Theory of Fun for Game Design

games serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools. It’s one thing to read in a book that “the map is not the territory”* and another to have your armies rolled over by your opponent in a game. When the latter happens because your map didn’t adequately reflect what was going on, you’re gonna get the point even if the actual armies aren’t m

The last kind of thinking is not thinking. When you stick your finger in fire, you snatch it back before your brain has time to think about it (seriously, it’s been measured).*

The brain is actively hiding the real world from us.

This is why tic-tac-toe ends up falling down — it’s exercise, but so limited we don’t need to spend much time on it.

Practicing can keep a game fresh for a while, but in many cases we’ll say, “Eh, I get it, I don’t need to practice this task,” and we’ll move on.

Thinking is, in fact, mostly memory, pattern-matching against past experiences.

If I asked you to describe how you got to work in the morning in some detail, you’d list off getting up, stumbling to the bathroom, taking a shower, getting dressed, eating breakfast, leaving the house, and driving to your place of employment. That seems like a good list, until I ask you to walk through exactly how you perform just one of those ste

The brain notices a lot more than we think it does.

why learning is so damn boring to so many people. It’s almost certainly because the method of transmission is wrong. We praise good teachers by saying that they “make learning fun.” Games are very good teachers...of something. The question is, what do they teach?