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The eternal question. Spoiler alert for this post. I don't know the answer to the leading question in the title. However, as a designer this is the #1 goal players have when they approach your game. They want to have fun! Of course, what that means varies a lot!

I have talked to a lot of different players in my time to try to answer this question, "What is fun?". Here is a snapshot of answers I have received:

-Winning is fun!
-Hanging out with my buddies is fun!
-The spectacle of a good game is fun!
-Getting some insight into the period is fun!
-Telling stories on or about the games is fun!
-Playing and seeing what happens is fun!
-Painting and setting it all up, and seeing it all come together is fun!
-Letting my imagination run wild is fun!
-Trying to master the game is fun!
-Smack talking my friends is fun!
-Researching the period is fun!
-Being part of a larger community of folks is fun!
-Talking about the games is fun!
-Having a lot of choices in gameplay is fun!

The list is honestly endless. There are as many different answers to "What is fun?" as there are players. Each player comes to the table with their own history, personal preferences, styles, and calibrations for what is FUN and what is NOT FUN!

If you ask players the flip-side of the coin, what is NOT FUN you also get a variety of different outcomes too. If you list what is FUN on one side, and what is NOT FUN on the other you will often see the same answers!

Therefore, how is a designer suppose to tackle the elephant in the room? I take a crack at it on the Blood and Spectacles blog here:

https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/01/wargame-design-what-is-fun.html

However, I am interested in what you design to create fun? What are your preferences and what do you stretch to include? How do you manage all these compete ideas of "FUN"?

My game design preferences have shifted quite a bit as I've gotten older. I used to love immersive games like West End's Imperium Romanum II, or time-wasters like the Brigade Series.

Alas, finding the time and opponents for these hasn't been feasible for a while. I'm now much closer to the Axis and Allies end of the spectrum.

This guided my game designs for the Air Force, which were focused on identifying friction or simply familiarization with the theater of operations. They needed to be quick because time was always short (military wargaming is mostly a box that is checked, not a serious evaluation, and you see the results around the world).

Thus, a design should above all things be brief, playable in an hour, easy to learn and the complexity should be tied to consequential decisions. Since October, I've been wanting to build a fast-playing card-driven game of the Indian wars in the Great Lakes basin, but finding time has been impossible. (I bought a box of Soviet infantry at Thanksgiving and still haven't been able to assemble it!)

At some point things will let up, and then I'll be able to show folks what I mean in greater detail.

Fun is a byproduct. You can't directly produce fun, fun can only emerge from something else. Thus, fun can't be a game design goal, but rather something you achieve by designing something more specific well. It's a metric in the same way a meter is, you can measure something by it, but don't produce 'meters'. EVERY* game is supposed to be fun. You can't make something that registers as fun for everyone, but you can make something that's extremely fun for specific subsets by focusing a design. Just do one or two things really well is usually enough.

* Some of the more esoteric roleplaying games that are about dealing with pain and trauma legit are not designed to be fun, but those feel sufficiently out of scope here.

Yeah, agreed with slyphic. The game should be *engaging*. Fun is a by-product of that engagement, and is often something out of control of the game designer and highly dependent on situation/scenario (i.e. location its being played in, context of the play, opponent, etc.).

Likewise, whether or not people play a wargame for "fun" is subjective in and of itself - I would wager that theres a lot of people who aren't necessarily having what most people would define as or consider to be "fun" while they are playing wargames, instead they are playing for the mental challenge or the stimulation offered, etc. That gets interpreted as "their idea of fun" of course, and they may legitimately gain enjoyment from the activity, but does it mean the technical or physiological definition (etc) of "fun"? That is a bit less clear.

 slyphic wrote:
Fun is a byproduct. You can't directly produce fun, fun can only emerge from something else. Thus, fun can't be a game design goal, but rather something you achieve by designing something more specific well. It's a metric in the same way a meter is, you can measure something by it, but don't produce 'meters'. EVERY* game is supposed to be fun. You can't make something that registers as fun for everyone, but you can make something that's extremely fun for specific subsets by focusing a design. Just do one or two things really well is usually enough.

* Some of the more esoteric roleplaying games that are about dealing with pain and trauma legit are not designed to be fun, but those feel sufficiently out of scope here.

I disagree. I think "fun" describes a specific type of entertainment, a form of pleasure distinct from engaging or engrossing. Generally complicated and profound things aren't considered "fun."

Games like Munchkin are designed to be fun - make you laugh, not take it seriously, not tax your mind too much. I just watched a fun movie - not at all serious, silly in places, and - as a work of art- hardly something one would describe as epic.

Fun games are at the shallow end of the complexity pool. No one calls Campaign for North Africa fun. No one.

Cards Against Humanity is fun. Storm Over Arnhem looks cool, but it is not fun.

Cards Against Humanity is only fun once, basically. After that's its cringe.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Cards Against Humanity is only fun once, basically. After that's its cringe.

I think the point stands, though.

I would argue that 40k started out being fun, and has slowly leeched that away. Fun games never take themselves too seriously.

Well I find engaging and challenging things extremely fun, so I cannot agree.

Munchkin's design goals are: fast playing, satirical humor, simple rules, and replayability through large card pools. Munchkin stops being fun once a group understands it's a push-your-luck game where the the third or fourth player to try to win actually gets to win due to card attrition from other winning attempts, and the latter half of the game is an extremely random drag. This usually takes 3-4 games.

Cards against humanity is extremely diminishing returns on transgressive humor and ... that's about it. It's novel, then it's boring and not fun at all.

Campaign for North Africa isn't fun because it's a terribly designed game that merely asks the question: what if we did as little abstraction as possible. It does nothing well. It's about as fun as FATAL, as a joke to point and laugh at.

Not Storm over Arnheim, but I regularly play hex&counter wargames with my friends and I assure we have fun. The Air-Eaters Strike Back was on the table a couple weeks ago, and War in the Ice: Battle for the Seventh Continent is coming out soon.

 slyphic wrote:
Well I find engaging and challenging things extremely fun, so I cannot agree.

I think it's important to have an agreed upon definition before proceeding any further. I think the OP is treating "fun" as a subset of pleasure or enjoyment, one that usually involves humor or some sort of fooling around. People speak of "playing just for fun" to reference that it isn't taken seriously and that competition is beside the point.

Thus: Munchkin, which cannot be enjoyed if played to win. That's why the design continues to sell product and has decent replay value because it isn't a serious exercise. Winning is almost beside the point (particularly in our family games) where the "fun" factor is everyone dogpiling Dad.

Standard wargames approach the subject matter with great seriousness, as befitting the topic. No one considered logistics to be "fun," and games that represent them can bring pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, but never fun. Stratego can be fun; Axis and Allies can be fun; serious hex-sheet games aren't fun unless you do something outside of their normal sphere.

For example, over Christmas Break in 1990 my friends and I set up a grand campaign of the Third World War series - a rule set that is absolutely NOT fun to cycle through (the turn sequence fills an entire sheet of paper in densely formatted type).

But we had fun because of how we approached it, with snack runs, overconsumption of sugar, jocular humor and the "satellite view" where one could climb a small ladder and survey the vastness of the map.

Rolling for aircraft availability, removing disruption markers and attempting to maneuver toppling stacks of cardboard counters was not the fun part. True, the sheer absurdity of the exercise and time needed was somewhat fun, but there was a reason we reverted to playing Shogun for our usual get-togethers.

Shogun was easier and faster to play, making it more fun.

You guys are illustrating my point. You can't design for fun, because everyone has different definitions of fun. Therefore, FUN should not be a design goal.

I think its rare for everyone in a dakka post to be almost unanimously in agreement on the original topic. We have some differences as to what exactly constitutes fun, but yes - it seems that we all agree that fun is subjective and often individualized, and so cannot or should not be something that a designer specifies as a goal.

That being said, the old chestnut piece of advice I've often heard is that as a designer you should try to design the games that you would want to play. Presumably, that means as a designer you should design a game that *you* consider fun, with the expectation that your interests are not so singular that nobody else on the planet would also find it fun as well.

I've had some really negative reactions from game designers about the usefulness of 'fun' as a design goal, both inherently and as something to convey to a customer.

"This game is designed to be fun!" OK, but where does the fun come from? "You're thinking about it too hard, it's just a game for fun" So it's a beer&pretzel game. "No, it's a game for having fun" So it's not a beer&pretzel game, it's serious and challenging "Shut up and just let people have fun".

Paraphrasing, but that was the last time it came up. I'm glad this one is going better.

Not surprised, many of the published game designers I've encountered have serious cases of head-ass. Nerds who have been ostracized most of their lives and suddenly achieve just a shred of niche fame seem to let it allllll go to their heads.

 slyphic wrote:
I've had some really negative reactions from game designers about the usefulness of 'fun' as a design goal, both inherently and as something to convey to a customer.

"This game is designed to be fun!" OK, but where does the fun come from? "You're thinking about it too hard, it's just a game for fun" So it's a beer&pretzel game. "No, it's a game for having fun" So it's not a beer&pretzel game, it's serious and challenging "Shut up and just let people have fun".

Paraphrasing, but that was the last time it came up. I'm glad this one is going better.

I detect a certain amount of defensiveness in those replies, where "fun" serves to hand-wave away poor design elements.

Words have specific meanings, and fun is a subset of something pleasurable. It's hard to quantify to the first decimal, but you know it when you have it.

I mean, much of the "fun" of Munchkin comes from Schadenfreude, not actually winning the game. I'd say in most of my game play winning is accidental - the primary purpose is to dish out punishment to the people around you, watch them fall ever farther behind, which can be a lot of fun.

As a design element, I think it's a good question to ask, because it is easy to get caught up into the complexity/realism trap, or "how do I monetize everything attached to this?" modes of thinking.

Contemplating whether it "sparks joy" and how it is supposed to be fun is a useful mental exercise.

In a more objective sense, surveying players and asking what they like most about a game is also useful. That helps you nail down what is fun and what isn't.

I think "how" it sparks joy is less important than to whom it sparks joy for. Who is your audience, and is it a big enough audience to pay the bills?

chaos0xomega wrote:
I think "how" it sparks joy is less important than to whom it sparks joy for. Who is your audience, and is it a big enough audience to pay the bills?

Identifying your audience is crucial, but so is understanding the mechanism by which you are reaching them. Going back to Munchkin, the designers understand that it's not a tournament-type deliberate strategy game where winning brings a sense of earned accomplishment. It's a party game where winning is incidental to what's going on, which is reading funny cards aloud, creating bizarre creatures and magic items while tormenting each other.

In a sense, it comes down to consistency in tone and purpose. As we discussed, some people really enjoy dry, immersive strategy games, but if you add too much randomness, the players are angry because all the planning and effort are undermined by dice rolls.

Conversely, a game of random draws and dice rolls that cause the game to veer all over the place encourages players not to take it seriously. I mean if we want to do a "fun/complexity" spectrum, on one side you have Campaign for North Africa, and on the other, Twister.

Twister is a great example of a game purely designed to be silly and fun. Operation is another. In both you have a unity of effort and result. Where games have issues is situations like the various GW iterations where it's not clear if the game's just a joke or serious tournament-level strategy.

I think the "how" also comes into play when envisioning what the players are doing. Are they precariously clinging to dots on a vinyl sheet or squinting at divisional counters piled up on the Eastern Front.? That's kind of important to know.

A while back we debated "engagement," and how that means different things to different people. In a card game with rapid turn rotation, you have a lot of engagement and also opportunity for cross-talk. Indeed, that's the peril of multiplayer games - too much crosstalk.

But that also can be a form of engagement, as in Avalon Hill's Civilization. So the "how" of fun I think is quite important.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Cards Against Humanity is only fun once, basically. After that's its cringe.

I think the point stands, though.

I would argue that 40k started out being fun, and has slowly leeched that away. Fun games never take themselves too seriously.

You aren't really wrong about 40k. By looking through the various editions you can kind of see the game morph from what the designers thought were cool, fun ideas, i.e. a game they made for themselves, to something designed for mass appeal and marketing, with the 'fun' factor being a very distant second to ensuring maximum sales. Even as early as the leap from 2nd edition to 3rd, you can see the game become more sterile in the pursuit of selling more models.

Not that that's necessarily bad, I'm sure there are plenty of people who were far more interested in throwing down large armies than rolling a scatter check for each individual jump-pack trooper. It's just interesting comparing the early editions against the later ones and seeing the difference in design decisions when designers make something for themselves and when they make something for other people.

chaos0xomega wrote:
The game should be *engaging*. Fun is a by-product of that engagement, and is often something out of control of the game designer and highly dependent on situation/scenario (i.e. location its being played in, context of the play, opponent, etc.).

This is it.

People have fun doing different things. But DOING the things is where the fun comes from. Some people have fun drawing or writing that others would find a miserable experience. So you make games ENGAGING. Your mechanics need to give players Game Play and the more deep (more viable options at any decision point) the more engaging the it is. That doesn't mean every game needs to be mind bending deep. That can also be exhausting. But it needs SOMETHING. Some degree of game play to keep the player/s engaged and interacting with the game. That is where the fun comes from.