The Technical Guide to What Makes a Game Fun

What Makes Games Engaging and Fun?

Games have been around for a long time now, and they have evolved a lot over the years. They have gone from being simple games of chance to complex games that are full of stories and deep gameplay. Let’s look at how games make players feel by using different psychological understandings behind what makes video games engaging.

The Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types

Bartles player types is a model created by Dr Richard Bartle in order to describe the types of people that play multiplayer online Dungeons (MUD) games, what they want, how they behave, and how they interact. Since Richard Bartle enumerated the four types of players he found playing Multi-User Dungeon games (MUDs) in writing back in 1996, Bartles player-type taxonomy has been everywhere, universally applied, both good and bad.

Each player type (Socializer, Explorer, Achiever, and Killer) is defined by what elements of gameplay each type finds more pleasurable. Knowing the demographic and player type of your audience helps define the main activity or core loop of your gameplay. For example, if we were to design a game for achievers, list of tasks or progression bars would encourage the player to keep on playing as they would tug on their natural inclinations to strive for achievements.

Flow - Getting Players In The Zone

If you make the game too difficult, no one will play because of frustration, but at the same time, making a game too easy will also make players bored. If tuned just right, players would then have a chance to experience what’s called a Flow State; Popularly known as being in the zone“. Coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975, this causes players to be absorbed into a state of intense focus.

To achieve this, games require extensive play-testing and UX tuning. For the difficulty of a game to land on the “Goldilocks zone”, the player also needs to be onboarded gently through carefully crafted tutorials. This aids the player in mastering the mechanics of your game and learning the foundational rules. Once they have learned to walk, the difficulty of the game should gradually test the players’ understanding and ease them into the Flow State.

Game Balancing with Feedback Loops

Essentially, feedback loops are systems in which a game responds to how well a player is doing to make the game more rewarding. A positive feedback loop should not be mistaken for something that will always provide the player with positive results, such as becoming stronger, faster, or getting stronger gear. In games, we view feedback loops as counterbalancing the relationship between the player and the game state. Games are usually collections of reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, which feed into the dynamics of the player’s interactions. A negative feedback loop, for example, can be designed to introduce a handicap to high-level players in order to close a gap between the top player and the underdog.

Extrinsic Vs Intrinsic Motivations In Games

In short, intrinsic motivation is driven by enjoyment in performing a task or activity for its own sake, while extrinsic motivation involves performing the task for external rewards. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something not because you enjoy doing it, but because you wish to receive a reward or avoid a punishment. For instance, a casual game of chess is typically motivated by the intrinsic pleasure derived from playing, whereas participating in a lottery that relies on drawing draws is motivated extrinsically by the prospect of winning.

While both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations have their place in game design, the identification of the intrinsic motivators behind them remains a differentiating factor in success vs. failure over the long run. The reason intrinsic motivation is important is that studies show a greater sense of accomplishment when it is closely aligned with a player’s internal motivations. Extrinsic rewards should be used to entice a player to begin playing the game, and structured so they slowly result in a player becoming hooked to the game for intrinsic reasons.

Building Fun at Weyrdworks

We at Weyrdworks have been building games for over 10 years spanning genres from mobile games and mini web games to high-fidelity co-op games on Steam. As a game development company in Malaysia, we make it our business to dissect and fully understand the anatomy of fun at its very core.