Ian Bogost gave a thought provoking presentation on “Fun” at UXWeek 2013, where he defined it as “the feeling of deliberately operating a constrained system”. And while this certainly struck a chord with me, with its sense of exploring and discovering the boundaries and reactions of the system to my actions that is inherent to a lot of games, I felt it perhaps excluded or overly simplified a number of activites in gaming, where there is a step beyond this definition.
The first is obviously that some people don’t merely operate the constrained system, they in master every subtle nuance – the best examples are the e-sports communities, where RTS players’ actions per second are vaunted and where pulling off moves in fighting games rely on split second timing to ensure that the move occurs at exactly the single animation frame it needs to to take effect.
Closely related to this is pushing the boundaries of the system, exploiting the underlying mechanics – holding a particular weapon in an FPS to move faster, the entire subgenre of speedruns and less positively; griefing.
Finally there is extending the system through mods – a browse through any forum for a game with a strong modding community, will inevitably encounter multiple definitive lists of mods which, the authors maintain, the game cannnot be played without. They have reached a stage where operating the original system has lost its lustre, so to recapture the fun, have moved to a related but different system and cannot contemplate moving back.
I’ve felt this myself most recently playing Kerbal Space Program. KSP is a game where you build rockets to launch little green men into space to explore their galaxy. Its a really excellent game and even educational about orbital mechanics and rocketry (a mission pack in collaboration with NASA has been announced) and I thoroughly reccomend it.
KSP started off with only its sandbox mode where players were free to build their own elaborate rockets without any limitations, in recent updates it has introduced a tech tree, limiting access to certain components until suffcient research is done. I had been an avid player of the sandbox mode and had installed a number of mods but when attempting to play using the tech-tree, bounced off it. I felt too limited by the restricted selection of components available at the outset and soon went back to the original sandbox mode. Had I been new to it, I think the tech-tree could have worked as an good introduction and tutorial, drip-feeding new components to keep things fresh, but as I was already familiar with them, this was less appealing to me.
Perhaps when I’ve fully explored all the planets and moons and am seeking a new challenge, I’ll revisit the tech-tree mode, but it will have to wait as my first manned flight to another planet is on final approach…
