WIRED by Design: A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun

[Music] [Applause] [Music] these days it seems like we want to have fun all the time everyone has a plan for making work fun making learning fun making laundry fun and it's become so common and so cloying it's almost enough to make you want to swear off fun forever games are perhaps the only medium daed enough to measure their aesthetic value with a nebulous concept like this like fun and as a result games tend to be seen as a form of of black magic we we know that they have a power over people and we can't quite characterize that power which makes us desperate to control it you know Educators wonder what are all my students doing in Minecraft all day and parents wonder why can my kid lead a World of Warcraft Guild but can't finish his homework and all of us wonder why why are we so addicted to Candy Crush and we tend to think that games are powerful because they they deliver this payload of fun we think we want to have fun everywhere but what does it mean to make something fun do we even know what it means if you wanted to design a fun toaster or a fun tasting menu or a fun conference talk how would you go about it we've misunderstood fun to mean something like enjoyment without effort and that's why every activity now has someone trying to gamify it as the as the Consultants keep saying to make it fun to turn it into a delightful morsel of sugar in your mouth and in fact it's with that morsel of sugar that many of us first learned about how games supposedly make things fun thanks to that great philosopher of fun Mary Poppins so if you remember how the the mystical Victoria Nanny assures the bank's children she says a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and this song rehearses our understanding of fun as enjoyment as opposed to misery essentially what Mary Poppins suggesting is covering over drudgery just as the robins song supposedly hides the boredom of nest building or something and the poppin song hides the boredom of cleanup but actually a spoonful of sugar tells us so little about fun that it's it's kind of embarrassing we've let the song get away with it for so long in job that must be done there is an element of fun you find the fun and snap the job's a game so that sounds great right but just try to follow this advice I dare you if an element of fun is hidden in every job then how do you find it where do you look by what process does the job become a game do I just snap is that it do I need to hire my own Supernatural Nanny a spoonful of sugar turns out to tell us what we already know it's just a toy job seems more fun if it seems more fun Mary Poppins was selling snake oil it turns out games and fun are connected not because games are intrinsically enjoyable but games are fun because they are experiences we encounter through Play and play is the act of manipulating something that doesn't dictate all of its capacities but that does limit many of them so Minecraft asks you to survive in a world made of these inhospitable cubes that you can use as resource ources and Candy Crush asks you to solve puzzles given a limited supply of powers and play it turns out isn't limited to games at all it's it's everywhere it's in anything we can operate a mechanism like a steering wheel has some play built-in room through which the steering shaft moves to turn the pinion play isn't an act of diversion but a name for making something work for interacting with its materials and that's why we also say that we play an instrument or a sport there's an old aism about golf that calls it a good walk spoiled and it's meant as a joke of course but it underscores something fundamental games make no sense and yet we take them seriously precisely because they make no sense the philosopher Bernard sweetz calls it the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles there's something unreasonable something something foolish about playing games and and as it happens this is where the word fun actually finds its origins in foolishness the the Middle English word that would become fun means a fool or to make a fool of like you might say don't poke fun at me and the medieval fool the jester or the trickster um was not Reckless this was an honest to God job being a fool was a commitment the fool was expected to see life differently in fact Queen Elizabeth is even said to have rejoined her fools for not being critical enough of her Reign what the fool does is ask what else is possible possible and then carries out even the most outlandish answer that takes a kind of shrewdness it's not a witless practice it requires this painstaking attention to detail to find something new in a familiar situation not this anything goes carelessness that we usually think of when we think of fun in fact the fool teaches us that fun requires a greater commitment to everyday life not not a lesser one at all and fun isn't a feeling it turns out it doesn't involve making something easy or by rewarding it with points as if life is some latent version of Space Invaders instead fun means deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way and we can only have fun once we've accepted the truth of that situation treated it for what it is golf isn't a good walk spoiled it's a way to transform Landscapes into a centuries long Hobby and like golf that things that we tend to find the most fun are not easy and sweet like the Banks's cleanup routine I mean manual transmissions and knitting are fun because they make driving and fashion hard rather than easy they expose the materials of vehicles and fabrics and they do not apologize for doing so there's a kind of Terror in real fun this Terror of facing the world as it really is rather than covering it up with sugar and this is where where Mary Poppins leads us astray a spoonful of sugar it hides something it it turns it into a lie it assumes that the subject of our attention can never be sufficient on its own when you think about it a job is made fun not by turning it into a game but by deeply and deliberately pursuing it as a job jobs are fun when their work is Meaningful when their activities matter when the act of conducting them can be done over and over again with increased adeptness so fun can't be added to something no no more than chocolate turns broccoli into dessert but you can design and use things with enough resistance to allow this capacity for play and every now and then they reward you for doing so in 2010 at Wimbledon for example John Isner and Nicholas mahoot played a match of tennis for 3 Days neither one was able to break the other's service to tip the match out of equilibrium and both of the players served over 100 Aces Isner finally bested mahoot with a 7068 final set it was completely ridiculous they had found something in tennis the two of them that nobody had found before as if they were unearthing a fossil two well-matched players could make tennis go on almost forever they coaxed the sport to give up this secret because they treated it with such absurd respect that the game couldn't help it release it and this is what fun looks like at its best but you don't need to be a tennis pro to access it anyone can play anything with the deliberateness that produces fun for example I mean each morning you grind your espresso beans and you unclump and Tamp them to the right weight and density which you've discovered over many other mornings and then you time temperature regulated hot water through the group head to produce this 27c pull that you've timed and it balances sourness against bitterness in the particular roast you've chosen but then next week you choose a new Grind or a new Tamp to to work with a new blend on Tuesdays you go out with your friends and even with the same company at the same bar with the same hot wings the same complaints about the same co-workers each evening results in some new discovery the way way a sense of humor responds to a particular Story the way a face blankets a new worry with a familiar gentleness on Sunday you mow the lawn and you use a manual reel mower to reduce noise to connect yourself physically to the active mowing but the blades catch short on your uneven plot and so over many Sundays you discover a pace that allows you to keep their momentum through the switchbacks and while struggling to maintain that control you refine the straightness of your lawn Stripes over the months over the seasons fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something that offers enough freedom of movement enough play that such attention matters and even seemingly stupid boring activities can be fun in the process maybe especially stupid boring activities can be feeling that you are having fun at something is a sign that you've given it respect and we fail to have fun we fail to design for it too because we don't take things seriously in enough not because we take them too seriously Minecraft is fun because it's not trying to be anything but Minecraft it's not trying to be Minecraft for physics education or Minecraft for laundry but imagine if physics and laundry took their practices as seriously as Minecraft takes Minecrafting imagine if all the people trying to add fun to their products and services redoubled their commitment to the experience of using them instead and that's how you design funds by treating the thing you are making or doing as exactly what it is fun isn't a kind of pleasure at least it's not a direct kind of pleasure fun is giving respect to something that doesn't deserve it becoming infatuated with something for which infatuation seems impossible just by working it carefully and deliberately over time in the hopes that it might someday blush before you and reveal its Secrets thank you [Applause] [Music] ch

Channel: WIRED

Views: 337,515

Keywords: Game Design, Ian Bogost, wxd, design, wired design conference 2014, new, news, Wired App, Wired Magazine, Wired.com, Wired

Id: 78rPt0RsosQ

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 15 2014