked a question, it samples the data through these correlated pathways, such that it can reliably make sense. A tool like ChatGPT works this way. The similarity it has with our mind is that we too, have a subconscious weighted correlation between subjects maintained by our brains. When we have a thought, we associate the range of related subjects unconsciously. Thus, the allure of narrative is to act as training data for these relations in our mind. When we take in stories, we are forced to create new permutations of adjacent subjects and grapple with them. The data of a story is fun, since the mind is rewarding the user for grappling with new information and calibrating the subject correlation network of our subconscious.
Games of strategy educate the player more straightforwardly. Hearthstone, a trading card game, demands contemplative reflection on the cards most suitable for use. It asks the player to comb thoughtfully through their collection to make the most coherent synergies possible to bring to competition. Then in competition, it quizzes the player on tactics, allowing them to make decisions which can better or worsen their odds at winning. If poker had a deck of 5000 and allowed the player to filter what made it into the draw, it would look something like this. I remember in high school spacing out to think about these strategies in place of the duller content matter. I grokked with the concept of annuities, how an early tactical investment might pay off, or pay off too late. I established a vocabulary though this game, for terms I called tempo, which means burning more resources for an immediate effect, or value, which is the maximizing of resources irrespective of timing. I learned to weigh fractions in my head as possibilities that the card I hoped my opponent wouldn’t have was indeed not in their hand, and this created stories of great successes and failures, a narrative of self improvement. Especially in tournaments these stories gained new significance under the spectacle of others and the potential of a more significant a prize. The innovation of the competition furthermore drives an evolving metagame, adding yet another layer of complexity, demanding the player constantly learn how to counter the newest counter, to the counter, of the last counter, and so on. How the Witcher 3 spins a wide caste of possibilities, Hearthstone enlists the players to be the generators of the next dilemma. Eventually however, the artificial inflation of the power balance to drive commerce toward the game eroded the richness of the metagame into something rigid and predictable as the new cards were less creative, and always the correct option. This placed an artificial cap on the skillset and experienced players would be able to solve the game quickly.
The roguelike is another solution to the problem of supplying the player with new and challenging lessons. Roguelike is named to mean akin to the game Rogue, a classic in which the player would navigate a dungeon that was different with each iteration. Roguelikes determine the dilemma for the player based primarily on randomness, and sometimes with a variable difficulty gauge as well. This model seems to be an advancement from the game consisting of a set of exhaustible levels. In this setting, the player is free to challenge an endless stream of unique circumstances until the mechanics of the game are sufficiently mastered to perfection (a near impossible task). The game Slay the Spire is iconic in this genre.
Finally, there is the sandbox game. Where the goal is what you make it. The undeniable figurehead of this genre is Minecraft. A simplified world with discrete and explicitly enumerated qualities makes for straightforward exploration of mechanics as each new material might be combined with each other in ways to be discovered. This genre and the automation genre are fundamentally the same. Minecraft is so general in its simplicity, that it incorporates fundamental logical relationships as ‘Redstone.’ I can’t help but suspect whoever thought to incorporate this is a skilled teacher. With the basics of all logical systems as blocks in a game, the player is free to create anything that their computer can handle without crashing. In first year, university, learning digital design, I used Minecraft to apply my knowledge of hardware to create a simple calculator. A monolithic collection of discrete logical blocks usually abstracted away by a diagram. People have gone far further, to achieve incredible things within the broad confines of the game in the name of fun.
We have established some of the modus operandi of games, that the creation of a fun game means the design of a complex puzzle which rewards interaction. In this sense, fun is sharpening our skills. Fun is the cat tackling the stuffed mouse, knowing it will be better prepared for the real thing. Thomas Aquinas describes a proper disposition toward theology in terms of fun. He establishes that one plays for the sake of playing, and that this is no mistake, but a model we are meant to internalize for our approaches more broadly.
In order to be wisdom, the contemplation of God and of everything as it relates to God must lead to the love of God for God’s own sake, just as play is done for its own sake and the delight of the game (Whidden, 284).
Aquinas likens the playful mentality to be a model of our intended approach to the divine, that understanding for its own sake is the only understanding that cannot be muddied by our intentions. Could this be the intention of play? Is this invariably what play is? Learning for the simple joy of discovering more of the world, which is no different from discovering more of the nature of creation, and in so doing, the creator.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga approaches the notion as well when he says: “the ritual act has all the formal and essential characteristics of play” (Huizinga, 18). Mankind being unique in terms of conducting ritual, is not unique in terms of play, so such an argument harnesses the nature of man to an animal that plays through ritual. It also does not discredit ritual but heightens play. When we are given fake cooking supplies as children to emulate our parents who cook for us, is it different from taking the wine and the bread, and emulating the sacrifice of Christ’s blood for us in communion? Huizinga turns to Plato:
God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything and that is the best part of him. Therefore, every man and woman should live life accordingly and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present … for they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy of the name which are the things we deem most serious. Hence, all must live in peace as well as they possibly can. What then is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play. Playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods and defend himself against his enemies and win in the contest (Huizinga, 18).
Life must be lived as play, says Plato, and only then can he propitiate the gods, defend himself, and win the contest. In other words, it is not a viable strategy for success other than to live through play. Playing certain games, making sacrifices, and singing and dancing. This implies the unambiguous association of ritual with play, and a sense of joviality in the fun of play which is vital to success in his view. This sentiment is also echoed in Ecclesiastes:
Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil – this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart (Ecclesiastes 5:18-20).
In this sense, games are a guiding force and an illustrative tool for the nature of the world.
In the sphere of making games, this philosophy of fun rings true. There is a bespoke public sentiment towards independent games:
Andy Schatz explains, “’Big-budget games are boring… Good indie games are never built for a demographic: they are built with the passion of the developer. In the best cases, that passion is infused into the game in such a way that it rubs off on the gamer’” (Parker, 2011). Marcus Persson was even more direct: “Indies are saving gaming. EA is methodically destroying it” (Rosen, 2012). For such developers, the decision to be independent is not strictly out of need, that they are too unskilled to be hired; Persson’s company specifically rejected an attempt by EA CEO John Riccitiello to buy them out (see French, 2011). Being indie both implicitly and explicitly opposes mainstream practices by choosing to deviate (Lipkin, 19).
These sentiments seem to be detecting the muddied intentions of the large corporations to produce games for the sake of gain, rather than to produce games for the sake of fun. Many are of the opinion that a corporation pandering to mass appeal for a product is virtually incapable of making a game with a moral people resonate with. The triple A gaming space lacks inspiration like fast food lacks nutrition. It stands to reason that part of the ritual in making a good game, is to go about the ritual of creating a game, as play. The indie space seems somewhat more capable of applying the rudimentary philosophy of fun to the ritual of making games, echoing the sentiment: “Play is the answer to how anything new comes about” -Jean Piaget.
Games are teachers of the many aspects of life, and genre seems to be little more than a categorization of which of those aspects are included in a game. To shop for a game by genre, we are choosing an aspect of life we enjoy and look to improve in it for the intrinsic reward of fun. The difference between work and play, can be seen as a matter of perspective. Raph Koster exhibits this perspective as well when he says, “I think work and play aren’t all that different to be honest”. To live through play, as Plato and Ecclesiastes suggest, means to have the perspective that what we deem ‘work’ is the voluntary play at an aspect of life for the rewards of advancement of our position in life. Since I describe fun as advancement, I believe this to also be intrinsically fun. The ethical line is drawn by Plato that things which are merely serious, the classic corporate trope of the mundane and soul crushing, and war, is actually an immoral perversion of life away from play. This is not to say that games cannot be repetitive or tedious, or require immense sacrifice, especially within life, the sacrifice demanded by proper play can even be death, yet when regarded in light of play, the sacrifices become voluntary to the greater cause of the goals of the game, and not a mere triviality in perpetuating survival. A different and valuable argument to have is to build upon what kind of game life is then. It naturally follows that it supersedes all other games and encapsulates their lessons to reward the more ‘real’ application of skills. According to Koster: “Life is the holy grail of game design”. These perspectives roughly agree that the function of play is a teacher of right living. It has been noticed by Huizinga, Plato, Aquinas, Ecclesiastes, Koster, and others. I have come to regard this as the philosophy of fun.
Bibliography:
Lipkin, Nadav. “Examining Indie’s Independence: The meaning of” Indie” Games, the politics of production, and mainstream cooptation.” Loading… 7.11 (2013).
Rathakrishnan, Balan et al. “Gaming Preferences and Personality among School Students.” Children (Basel, Switzerland) vol. 10,3 428. 22 Feb. 2023, doi:10.3390/children10030428
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Angelico Press, 2016. Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. O’Reilly Media Inc, 2014.
Whidden III, David L. “The theology of play and the play of theology in Thomas Aquinas.” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 80.2 (2016): 273-284.
Jordan B Peterson. “Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks | EP 501.” YouTube, 25 Nov. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI5SF4fOtBc.