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Theory of Fun in games (book review)

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Theory of Fun in games is developed by Raph Koster in "Theory of Fun for Game Design". One of the main ideas in first 10 pages of the book is that games become repetitive and therefore boring. When you master every trick game can throw at you - you will become bored with it.

The author comes to explain that kids learn very fast using games, they learn first leanguage in a few years using fun games (and they do it without translation), while it takes a lot of time for grown ups to learn a language. So we should take games more seriously.

Raph Koster explains many interesting things in his book, like:

how the brain works and how children actually play;
why we can miss the big pink gorilla in the background;
why we get bored with some games and other are there to stay;

This is a suprisingly interesting and easy reading with very deep ideas, going into understanding of how our brain works in context of games, and probably this is the only book I found so far on the idea of fun.

Interesting quotes

"Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life"
"Games that fail to exercise brain become boring"
"To make games more long-lasting, [game designers] need to integrate more variables (and less predictable ones) such as human psychology, physics and so on"

My opinion about fun

The games lately are surprisingly dull, the latest "fun" game I played was "Mirror's egde" and I before that original GTA III was fun (still is, actually, lots of good memories), because it was new.

Mirror's edge is fun because it has something new in game, never seen before in the game, whereas most other games are just getting better and better at replicating reality. If I wanted "reality", I wouldn't buy a game.

Still "Theory of Fun for Game Design" is a must for anyone considering creating games.

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