Book description Now in full color, the 10th anniversary edition of this classic book takes you deep into the influences that underlie modern video games, and examines the elements they share with traditional games such as checkers. Show and hide more. Table of contents Product information. Why Write This Book? How the Brain Works 3. What Games Are 4. What Games Teach Us 5. Different Fun for Different Folks 7. The Problem with Learning 8. If they keep getting the same easy tasks, the game becomes boring.
This is essentially what happens in Tic-Tac-Toe when a child makes the transition to understanding the strategy of the game. The answer is that young children are still learning valuable skills from these games: how to roll a die, move a token on a board, spin a spinner, take turns, read and follow rules, determine when the game ends and who wins, and so on. These skills are not instinctive and must be taught and learned through repeated play. When the child masters these skills, that is about the time when decision-less games stop holding any lasting appeal.
Ideally, as a game designer, you would like your game to have slightly more lasting playability than Tic-Tac-Toe. What can you do? Games offer a number of solutions. Among them:. Csikszentmihalyi identified three requirements for a flow state to exist: You must be performing a challenging activity that requires skill. The activity must provide clear goals and feedback. The outcome is uncertain but can be influenced by your actions. In other words, you go on autopilot, doing things without thinking about them.
In fact, your brain is moving faster than the speed of thought — think of a time when you played a game like Tetris and got into a flow state, and then at some point it occurred to you that you were doing really well, and then you wondered how you could keep up with the blocks falling so fast, and as soon as you started to think about it the blocks were moving too fast and you lost. Concentration on immediate tasks: complete focus, without any mind-wandering. You are not thinking about long-term tradeoffs or other tasks; your mind is in the here-and-now, because it has to be.
Loss of awareness of self, loss of ego. When you are in a flow state, you become one with your surroundings in a Zen way, I suppose. There is a distorted sense of time. Strangely, this can go both ways. In some cases, such as my Tetris example, time can seem to slow down and things seem to happen in slow motion. Actually, what is happening is that your brain is acting so efficiently that it is working faster ; everything else is still going at the same speed, but you are seeing things from your own point of reference.
Even Plato, Koster is quick to point out, famously declared that "the most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things. The original edition of the book became something of a bible for game designers. University game design programs across the globe made it a part of their curriculum, and the book was translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean, eventually selling over 30, copies. This year Koster teamed up with publisher O'Reilly to release a 10th anniversary edition , due out December 5.
The book's many charming illustrations are now rendered in full color, and Koster has updated the content to make it more relevant to the modern games industry, but the core idea at the center of A Theory of Fun — that learning and fun can be synonymous — has gone unchanged. That's mostly because in the 10 years since the book's release, nobody has been able to successfully challenge that idea. Much of Koster's game industry experience is with MMOs.
Six months ago he left an executive position with Disney to strike out on his own.
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