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

Your version of fun may vary …

amazing mary poppins references. im gona watch that movie soon because of this vid

Sometimes when playing pool I get very precise about defining the rules of our particular game and often people get annoyed and will say something like, "Oh im just playing for fun." This frustrates me because having loosly defined rules significantly reduces how much fun I can have. How can I perfom better not know where the goalpost is? Similarly, it wasn't until I competed against other players in disc golf that I started to take the game seriously enough to make enjoyable. For me personally, fun comes when I care to try sufficiently hard enough to improve or win. This talk nailed it and makes me feel less like an overly competitive weirdo.

This guy makes a very good point regarding how much of a poor idea of what fun is we have. Creativity, challenge are the core elements of fun. The coffee example is perfect for anyone who is a coffee aficionado, pouring a good shot is a mild inconvenience that makes mornings less boring because unlike the most of the morning routine it has challenge and self expression. I do this kind of stupid stuff he mentions all the time. If I’m making some tea and toast with butter and jam I try to come up with optimal paths: how to brew the tea so it’s at the right temp when everything is finished, when the toast should be made so it’s not hot enough to liquify the butter, when the butter should be taken out of the fridge so it’s soft. It may seem mental to other people but it’s a mental stimulus to an otherwise boring routine.

Let me guess. If a certain job has not fun, does it mean people do not respect it?

The guy is brilliant!

Thanks gilfoyle

I am so annoyed by the way this talk is written that I can't continue listening

Absolutely incredible.

I wonder if this is why I always get bored of games so quickly. I rapidly exhaust everything a game has to discover that is interesting to me.

This dude is so dead right. There is nothing more boring than something you can count on beating consistently, or worse, every time.

Dopamine fun is learning with risk

Serotonin fun is respecting something for its reality because reality is inherently dangerous

So… perfection is fun?

I think there's a larger idea here. A goal and the journey to that goal is an important aspect of life. If it's not pleasure the it must be this, otherwise it's apathy.

Tesla is fun

When you talk alot but a lot of nothing

so I still didnt get what he's talking about, what is the secret?

awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This guy gets it!
Also, all the comments complaining that this lecture wasn't "fun" enough have completely missed the point.

THIS

This video is so unbelievably eye opening and so absurdly true that I am at a loss

That guy is with the shits. Great talk :)

how can this get so many likes? absolutely dull

Fun is play or control / movement that allows you to have control over it and experiment with differences. Experimentation and control.

This is incredibly insightful. Thank you

A game you can learn and become better at and eventually master is a game that people will enjoy
When they pour enough time to be happy with their skills
Or something like that

I clicked on this video thought it would be Keanu Reeves

That was literally more educational than my Games Tech course at uni.

I don't get why everybody is pissed with the comment section

The thumbnail looks like Keanu

This guy has NO IDEA how to make a game! All he does is TALK ABOUT it but hasn't actually DONE IT! It's unbelievable!

They should've spoken to actual, real developers of games!

Watching this video was not fun.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing this info and inspiring students @mediaartssbcc

Ian is a genius. The talk is all it took to make me look him up, find his book, "Play Anything"", and buy it.

The speaker seem to be very serious to talk about fun

Great talk, very interesting, it felt like 6 min!
But I think it's debatable.. Guess I had fun watching this ;)

this man speaks in poetry

Dude talks about authism

so fun i fell asleep halfway toward them lecture ....

he never really revealed how to make things fun :(

Love this guy. Hands down. He's got the gist of it, he knows what it is in the core of the thing. I am glad to henceforth call myself a professional Fool. Thank you for defining my role in life.

So?

Amazing

I'm not sure it can be summed up as eloquently as that. Sure, for us nerds fun is delving into a subject and learning it's nuances and boundaries, mastering it and proceeding to break the boundaries to make an entirely new subject that can then be mastered. Take Jazz for example. But then theres also stupid fun. That is a legitimate kind of fun that is almost entirely mindless, and that might be the kind that Mary Poppins was referring to!

This is philosophy.

If he really believes what he Is saying:
I Wish every game designer was like that.
Money will come if the game is fun
Fun will not if the game is made for money

His definition of a fool. Totally me.

So to have fun in a corporate job, I'm meant to EMBRACE the vapid childishness and meaningless tasks? I've been doing it wrong all this time!