Fun and Learning
Regardless of whether it leads to an improved career, I am having the time of my life learning animation software.
In A Theory Of Fun For Game Design, Raph Koster wrote:
Fun is just another word for learning. Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. With games, learning is the drug.
In school, I never liked math. But my favorite games all involve math. Every turn of Stone Age involves division, for Pete's sake! Most of the games I play involve changing the odds in one's favor, so I have recently begun to seek out an accessible introduction to statistics.
What creates this transformation? When is learning fun? It takes S.M.A.R.T. goals: specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed.
- Specific: Not open-ended. You do not have to guess at the limits and parameters of your challenge.
- Measurable: You can tell whether you advanced or not.
- Actionable: Steps are obviously related to the goal. Routes to advancement are at least partially visible.
- Realistic: You can do what you are called upon to do.
- Timed: The challenge resolves. It cannot get stuck indefinitely. Carrot or stick feedback occurs within a psychologically-rewarding period.
I'll bet that my feeling of dissatisfaction with trick-taking card games, roleplaying games, and alternate reality games is a recognition, when I play them, that I am not learning. The carrots and sticks just appear, seemingly unconnected to my decisions. Something is breaking my learning feedback loop.
My trouble with roleplaying or ARGs is that it's one time only. I can't reset the game to test a different strategy under the same conditions until I figure out how to win. I'm not even sure what goal to attain.
When I see others play a trick-taking partner card game like Euchre, I can tell they are forming hypotheses about their partner's and opponents' mind, and they are trying to remember which cards they have seen. Those skills do not come easily to me. I would need to practice a very simplified form of the game until I bootstrap those skills from the ground up.
In Apples to Apples, the game system exists inside the participants' minds even more so than in the previous examples. It is difficult, at least for me, to attain predictable mastery of a system when it is not very systematic. But that says more about my skill set than about games as a medium.
Comments
merlyntemple on Jun. 8, 2010 2:44 AM
I think in games like Apples to Apples and Balderdash, I care much less about the actual end goal of winning and much more about the fun I have with the other people playing. The games are fun because they're not predictable. Those two in particular make me laugh much more than the average game, so therein lies the fun. Creativity and figuring the other players out quickly is definitely the key to winning those sorts of games, but I find they're much more fun if you can forget the end goal and just play the game.
As for learning in those types of games, you're learning more about the people you're playing with and less about how to play the game itself. I would liken the people to the Dominion card stacks... every person creates a different game experience and in different combinations, an even more complex one. However, people cannot be clearly defined like Dominion cards can, so that's a very simplistic model, but I think the point is still there somewhere. And even if you don't learn anything from the game at all, there's still the entertainment factor to consider. :)
jodybrai on Jun. 8, 2010 11:35 AM
Sir, you impose a challenge!
You create in me the desire to run a tabletop RPG in a format which meets the goals you have stated.
It must be S.M.A.R.T., but it must also engage the cooperative story-telling aspect that makes an RPG what it is.
Will you playtest such a game, if I can demonstrate how it follows the above?
matt-arnold on Jun. 8, 2010 12:45 PM
People's brains are full of seemingly randomized weather patterns. Roleplaying unleashes this chaos, making it difficult to build a mental model with which to predict outcomes. Roleplaying is supposed to compensate for that issue by providing an entertaining narrative story. But it's not. It's a collision of incompatible creative visions by extremely amateur authors. The only person who's done any creative prep work is the gamemaster, and often not even him. It's certainly not going to be me, because I'm not an author.
The degree to which a system involves cooperative storytelling is likely going to be the degree to which it will leave me cold. But if you devise such a system, I certainly look forward to sitting in the same room and listening to the playtest.
You may wish to adapt one or more features of the Parsley system. It's a live multiplayer version of a text adventure, full of puzzles, in which the game master is the parser. They have two scenarios for it now: Action Castle, and Jungle Adventure. Here is one person's description of play.
What interests me about that system is that it is possible to reset the scenario and try again.
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