Game Fun

Having completed this weeks reading task on the 'Different Kinds of Fun' I have learned more about why we play games, and what makes some games addictive.

The first of this weeks readings about fun in games I read was Natural Funitivity by Noah Falstein. This article focuses primarily around how we developed a want to play games from our ancestors. At the most basic level it looks at hunter-gatherers and their need to hunt and how that has traversed to us through thousands of years of evolution. Hunting has given us a desire to be physically active, but in recent years we have begun to simulate it through entertainment - like movies and video games for example. It has also given us a yearning for things that could technically help us with hunting, such as motorcycles and cars that can give us more speed. Sure we don't need to hunt nowadays but our ancestors utilised tools to complete tasks and vehicles have become tools to us for many reasons - getting us too and from work, going to the shop and even just for the thrill of going fast in some cases.

The same can be said for entertainment that includes gathering - casinos and slot machines have encouraged us to "berry-pick", lots of people collect materialistic things like coins, plates, shoes and in video games we even tend to stockpile items because they "might come in handy later". It is somewhat similar to a hunter-gatherer collecting food to eat at a later date. There are a lot of things that we do because of our inherited genes, and identifying these can help us to make better games by using people's psychological needs to make games more fun and addictive.

The second article I read about fun in games was Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard A. Bartle. This article focuses on the four types of players who suit MUD games. (MUD can mean Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Domain, and is the predecessor to today's MMO games or Massive Multiplayer Online).

The four player types Bartle discusses are achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. He goes on to categorise them as follows: achievers are Diamonds (they're always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).

I feel this categorisation of players within today's standards of MMOs and for that even within any online multiplayer is still a relevant and accurate description of how people play. 

Take for example a first-person shooter like Call of Duty (COD): the Achievers set out goals and aim to achieve, either with a group or alone. In COD an Achiever could set out to capture as many points on the playing map as possible and could do this alone or with others.

Explorers aim to find out more information, and within COD this could be relevant to keeping track of the teams score and encouraging other team players to follow the Explorers commands as they know a playing map or the other teams playing style the best. The Explorer could also seek out the physical limitations of the game and use bugs or glitches to better their chances of winning.

Socialisers can use a game for exactly that - socialising. Jump into any COD multiplayer lobby and you're bound to find one or two strangers attempting to converse with other people, sometimes just to talk strategies, but also to find players they can befriend and play with on a regular basis.

Finally we have Killers, who set out to do only that - kill. In objective-based game types in COD it is common to have people on your team who don't focus on objectives like capturing positions on the playing map but instead focus on killing other players for their own benefit. This doesn't just apply to COD but also many other objective-based game types in other games.

My personal favourite first-person shooter game, Battlefield, has often times promoted the use of the abbreviation PTFO to encourage players to do exactly that - Play The F**cking Objective!

Overall I feel that the two articles I read provided me with a better insight to player psychology and player personas. Having a clearer understanding of how the two can be used when making a game can help to make a game that the player finds fun - because it targets their primal instincts with hunting and gathering, and because there's a role to fit their personality within your game.

A combat in The Shadow of Yserbius, an early graphical MUD - Source