Is “fun” just a buzzword?
I don’t treat fun as a buzzword, but of course I have a more specific definition of fun than other people.
The big deal is, Fun is a conclusion. Fun isn’t a reason or justification. You need to say why something is fun, not just that it is fun.
I go on about Depth a lot, but if I just said, “This game is deep” then I wouldn’t be saying much of anything. Same for “This game is balanced” or “This game is hard.”
It makes sense to have words for these conclusions, they’re not buzzwords, but the trouble is in assuming that the conclusion alone is self-evident. It’s useful to be able to say a game is fun, hard, deep, or balanced, but we shouldn’t take these conclusions to be self-evident.
This is in reference to your answer to that “is fun a buzzword” question from a couple months back. What is depth’s relation to how fun a game is? Does a game’s amount of fun differ based on the person playing it?
There’s no relation between fun and depth, I just like depth a lot, so I try to make people think there is!
Alright, I’m kidding. So if fun is the base human drive to make something inconsistent produce the results you want, then depth is practical in the pursuit of fun, because it gives people many different outlets for this phenomenon. If you have a deep game, then you can fail and succeed at many more things to many more degrees than in a shallow game, so you are constantly going through that loop of what constitutes fun.
Arguably, this is a component in the success of penny slot machines. Penny Slots have a lot of different ways to win, so even if you’re losing overall, you’re getting a win of some kind every time you pull the crank (or push the button when you get tired of pulling the crank), and this is a big part in why they’re so successful at draining people’s wallets compared to traditional slots. As for whether penny slots are truly deep or not is debatable, but there is a confluence here.
Depth affords a number of positive design ramifications. It means that if you’re having trouble doing something one way, you can try other ways and those may work, resulting in people not getting stuck as easily. It also means that the game can be played in different ways on repeat playthroughs, preventing it from getting boring after a single completion. It means that even when repeating sections, things are likely to go differently than the previous time. These help keep the game fresh over an extended period of time, both for new and old players.
Depth also means that as players improve, becoming more consistent at easy things, harder things move in to fill the place of the easy things the player has mastered. The saying, “easy to learn, difficult to master” is an allusion to the principle of depth, and has been taken as the mark of a good game.
As for whether the fun of a game differs depending on the player, that’s a matter of perspective. Different people will be of different skill sets, and so will find games more or less fun based on how much of the depth of the game they can access. Street Fighter doesn’t get fun until you get over a certain threshold, so for a beginner, the game might not be fun at all. However if we’re going to address how fun a game is in general, I think it’s reasonable to consider it in the context of a skilled player. If you want to plan for success, then you need to consider it at all skill levels though, like Smash Bros Melee or DBFZ does.
I’ve heard people say Tekken is really fun for people who don’t know what they’re doing, because they can mash buttons and get a ton of different strings and all this crazy shit happens, but trying to learn the game on a low level is really frustrating, then it gets fun again when you get it, and then it gets really frustrating again once you have to learn how to defend and punish every move in the game, and fun again when you get over that hurdle.
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